Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I appeal the ruling of the chair. Mr. Speaker, I often refer to Archie the cockroach. This is my political bible, and Archie has something for almost every occasion. One thing he said once was ``Boss, I believe the millennium will come, but there is a long list of people who have to go first.'' I think Charlie misunderstood. Charlie, Archie was not talking about you, and I hope you reconsider. Mr. Speaker, for 40 years Charlie has been at the center of every effort of this institution to live up to the responsibility which it has to the oldest democracy in the world. Democracy can thrive only when all of our citizens believe that there is at least one place, some forum to which they can go in order to make their case and to have their arguments heard. They do not have to win, but they have to know that there is a place where they will receive a fair hearing. When that happens, democracy thrives; and when it does not, democracy dies a little. I think more than anyone in this institution, Charlie Johnson has dedicated himself to see to it that on this floor, democracy thrives. He has been dedicated to the proposition that the rules ought to be applied in a way that enabled the majority to meet their responsibilities to govern and at the same time to enable the minority to offer and be heard on its alternative visions. To the extent that the House has on occasion not been used that way, the fault certainly does not lie on the shoulders of Charlie Johnson. Charlie Johnson, I think, has met his responsibility to the institution, to the country, to both political parties; and we are all the better for it. I know people have said a lot of good things about him today, and I know that on occasions like this people often exaggerate. For instance, I understand that Charlie's own wife was watching this on C-SPAN, and she heard so many good things about him that she rushed to the Chamber to see if we were talking about the same fellow. We are, Charlie. We are all talking about you. If Dick Bolling were here, who was my mentor in this place and who as a Member I think knew more about the rules than any other Member I ever knew, if Dick Bolling were here today, he would say, ``Well done, thou good and faithful servant.''

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, this resolution will be minimally useful at best. I intend to vote for it. But it falls far short of what this House ought to be doing today. Lou Dobbs two days ago on CNN I think said it best when he said that the reason the Commander in Chief needed to make a public apology for what happened in the prisons in Iraq was not just because that conduct was offensive to the Arab world but because it was offensive to basic American values. And I think Mr. Dobbs had it dead right. Later on in that same program, Anthony Cordesman, a well-known defense expert, made the observation that the worst thing about this from the standpoint of American troops is that because the pictures associated with these violations of human rights will have inflamed the Arab world, that unfortunately it is likely that additional Americans will die because of that. And unfortunately, he also had it dead on. This resolution needs to be amended, and there will be an effort to do that, to amend it to affirm that we need a bipartisan congressional investigation to conduct an investigation into these allegations of abuse, including those by U.S. civilian contractors and other civilians, and an investigation into the chain of command and other systemic deficiencies including the command atmosphere that may have contributed to such abuse. That is the minimum that is necessary. Now, months ago I called for the resignation of the Secretary of Defense because I think the conduct of the civilian leadership of the Defense Department in conducting the affairs in Iraq after the war was spectacularly incompetent. So I do not need to go into that today. Mr. Speaker, the following is an article from a Washington Post editorial on Mr. Rumsfeld's performance on this issue. [From the Washington Post, May 6, 2004] Mr. Rumsfeld's Responsibility The Horrific abuses by American interrogators and guards at the Abu Ghraib prison and at other facilities maintained by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan can be traced, in part, to policy decisions and public statements of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. Beginning more than two years ago, Mr. Rumsfeld decided to overturn decades of previous practice by the U.S. military in its handling of detainees in foreign countries. His Pentagon ruled that the United States would no longer be bound by the Geneva Conventions; that Army regulations on the interrogation of prisoners would not be observed; and that many detainees would be held incommunicado and without any independent mechanism of review. Abuses will take place in any prison system. But Mr. Rumsfeld's decisions helped create a lawless regime in which prisoners in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been humiliated, beaten, tortured and murdered--and in which until recently, no one has been held accountable. The lawlessness began in January 2002 when Mr. Rumsfeld publicly declared that hundreds of people detained by U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan ``do not have any rights'' under the Geneva Conventions. That was not the case: At a minimum, all those arrested in the war zone were entitled under the conventions to a formal hearing to determine whether they were prisoners of war or unlawful combatants. No such hearings were held, but then Mr. Rumsfeld made clear that U.S. observance of the convention was now optional. Prisoners, he said, would be treated ``for the most part;'' in ``a manner that is reasonably consistent'' with the conventions--which