Multiple Statements from Senator Feingold Today: HIV/AIDS in Africa, Oil for Food, and Rising Gas Prices
Posted at 20:18:17 on April 7, 2004
Lot of stuff to mention at once, so rather than make three seperate blog entries, I figured I'd put them all together.
Senator Russ Feingold has released three new statements today. We'll take them in the order they were posted online.
The first statement (read the full statement here) is titled "U.S. Senator Russ Feingold at the African Affairs Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearing on the 'African HIV/AIDS Report'":
I want to thank Chairman Alexander for calling this important hearing today. Chairman Alexander has made it his business to become very knowledgeable about the challenges confronting AIDS-affected communities in Africa, and to follow up very closely on the U.S. government efforts underway. I commend him for his steady focus and leadership on this issue.
Of course, we all want those efforts to succeed. The President's historic State of the Union commitment to fighting AIDS raised the hopes of communities all over the world, and it gave the ongoing and bipartisan effort to respond to this crisis new momentum and vigor. And today, we have come such a long way. We have moved past the days when talking about scaling up treatment made one a radical, past the days when policy-makers had to be convinced that this is an urgent and critically important crisis. We have moved past any notion that we can protect our interests and meet our basic human obligations by addressing AIDS on the cheap.
Obviously, as with any of his statements you'll find listed in this blog, click on the link in the earlier paragraph for the full text.
The second statement (read full statement here) was titled "U.S. Senator Russ Feingold at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearing on the United Nations Oil for Food Program" and goes as follows:
I thank the Chairman and Ranking Member for holding this important hearing, and I thank all of the witnesses for their testimony.
Since late last year, we have gathered more and more information regarding abuses of the Oil for Food program that was intended to ease the burden borne by the Iraqi people under Saddam Hussein's regime. What we know thus far suggests behavior that was simply unacceptable and in some cases quite likely criminal. Getting to the bottom of who was involved in abuse and why oversight mechanisms failed to expose and stop abuse sooner is critically important – not only for the Iraqi people, who have suffered for so many years, but also for the American people and people around the world who hear of these revelations and ask themselves why they should have confidence in the basic competence and integrity of the United Nations. Transparency and accountability are absolutely crucial to the future of U.S.-U.N. relations.
The third statement (read the full statement here) is titled "U.S. Senator Russ Feingold at the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights of the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing". Here's an excerpt:
The reason we should subject OPEC to U.S. antitrust laws is simple: price-fixing and market manipulation by the OPEC oil nations are affecting the average U.S. consumer. The 2004 OPEC production cuts have resulted in huge increases in oil prices. OPEC instituted its production cut in February 2004, which reduced production by 2,000,000 barrels per day. From February to March 2004, crude oil prices have gone from $28 per barrel and now exceed $38 per barrel. These cuts represent an attempt to maintain artificially high crude oil prices in order to bring record profits to members of the OPEC cartel.
High gasoline prices are inextricably linked to high crude oil prices. And these high oil and gas prices hurt Americans across the nation and from all walks of life. Farmers, teachers, and small business owners are getting hit hard by these skyrocketing costs. For gasoline, the increases in crude oil prices have resulted in a pass-through of cost increases at the pump to an average national price of $1.80 per gallon. These are the highest gas prices we have seen in 13 years.
- Trae
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