Bill Delahunt

Mr. DELAHUNT

Mr. DELAHUNT. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, I just want to conclude something. So with this giveaway program, this giveaway from the American taxpayers, we have not even spent the money well. The Iraqis have not spent the money well. We were going to build 150 primary health care centers in Iraq. Only six have been built, and they are running out of money. Great record. A great record. That sounds to me like the Babe Ruth of mismanagement, waste and absolute pilfering of American tax dollars. Why can't we do it here in the United States, Mr. Speaker? Why can't we build 150 primary health care centers for our own people? Would somebody please respond. All I know is we are taking this money and we have brought it over there. And by the way, one of the most incredible readings that anyone could take on is the special inspector general's report about the missing $9 billion; $9 billion is simply unaccounted for.

Mr. DELAHUNT. And if the gentlewoman would yield.

Mr. DELAHUNT. If I could just rephrase it a different way, because Ms. Kaptur mentioned the phrase ``the importing of capital.'' And what we are doing in terms of our economic policy is that we are exporting our manufacturing base. In other words, that icon of an American company, Maytag, who I am sure provided good jobs and good wages to generations of Americans who represent, if you will, that core American middle class that really distinguishes a healthy democracy from other systems. We have taken that, we have exported those jobs because of these economic policies. Simultaneously, we are importing capital from abroad. And I think this is a very telling chart, in the past 4 years, from 2001 to 2005, we have borrowed, in addition to the pre-existing national debt, $1.18 trillion. Of that $1.18 trillion, 1.16 is from overseas, from those countries that are evidenced on the chart beside Mr. Ryan. Now, what have we done with that money? We have financed a war that is being pursued heroically by our military personnel and incompetently by our civilian leadership. In addition, the tax cuts have not favored any particular percentage of the American citizenry other than the super rich. If one takes a look at the chart beside Mr. Ryan, if you earn $40,000 a year you receive a tax benefit of $17. Just think of that, $17. If you make over $200,000, your tax break amounts to $1,300. Even if you make $1.5 million, you get $4,500 off your tax liability. But if you make more than $1 million your tax break is $42,000. So we are borrowing from overseas to advantage the top, not just the top 1 percent, the top .001 percent in this country and funding a war in Iraq that is costing us dearly in terms of our national treasure, which are our young people, as well as dollars and cents being provided for by Americans who are going through very, very difficult times, that I would suggest is reflected in our financial markets if you look at the difference between this past month and that Dow Jones Index and that Dow Jones Index in the year 2000. With that I yield to my friend from Ohio.

Mr. DELAHUNT. Ms. Kaptur, do you remember when the President talked about ownership society? The rest of the sentence was, it is not going to be Americans that will own America. It is those whom we are indebted to. We are selling ourselves to other countries, given the obvious statistics that just jump out at you. For what? For what? For war and for a tax break for the extremely wealthy in this country. That is all that it is doing, and it is at the same time putting a burden on generations of Americans that obviously are unborn at this point in time. And what a disaster.

Mr. DELAHUNT. And meanwhile, we are building roads, we are building hospitals, we are building schools, we are building dams and levies, we are building deep water ports, where? In Iraq. And we are not building them here in Ohio. We are not building them in Massachusetts, we are certainly not building them in New Orleans. We are not building them here in America where there is such a crying need. And meantime, our people go forward, whether they be seniors and concerned about their retirement security, or whether they be young people and have debts of 40, 50, $100,000 because of education. There is something wrong.

Mr. DELAHUNT. Of course.

Mr. DELAHUNT. They do not want a Wall Street. They do not want a financial market that has not moved upward in 6 years. It has just slid and stagnated. That is what has happened here. All you have got to do is pick up the paper every morning and check the Dow Jones.

Mr. DELAHUNT. If the gentleman from Ohio will yield for a moment, the greatest risk to any democracy is a disparity between those that have in a society and those who do not. There is only so much poverty and uncertainty that any democracy can tolerate. If this trend should continue because that gulf between the affluent, particularly the very affluent among us, and the rest of America is growing so large that we have to step back and take a hard look. And I think what is important to understand here is that occasionally you hear somebody from the other party talk about, well, Democrats don't do this and they don't do that. The truth is that all of the sources of power in this country today at the national level are controlled by Republicans. They control the House, Madam Speaker. They control the Senate, and they control the White House. You cannot blame Democrats. This is your package. You have got us here. You have owned Washington. Do not say that Washington is the problem because if you say that Washington is the problem, you are admitting that you are the problem because you are Washington. And that is the reality.