the secretary breezily suggested, was outdated. In one important respect, Mr. Rumsfeld was correct: Not only could captured al Qaeda members be legitimately deprived of Geneva Convention guarantees (once the required hearing was held) but such treatment was in many cases necessary to obtain vital intelligence and prevent terrorists from communicating with confederates abroad. But if the United States was to resort to that exceptional practice. Mr. Rumsfeld should have established procedures to ensure that it did so without violating international conventions against torture and that only suspects who truly needed such extraordinary handling were treated that way. Outside controls or independent review could have provided such safeguards. Instead, Mr. Rumsfeld allowed detainees to be indiscriminately designated as beyond the law--and made humane treatment dependent on the goodwill of U.S. personnel. Much of what has happened at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay is shrouded in secrecy. But according to an official Army report, a system was established at the camp under which military guards were expected to ``set the conditions'' for intelligence investigations. The report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba says the system was later introduced at military facilities at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, even though it violates Army regulations forbidding guards to participate in interrogations. The Taguba report and others by human right groups reveal that the detention system Mr. Rumsfeld oversees has become so grossly distorted that military police have abused or tortured prisoners under the direction of civilian contractors and intelligence officers outside the military chain of command--not in ``exceptional'' cases, as Mr. Rumsfeld said Tuesday, but systematically. Army guards have held ``ghost'' prisoners detained by the CIA and even hidden these prisoners from the International Red Cross. Meanwhile, Mr. Rumsfeld's contempt for the Geneva Conventions has trickled down: The Taguba report says that guards at Abu Ghraib had not been instructed on them and that no copies were posted in the facility. The abuses that have done so much harm to the U.S. mission in Iraq might have been prevented had Mr. Rumsfeld been responsive to earlier reports of violations. Instead, the publicly dismissed or minimized such accounts. He and his staff ignored detained reports by respected human rights groups about criminal activity at U.S.-run prisons in Afghanistan, and they refused to provide access to facilities or respond to most questions. In December 2002, two Afghan detainees died in events that were ruled homicides by medical officials; only when the New York Times obtained the story did the Pentagon confirm that an investigation was underway, and no results have yet been announced. Not until other media obtained the photos from Abu Ghraib did Mr. Rumsfeld fully acknowledge what had happened, and not until Tuesday did his department disclose that 25 prisoners have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. Accountability for those deaths has been virtually nonexistent: One soldier was punished with a dishonorable discharge. On Monday Mr. Rumsfeld's spokesman said that the secretary had not read Mr. Taguba's report, which was completed in early March. Yesterday Mr. Rumsfeld told a television interviewer that he still hadn't finished reading it, and he repeated his view that the Geneva Conventions ``did not precisely apply'' but were only ``basic rules'' for handling prisoners. His message remains the same: that the United States need not be bound by international law and that the crimes Mr. Taguba reported are not, for him, a priority. That attitude has undermined the American military's observance of basic human rights and damaged this country's ability to prevail in the war on terrorism. Mr. Speaker, I would just make this observation. The Congress has only two real abilities to effect events. The first is to use the power of the purse, and preliminary to doing that, to ask the right questions about what the intent of our government is before we get into something like Iraq. The Congress, unfortunately, settled for spongy answers beforehand. But the second power that Congress has is the power of investigation. At least after the fact, this Congress ought to investigate from top to bottom what contributed to this outrageous chain of events that has been such a disgrace to our ability to stand up for basic American values. At least if we do that, we can try to ensure that something like this never happens again in the name of the United States of America.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, Earth Day is a great day to call attention to the many environmental and public health challenges that face everyone on the planet. It is also a great opportunity to reflect on the history of the Earth Day movement and to pay tribute to one of recent history's great statesmen and founding father of the movement, our former Senator from Wisconsin, Gaylord Nelson. Today, people all around the nation are celebrating Earth Day. Local communities have organized events to, once again, bring to the public eye the importance of working together to improve our quality of life and to protect our natural heritage. However, without the leadership of a passionate public servant from Wisconsin, we would no be breathing air as clean. We would not be swimming in lakes, rivers and streams as safe. We would not be enjoying the beauty of public lands as special as those we were able to protect under laws he championed. We would not be holding Earth Day celebrations each year on April 22nd. Earth Day was ``born'' in September, 1969. Senator Gaylord Nelson was invited to give a speech at a conference held at the Seattle Science