[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 137 (Wednesday, October 1, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H9074-H9075]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   GOLD-PLATING AND WAR PROFITEERING

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Madam Speaker, the President has asked the United States 
Congress to borrow another $87 billion to finance ongoing action in 
Iraq, and of that, the President is asking the United States Congress 
to borrow on behalf of the American people $20.3 billion to engage in 
an extensive reconstruction of Iraq. There has already been discussion 
on the floor of the no-bid contracts and the favoritism and extortion 
prices to Halliburton and other companies, war profiteering, but now 
there is also, now that we have seen the list, questions about the 
priorities in a couple of ways.
  There are questions about what they are going to spend the money on. 
On the list is Wifi. A lot of people do not even know what Wifi is. 
Iraq is a country where I do not think the average Iraqi or even the 
elite Iraqis own laptop computers. We are going to give emergency 
spending money, which the American people are going to borrow, to give 
them Wifi capability in Iraq, when the people in the rural parts of my 
district do not even have broadband. They have hardly decent telephone 
service, but we are going to do Wifi in Iraq.
  We are going to give them Zip codes in Iraq, an American invention. 
We are going to give them a national 911. Is that not nice? The 
American people are going to borrow money to install 911 in Iraq. Why 
would we do that? Why is that necessary? They did not have 911 before 
the war. We did not destroy it with bombing. Why they are going to have 
it now?
  Then there is the executive training. We are going to provide $10,000 
for a 4-week course for Iraqi executives that exceeds the cost of 
sending them to Harvard University for the same period of time, let 
alone a community college in my district that could do a fine job for a 
quarter the price, but no, it is not just that. It is the fact that 
this is gold-plated and out of control.
  Here are a couple of examples. Major General David Petraeus, in 
charge of North Iraq, told a congressional delegation, his engineers 
said and we priced rebuilding a cement plant for $15 million. Well, the 
Iraqis were in kind of a hurry. So they decided to do it on their own 
and not wait for the $15 million and the U.S. contract. They did it for 
$80,000, a tiny fraction of the price. So at least the American 
taxpayers did not get gouged for that and did not have to borrow $15 
million to do an $80,000 job on a cement plant. Maybe that was 
isolated. Well, unfortunately, no.
  We also have another instance, $25 million to refurbish 20 police 
stations in Basra and a member of Iraq's governing council kind of 
laughed at that and said, we could do it for five and still make a 
bunch of money.
  So the American people are going to be asked to borrow $25 million 
for a gold-plated contract to do something that would cost something 
less than five. The American people are being asked to borrow money to 
build houses in Iraq at a price that is 10 times the value of the 
average Iraqi house. Maybe it would be better if we give them a little 
of the wherewithal, some materials and nails and cement, and let them 
go at it themselves. They have 60 percent unemployment. I think they 
would be happy to build their own houses.
  But that is not the way the Bush administration wants to do this. 
They want to gold-plate it. They want to make the American people 
borrow $20 billion and pay for it the next 30 years, the gold-plate and 
war profiteer, for the reconstruction of Iraq.

[[Page H9075]]

  Then, finally, there is Ahmed al-Barak, a member of the Ruling 
Council, very prominent, who became unpopular with this administration, 
although previously had been very favored by them, when he said the 
savings could be a factor of 10 if the Iraqis did their own work. 
Basically, where they spend $1 billion, we would spend a hundred 
million.
  So I offer the 10 percent solution to this administration. Two point 
three billion dollars is still a lot of money where I come from, but it 
is a lot better than $20.3 billion, and the Iraqis could do it for that 
price. We could do the reconstruction, whatever we are really obligated 
to because of the destruction of the war, but we do not need to give 
them exotic things they never had before.
  I have heard we have to rebuild the electrical infrastructure. We 
have kind of got a failing one here, and the reason was they have got 
boilers from the 1950s and 1960s. Guess what? Our war did not install 
boilers from the 1950s and 1960s, so why is it the American people have 
to borrow the money to give them brand new boilers or new high-
efficiency turbines to generate electricity when we could use that 
money here at home to put Americans to work? If we spent $20.3 billion 
on real infrastructure projects that are underfunded by this 
administration in the United States of America, we could put one 
million Americans to work.
  So, no, to the gold-plating, maybe a 10 percent solution if that is 
justified, but we should not be borrowing in the name of the American 
people $20.3 billion and indebting generations of Americans to pay for 
the gold-plated war profiteering in Iraq.

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