[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 15]
[House]
[Pages 19737-19738]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




        EMPLOYING PEOPLE WHO WERE DISPLACED BY HURRICANE KATRINA

  (Mr. KUCINICH asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. KUCINICH. Mr. Speaker, for the people of the Gulf Coast region 
who were stricken by Hurricane Katrina, there is less to the emergency 
supplemental than meets the eye. I mean that exactly zero dollars of 
the $50 billion Congress will send today for emergency relief and 
temporary construction will be used for employing people displaced by 
Hurricane Katrina. However, the administration is not withholding 
anything from Halliburton. Halliburton received a no-bid contract 
immediately after the hurricane. Yet the CBO estimates 400,000 people 
were made unemployed by the hurricane with no hope in sight of 
regaining their former jobs because their workplaces were destroyed.
  For the region, the economic devastation is on par with the effects 
of the Great Depression. At that time President Roosevelt asked for a 
National Industrial Recovery Act with which the government put millions 
of people back to work rebuilding the country's infrastructure. That is 
what the hurricane-demolished region needs today. The people of the 
region who have lost their livelihoods should be given a preference in 
hiring for the Federal dollars

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spent, and the Federal dollars should be conditioned on local hiring 
targets.
  But this is not a New Deal administration. Instead of leveraging 
Federal tax money to put people back to work, this administration is 
content to send Halliburton billions of dollars in no-bid contracts.

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