Mr. DELAHUNT. Marcy?

Mr. DELAHUNT. Ms. Kaptur, I know that you are still under that cutoff of 40, but it is great having you on board because I feel very lonely here with these young people.

Mr. DELAHUNT. I am going to ask the gentlewoman to help on this because she serves on the Appropriations Committee, but there has been a raging debate in this country about immigration. There is nobody, I dare say, on either side of the aisle that does not believe that our borders should be secure. And the best evidence, however, of a sincere intent to secure the borders is the recent history of the Appropriation Committee's lack of action in terms of creating the suitable or the necessary funding for Border Patrol. The American people should be made aware when we hear our friends rail on the immigration issue that they have voted time and time again against Democratic amendments over the past 5, 6, 7 years to increase funding for Border Patrol so that our borders would be secure. And I hear that, and I just have to laugh because they own it. They own it. They want to indulge in the rhetoric. They want to talk tough. But when it comes to producing the resources so that we can say our borders are safe and secure when it comes to illegal immigration, they are missing in action.

Mr. DELAHUNT. I can give you a similar economic picture of what is occurring in my district back in Massachusetts. There was a recent headline in the Cape Cod Times. And in that particular region, where you have many second homes, we are breaking records now in terms of mortgage foreclosures. One can just foresee what is happening as we talk to our colleagues among ourselves, that the ingredients and the components for an economic downturn of significant proportion are out there. And it will be as a direct result of the borrowing, the reckless spending, the giveaway programs that are going on today in Iraq, and the mismanagement, the fraud and the abuse and the lack of accountability. When you add it all up, it spells a recipe for economic disaster for America.

Mr. DELAHUNT. What a dangerous thing, Ms. Kaptur, a debt-free America.

Mr. DELAHUNT. I hope it is in Ohio or maybe Kansas or maybe Ohio.

Mr. DELAHUNT. Did we get a Republican vote ever?

Mr. DELAHUNT

Mr. DELAHUNT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. I just found it somewhat ironic to listen to our friend from Oklahoma when he talks about the search that was conducted by Saddam Hussein for weapons of mass destruction, because it clearly was this administration during the 1980s that aided him in that pursuit. There is documentation out there that shows the transfer of dual-use technologies to Saddam Hussein by the Reagan-Bush administration. There is also sufficient evidence, and we can say he is a bad guy now, but maybe he was a good guy back in the 1980s, because he was taken off the terrorist list. In fact, the current Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was a special envoy of the Reagan administration to Saddam Hussein. When Saddam Hussein unleashed the hell of mustard gas on the Kurds in Halabja, it was that administration who said, no, we are not going to allow the U.N. to condemn our pal, Saddam Hussein. So I am glad he concedes that point because it is right and just that he concedes that point. I find it interesting now that we are embracing other good guys in this world, like Moammar Gadhafi, a great democrat who was taken off the terrorist list. I wonder sometime if we will regret that. But we are not here to talk about that. I am here because I was to echo the sentiments expressed by the gentlewoman. I don't think they can be repeated often enough, because the reconstruction of Iraq has been plagued by mismanagement, waste and fraud. The examples are too numerous to list. I would need the entire hour, and I will not burden my colleagues with that. But let us suffice it to say that the Bush administration cannot account for $9 billion, that is billion with a B, that it purportedly transferred to Iraqi ministries. But we cannot find it, it is missing. Let me just cite one specific example about the work of a company called Custer Battles, which I think illustrates the order of magnitude of corruption, fraud and abuse that has been perpetrated on the American taxpayer while we have other pressing needs in this country. They were retained to provide security at Baghdad International Airport, including personnel, equipment, and K-9 teams to process passengers and cargo. They were totally inept, and they were corrupt. They had a K-9 team that consisted of someone's pet that certainly couldn't sniff bombs. I don't know what they were doing, but they were not sniffing bombs there. But in any event, the director of airport security wrote this about them. Custer Battles has shown themselves to be unresponsive, uncooperative, incompetent, deceitful, manipulative and war profiteers. Other than that, they are swell fellows. Now that is the director of the Baghdad International Airport. It is rife over there with mismanagement, with fraud and abuse. Now, how do we know these problems? We certainly don't know them from the activities of this institution. I am the ranking member on a subcommittee of the International Relations Committee dealing with oversight and investigations. Last week we had our first oversight hearing into the activities of the administration when it came to the reconstruction phase. But we do know about these problems, because we know them through the work of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Construction, Stuart Bowen, whose reports have been objective, accurate and hard hitting, giving praise when it is due and giving criticism when it is due. They describe in clear, simple, understandable terms how the administration's incompetence, mismanagement and lack of planning have exacerbated our problems there. But now this bill, as the gentlewoman said, shifts the oversight responsibility for new Iraq reconstruction funds from the Special Inspector General for Iraq to the State Department Inspector General. Since the Department of State Inspector General has a fraction of the resources that were provided to the Special Inspector General of Iraq and clearly limited experience, this means that oversight of Iraq reconstruction will be drastically reduced. We can't afford that now. We can't afford it. We cannot afford it, and yet this bill does it. The American taxpayer cannot afford that. It is an egregious error in judgment to remove the Inspector General of Iraq, who is appointed by President Bush, from that oversight role. Well, I would urge because of those reasons that this rule be rejected.