Center. In his speech, he suggested that, just as Americans had been involved in ``teach-ins'' to protest the Vietnam war, the country should also set aside a day to call attention to the environmental problems facing our planet and to demand that Congress address those important issues. He expressed his firm belief that the American people needed to put their leaders ``on notice,'' and he encouraged folks everywhere to explain to their elected officials that they were tired of empty promises. It was time for real action on the environment. At that same conference, he suggested that in the spring of 1970, there should be a nation-wide grassroots demonstration on behalf of the environment, and he encouraged the listening public to participate. Wire services carried the story from coast to coast, and as history showed, the response was overwhelmingly positive. Within hours of that Seattle speech, telegrams, letters and telephone inquiries from across the country poured into his Senate office. His phones in the Capitol were literally ringing off the hook, as people called in to say that they wanted to organize Earth Day celebrations in their own communities. It was obvious that Senator Nelson had struck a chord, and that this was an idea whose time had come. Over the next four months, the calls and letters increased in number until his Senate staff was overwhelmed by the response. At that point, he decided to hire several talented students to help organize and respond to peoples' calls to action. Senator Nelson himself has said that no one individual or group had either the time or the resources to organize and coordinate all of the activities of the 20 million people and thousands of schools, community groups and others who made the first Earth Day such a success. Instead, he credits the many dedicated people in communities across the country, that were sparked to organize at the local level in response by his speech, and send a loud and clear wake-up call to their elected officials on the issue of environmental health. While his speech had resonated with Americans everywhere, and was clearly a catalyst for change, he insists that no single individual was responsible for organizing the first Earth Day. Rather, Earth Day 1970 literally organized itself. It is, to this day, a stellar example of how individuals can make a difference and literally change history. In April 1970, twenty million people spoke out for the environmental health of the planet--rich people and poor people, young and old, farmers and city dwellers, Republicans and Democrats--stood together for the planet. A week-long series of Earth Day events in Philadelphia drew over 30,000 people to Independence Mall on April 21, 1970 and an estimated 75,000 people to Fairmount Park on Earth Day itself, April 22. People came in droves to listen to the keynote speaker and author of the landmark 1970 Clean Air Act, Senator Edmund Muskie. Following that initial activism, thousands more attended events at every college in that region during that week. The organizers of those events accomplished this without having any contact with Senator Nelson, his staff, or any other national coordinating body. Like ripples in a pond, thousands of people in other communities across the country organized their own local Earth Day events in 1970 until the movement was 20 million strong. Today, local, ad hoc Earth Day groups continue to organize their own events on April 22, focusing on the local, regional, national or global issues that matter most to them. That was and continues to be the strength and power of Earth Day. As Senator Nelson is fond of pointing out, it is the activist students and folks in communities across the country, and their actions as a group rather than those of any one individual, who ensured the environment finally took its place as a priority issue on the national political agenda. They made possible the dramatic environmental gains of the past 34 years. We are all in debt to that generation of young people--grade school, high school, and college--who supplied the energy, enthusiasm, and idealism that made Earth Day such a spectacular success. Earth Day was and is a pluralistic event in which every individual and every group that wants to be involved is able to do so, and claim ``ownership'' of the day. Twenty years later, Earth Day has gone global and more than 200 million people from 141 countries participated in the last celebration. However, the millions who rallied on that first Earth Day are what gave Senator Nelson's simple idea its power. And in 1995, while celebrating the 25th anniversary of Earth Day, President Bill Clinton appropriately honored Senator Nelson's timely contribution to the movement by presenting him with the Medal of Freedom. We can all be proud and grateful for the contribution of one of Wisconsin's great statesmen, the thoughtful and provocative founding father of Earth Day, Senator Gaylord Nelson.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time. Mr. Chairman if this resolution is fiscally responsible, then the town drunk ought to be named the permanent president of the temperance union. The fact is, this resolution is the greatest demonstration of fiscal and social irresponsibility in the 35 years I have served in this institution. In the last 3 years, this Congress has followed this President off the fiscal cliff. Three years ago we had a surplus of $200 billion; today we have a deficit of over $500 billion. One-quarter of American workers live on less than $8.70 an hour, poverty level for a family of four. The number of Americans without health insurance has grown from 40 to 44 million. In one generation we have gone from the industrialized country with the smallest gap between rich and poor in the world to the country with the largest. The most-well-off 1 percent of our