by the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking and Currency It reads like a news report from 2009, not 1929: investment practices that favored rich insiders, collusion between Wall Street and Washington DC, the repackaging of bad loans to get them off the books of offending banks, and numerous other financial crimes the impacts of which reverberated through the world economy. Between 1932 and 1934, Ferdinand J. Pecora (1882-1971), an American lawyer, served as chief counsel to the United States Senate Committee on Banking and Currency as it interrogated those responsible for the stock market crash...

The United States spends more than $10 billion a year to support our permanent military presence overseas. And that does not include military personnel costs or spending to support the war in Afghanistan. Nearly 70 percent of that $10 billion is spent in Germany, the Republic of Korea, and Japan. The fact that such a high percentage of our overseas spending involves those three countries is not surprising. Germany is among our most important partners in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an alliance President Obama has rightly called "indispensable to global security and...

And so to keep a lot of those former Soviet, now Russian, engineers working, there was this extraordinarily successful program of the Nunn-Lugar effort to go in to gather up those nuclear weapons and simultaneously to support the Russian aerospace industry and to buy this incredible engine, the RD-180. And so today, those engines play a significant role in meeting our Nation's launch requirements. We have already launched four missions this year alone using that engine. And so now it is time that we are going to have to consider an alternative. Several of us in the Armed Services Committee...