Mr. DELAHUNT

Mr. DELAHUNT. And in addition to China, Mr. Speaker, the OPEC countries, they hold debt, American debt, in excess of $75 billion. Now, 5 percent of $75 billion, you know, is probably $4 billion, something like that. Those are just interest payments, Mr. Speaker, that we are sending to the OPEC countries. I mean, this makes no sense at all. It erodes the strength, the economic strength and the position of the United States of America in the international community. The President often talked several years ago about creating an ownership society. What he failed to tell us was that America was being sold piecemeal to the Chinese, to OPEC and to the Japanese. I mean, we no longer own our wealth. It is foreign governments, foreign nations that are our competitors and our potential adversaries, according to some, that are buying America's wealth.

Mr. DELAHUNT. I hate to interrupt. I thank my friend from Florida. They have a plan which is to increase the debt that the American people owe to foreigners. You know, those numbers that we were talking about in terms of China, that $270 billion, let us just pick a number and try to help me calculate what the interest payments are to the Chinese Government every year, 4, 5 percent? Can we agree on 5 percent, because that is easy? Well, what we are doing is we have a plan that is a consequence of their fiscal policy and their tax policy that sends in interest payments every year to China, $25 billion a year. Now, when you stop and think about the $25 billion that goes to China from the United States taxpayers every year, what could we do with that $25 billion? Ms. Wasserman Schultz indicated there was a plan by Democrats regarding energy, ethanol, the use of farm products, biomass. I bet we could fund that program. I bet we could do more with that $25 billion rather than send it to the Chinese, not to reduce principal but simply to pay the interest.

Mr. DELAHUNT. Going back to my era, aren't you?

Mr. DELAHUNT. That China debt has to be updated because China is escalating.

Mr. DELAHUNT. Just a minute. They are holding Treasury notes, and the American taxpayer is sending money to China for the interest payments on those American negotiable instruments, on those Treasury bills. We are supporting education in China.

Mr. DELAHUNT. Not here in the United States but in China.

Mr. DELAHUNT. Of course not. I think we all know that is an inaccurate statement, but I think what is interesting or even more interesting----

Mr. DELAHUNT. Is how are we affording these tax cuts? Who is paying? Where is the money coming from? You remember that movie about follow the money? I think what is particularly disturbing is the reality that we are borrowing money to subsidize tax cuts that are skewed in favor, disproportionately, for 1 percent of the American people, and when you examine the record, and I understand we do not have any charts this evening, but when you examine the record, you discover that we are borrowing money from foreign countries to provide the funding for the tax cut, and that includes the People's Republic of China, mainland China. Now, I know that there are many in this institution that are very concerned about the emergence of China as an aggressive competitor in terms of the global economy. Some would even suggest that China is a potential adversary, and yet, here we are, borrowing money from the People's Republic of China so that we can confer a disproportionate benefit on the top 1 percent of the American people. If you give me just another moment, I think I have a chart here and I know that it is difficult to see, but let me hold it up and let me refer to it. Public debt held by China quadruples under Bush. In the year 2000, American Treasury notes and bills in the possession of the Central Bank of China amounted to $62 billion. That figure today is in excess of $270 billion, four times more in the course of 5 years, four times. Now, I think you would have to conclude that our relationship with China, both commercially, politically and in every aspect of that relationship, we are losing leverage.

Mr. DELAHUNT

Mr. DELAHUNT. But the economy is growing. But the economy has grown.