families control 33 percent of the Nation's wealth. The bottom 50 percent control less than 3 percent of the Nation's wealth. In the teeth of all of that, this President's and this Congress' idea of how to deal with these problems is to pass this silly budget resolution which guarantees, when it is fully effective, that a person making a million dollars a year will have an annual tax cut of $155,000. I absolutely, totally disagree with that trickle-down approach to economics, and I will vote against this resolution. Instead, I have asked the Committee on Rules to allow me to offer an amendment, a 1- year amendment, which would cap the super-size tax cuts for people making over 200,000 bucks a year so that they will receive a tax cut no larger than the folks who are below them on the economic totem pole. That will save $19 billion. We would use 6 billion of that for deficit reduction. We would use the remaining $13 billion for high- priority investments such as homeland security, additional veterans' health care, strengthening education, helping kids who are being dumped off Medicaid rolls by States, helping the long-term unemployed, and strengthening our clean water activities. Last year, I offered a number of similar amendments such as this in the appropriations process, and our friends on the Republican side of the aisle said, ``Oh, Obey, you should not be doing that on the appropriations bills. You should be doing it on the budget resolution''. So here I am at the suggestion of the Republican majority, and I would hope that the Committee on Rules would make that amendment in order so that this House can face the true tradeoffs that we have to face if we are to be mature legislators dealing in a very difficult time. The purpose of the budget process is to force this House to confront specific tradeoffs such as that. Instead, this process is being manipulated to shield Members of Congress from having to vote on those specific tradeoffs. It is a gutless way to govern, and it hurts the country. I think we ought to end the binge. You ought to sober up. You ought to join AA, Alcoholics Anonymous, and you ought to vote ``no'' on this ridiculous and pitifully nonserious budget resolution.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I am so excited by what I just heard that I expect that we will fully see Iraq replace New Hampshire on the Presidential primary circuit before long.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to extend my remarks and include extraneous material during the House debate on the Iraqi resolution later today.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, really in one sense, it does not matter how people vote on this resolution because it has no effect, but some things need to be said about it. Every Member here supports the troops. Every Member here applauds the sacrifices the men and women of our Armed Forces have made. Every Member here understands that America needs no one's permission to defend this country from attack. But when American leaders choose to wage a preemptive war against a country that did not attack the United States, when those leaders attempt to rally the American people to their support on the basis of faulty information and bad intelligence, when that unilateral decision costs more than 500 American lives, when it costs thousands of American wounded, when it costs the lives of uncounted thousands of innocent civilians, that decision does not, despite the claims of this resolution, it does not leave us in a stronger and safer position, as this resolution falsely suggests. In fact, it could be argued it does just the opposite. Are we really in a safer and stronger position when the world and our allies know that we went to war unilaterally on the basis of wrong intelligence? Are we really going to be in a stronger position to persuade the world to follow us the next time we tell them it is necessary to act; for example, in the case of an American conclusion that North Korea has nuclear weapons? Are we really in a safer and stronger position in persuading more Americans to serve in the military when they see that we rushed to war before 45,000 U.S. troops were supplied with the ceramic inserts that they needed for their body armor, when they see their government did not provide the shields that protect Humvees and their occupants from roadbed explosions, or when they see that their government did not supply our troops with the electronic jammers needed to protect those troops against remotely detonated bombs and mines? Are we really in a safer and stronger position when we are forced to police Iraq largely on our own, with little help from our allies? Have we really created a safer world when, by our actions, we have told the Indians and Pakistanis, who have been close to nuclear war with each other, that a doctrine of preemptive war is acceptable? Are we really as safe and strong as we would be if we had not diverted to Iraq key personnel and taken intelligence resources away from the crucial task of finding Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan? Last night, many of us sang the praises of John Hume, the great Irish peacemaker. Hume said last night that there has been no war in history that has not killed more innocent civilians than it has combatants. Are we really safer and stronger in a world where thousands of young Muslims now are being told to hate the United States because we waged a war against a Muslim country that had not attacked the U.S., rather than focusing like a laser on destroying the al Qaeda network which is the justifiable target of our rage? Many Members who vote for this resolution today will do so despite the misstatements it contains, because it contains an expression of support for our troops. Many who vote against it will also do so because of the unwarranted assertions in this resolution that needlessly detract from our focus on the sacrifices those troops have made. Mr. Speaker, shame on the House leadership for drafting this resolution in a way that needlessly divides us rather than unites us. By not allowing meaningful alternatives to be debated and voted on, they do not promote democracy; they mock it. Mr. Speaker, I am inserting in the Record after my statement a copy of the resolution on which we should have been allowed to vote. Resolution Relating to the liberation of the Iraqi people and the valiant service of the United States Armed Forces and Coalition forces. Whereas Saddam Hussein and his regime committed crimes against humanity, systematically violating the human rights of Iraqis and citizens of other countries; Whereas Saddam Hussein's terror regime subjected the Iraqi people to murder, torture, rape, and amputation; Whereas on March 16, 1988, Saddam Hussein's regime had and unleashed weapons of mass destruction against Kurdish citizens, killing nearly 5,000 of them; Whereas as many as 270 mass grave sites, containing the remains of as many as 400,000 victims of Saddam Hussein's regime, have been found in Iraq; Whereas rape was used to intimidate the Iraqi population, with victims often raped in front of their families; Whereas the regime punished the Marsh Arabs by draining the marshlands, which created hundreds of thousands of refugees and caused an ecological catastrophe; Whereas the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 (Public Law 105- 338), passed by the House of Representatives by a vote of 360 to 38, made it United States policy to support efforts to remove from power the regime headed by Saddam Hussein; Whereas with the Iraqi regime failing to comply with 16 previously adopted United Nations Security Council resolutions, the Security Council unanimously approved Resolution 1441 on November 8, 2002, declaring that Iraq `has been and remains in material breach of its obligations under relevant resolutions, including resolution 687 (1991), in particular through Iraq's failure to cooperate with United Nations inspectors'; and Whereas on October 10, 2002, the House of Representatives passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 (Public Law 107-243) and on March 19, 2003, the United States initiated military operations in Iraq: Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That the House of Representatives-- (1) acknowledges the belief on the part of some that the United States and the world have been made safer with the removal of Saddam Hussein and his regime from power in Iraq and the belief that a final judgment on the value of activities in Iraq cannot be made until Iraq is stable and secure; (2) commends the Iraqi people for their courage in the face of unspeakable oppression and brutality inflicted on them by Saddam Hussein's regime; (3) commends the Iraqi people on the adoption of Iraq's interim constitution; (4) commends the members of the United States Armed Forces and Coalition forces for liberating Iraq and expresses its gratitude for their valiant service; and (5) urges the President-- (A) to take all steps necessary to ensure that all members of the United States Armed Forces serving in Iraq receive the best force protection equipment available, including protective body armor and extra-armored wheeled vehicles capable of providing better protection against explosive devices; (B) to ensure that all members of the Armed Forces who suffer wounds or other injuries, or who incur illness, while serving in Iraq receive complete, timely, and high-quality health care to treat the short-term and long-term consequences of such wounds, injuries, and illnesses; (C) to recognize the key contributions made by members of the reserve components of the Armed Forces, and their families, in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and, in consultation with Congress, to address immediately the disparity that exists for many Reserve and Guard personnel between the pay they receive in civilian life and the military compensation they receive when ordered to active duty; (D) to acknowledge that there were serious deficiencies in United States pre-war intelligence on Iraq, particularly in light of the failure to find any evidence of significant weapons of mass destruction programs, and to take steps now to improve intelligence so that United States troops are better protected and future United States national security strategies are better informed; (E) to request sufficient funding immediately to fully support United States military operations in Iraq and the surrounding region in order to ensure the safety and well- being of United States troops deployed to Iraq and the surrounding region; (F) to obtain far-reaching international participation in the securing, reconstruction, and political development of Iraq so that the United States can reduce the number of its troops in Iraq, and reduce the size of its financial commitment to Iraq operations; and (G) to take steps to correct the failure of the United States Government to plan adequately for the post-war occupation of Iraq, including the failure to integrate internal United States Government studies and outside expert opinions that predicted the onset of guerrilla activity and described how to promote effective reconstruction, democratization, and civil society development activities, and the failure to apply those studies and opinions today in order to improve current United States reconstruction efforts in Iraq; (6) expresses deep sorrow and regret for the deaths of more than 550 and the wounding of more than 3,500 members of the United States Armed Forces in Iraq and extends support to their families; and (7) expresses sorrow and regret for the deaths in Iraq of United States civilians, Untied Nations personnel, unknown numbers of Iraqi civilians, and other noncombatants.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, this bill certainly is fine, as far as it goes, but the fact is that higher fines are going to do nothing to mitigate the real problem, which is the concentration of power in the hands of a limited number of large corporations that believe they are outside the reach of the communities they serve. Communities determine standards of decency, and the most effective enforcement of those standards is through local ownership of television and radio stations. FCC fines, even in the millions, will not stop national broadcasters from lowering standards. Infinity stations, for instance, were fined $1.7 million to settle a series of indecency cases, but that did not stop them. On the contrary, just last year, they were fined for a radio contest for couples willing to perform sexually in public places in New York, Washington, D.C., and other cities with a different radio announcer following each couple and providing the play-by-play accounting of the activities. The House tried to do something about the core problem when it adopted, in a bipartisan manner, the Commerce, State, Justice appropriations bill, which had a provision to prevent the FCC from relaxing the established limits on network-owned television stations, and the Senate did the same thing. But at the last moment, in the dead of night, the White House convinced Republican congressional leaders to cave in to the special interest media conglomerates and they agreed to weaken the provision. So by all means, pass this bill, if you want. It will perhaps have a minor effect. But if you really want to do something to give communities the ability to stop this nonsense, you will take away from the FCC the ability to concentrate broadcasting power in the hands of a few corporations. That is what makes the system so fundamentally arrogant. That is what puts the system so far out of the reach of average citizens, who resent seeing this garbage. Until the Congress acts on that, it will be simply dealing with window dressing.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, anyone interested in why there has been such chaos in post-war Iraq needs to read the article I am inserting in the Record by James Fallows which appeared in the most recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly. [From the Atlantic Monthly, January/February 2004] Blind Into Baghdad (By James Fallows) On a Friday afternoon last November, I met Douglas Feith in his office at the Pentagon to discuss what has happened in Iraq. Feith's title is undersecretary of defense for policy, which places him, along with several other undersecretaries, just below Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in the Pentagon's hierarchy. Informally he is seen in Washington as ``Wolfowitz's Wolfowitz''--that is, as a deputy who has a wide range of responsibilities but is clearly identified with one particular policy. That policy is bringing regime change to Iraq--a goal that both Wolfowitz and Feith strongly advocated through the 1990s. To opponents of the war in Iraq, Feith is one of several shadowy, Rasputinlike figures who are shaping U.S. policy. He is seen much the way enemies of the Clinton Administration saw Hillary Clinton. Others associated with the Bush Administration who are seen this way include the consultant Richard Perle; Lewis ``Scooter'' Libby, the chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney; and the Vice President himself. What these officials have in common is their presumably great private influence and--even in the case of the Vice President--their limited public visibility and accountability. In person Douglas Feith is nothing like Rasputin. Between a Reagan-era stint in the Pentagon and his current job he was a Washington lawyer for fifteen years, and he answered my questions with a lawyer's affability in the face of presumed disagreement. I could be biased in Feith's favor, because he was the most senior Administration official who granted my request for an interview about postwar Iraq. Like Donald Rumsfeld, Feith acts and sounds younger than many others of his age (fifty). But distinctly unlike Rumsfeld at a press conference, Feith in this interview did not seem at all arrogant or testy. His replies were relatively candid and unforced, in contrast to the angry or relentlessly on-message responses that have become standard from senior Administration officials. He acknowledged what was ``becoming the conventional wisdom'' about the Administration's failure to plan adequately for events after the fall of Baghdad, and then explained--with animation, dramatic pauses, and gestures--why he thought it was wrong. Feith offered a number of specific illustrations of what he considered underappreciated successes. Some were familiar-- the oil wells weren't on fire, Iraqis didn't starve or flee-- but others were less so. For instance, he described the Administration's careful effort to replace old Iraqi dinars, which carried Saddam Hussein's image (``It's interesting how important that is, and it ties into the whole issue of whether people think that Saddam might be coming back''), with a new form of currency, without causing a run on the currency. But mainly he challenged the premise of most critics: that the Administration could have done a better job of preparing for the consequences of victory. When I asked what had gone better than expected, and what had gone worse, he said, ``We don't exactly deal in `expectations.' Expectations are too close to `predictions.' We're not comfortable with predictions. It is one of the big strategic premises of the work that we do.'' The limits of future knowledge, Feith said, were of special importance to Rumsfeld, ``who is death to predictions.'' ``His big strategic theme is uncertainty,'' Feith said. ``The need to deal strategically with uncertainty. The inability to predict the future. The limits on our knowledge and the limits on our intelligence.'' In practice, Feith said, this meant being ready for whatever proved to be the situation in postwar Iraq. ``You will not find a single piece of paper . . . . If anybody ever went through all of our records--and someday some people will, presumably--nobody will find a single piece of paper that says, `Mr. Secretary or Mr. President, let us tell you what postwar Iraq is going to look like, and here is what we need plans for.' If you tried that, you would get thrown out of Rumsfeld's office so fast--if you ever went in there and said,`Let me tell you what something's going to look like in the future,' you wouldn't get to your next sentence!'' ``This is an important point,'' he said, ``because of this issue of What did we believe? . . . . The common line is, nobody planned for security because Ahmed Chalabi told us that everything was going to be swell.'' Chalabi, the exiled leader of the Iraqi National Congress, has often been blamed for making rosy predictions about the ease of governing postwar Iraq. ``So we predicted that everything was going to be swell, and we didn't plan for things not being swell.'' Here Feith paused for a few seconds, raised his hands with both palms up, and put on a ``Can you believe it?'' expression. ``I mean--one would really have to be a simpleton. And whatever people think of me, how can anybody think that Don Rumsfeld is that dumb? He's so evidently not that dumb, that how can people write things like that?'' He sounded amazed rather than angry. No one contends that Donald Rumsfeld, or Paul Wolfowitz, or Douglas Feith, or the Administration as a whole is dumb. The wisdom of their preparations for the aftermath of military victory in Iraq is the question. Feith's argument was a less defensive-sounding version of the Administration's general response to criticisms of its postwar policy: Life is uncertain, especially when the lid comes off a long-tyrannized society. American planners did about as well as anyone could in preparing for the unforeseeable. Anyone who says otherwise is indulging in lazy, unfair second-guessing. ``The notion that there was a memo that was once written, that if we had only listened to that memo, all would be well in Iraq, is so preposterous,'' Feith told me. The notion of a single memo's changing history is indeed farfetched. The idea that a substantial body of knowledge could have improved postwar prospects is not. The Administration could not have known everything about what it would find in Iraq. But it could have--and should have--done far more than it did. Almost everything, good and bad, that has happened in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime was the subject of extensive pre-war discussion and analysis. This is particularly true of what have proved to be the harshest realities for the United States since the fall of Baghdad: that occupying the country is much more difficult than conquering it; that a breakdown in public order can jeopardize every other goal; that the ambition of patiently nurturing a new democracy is at odds with the desire to turn control over to the Iraqis quickly and get U.S. troops out; that the Sunni center of the country is the main security problem; that with each passing day Americans risk being seen less as liberators and more as occupiers, and targets. All this, and much more, was laid out in detail and in writing long before the U.S. government made the final decision to attack. Even now the collective efforts at planning by the CIA, the State Department, the Army and the Marine Corps, the United States Agency for International Development, and a wide variety of other groups inside and outside the government are underappreciated by the public. The one pre-war effort that has received substantial recent attention, the State Department's Future of Iraq project, produced thousands of pages of findings, barely one paragraph of which has until now been quoted in the press. The Administration will be admired in retrospect for how much knowledge it created about the challenge it was taking on. U.S. government predictions about postwar Iraq's problems have proved as accurate as the assessments of pre-war Iraq's strategic threat have proved flawed. But the Administration will be condemned for what it did with what was known. The problems the United States has encountered are precisely the ones its own expert agencies warned against. Exactly what went wrong with the occupation will be studied for years--or should be. The missteps of the first half year in Iraq are as significant as other classic and carefully examined failures in foreign policy, including John Kennedy's handling of the Bay of Pigs invasion, in 1961, and Lyndon Johnson's decision to escalate U.S. involvement in Vietnam, in 1965. The United States withstood those previous failures, and it will withstand this one. Having taken over Iraq and captured Saddam Hussein, it has no moral or practical choice other than to see out the occupation and to help rebuild and democratize the country. But its missteps have come at a heavy cost. And the ongoing financial, diplomatic, and human cost of the Iraq occupation is the more grievous in light of advance warnings the government had. before september 11, 2001: the early days Concern about Saddam Hussein pre-dated the 9/11 attacks and even the inauguration of George W. Bush. In 1998 Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act, which declared that ``it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power.'' During the 2000 presidential campaign Al Gore promised to support groups working to unseat Saddam Hussein. In the week before Bush took office, Nicholas Lemann reported in The New Yorker that ``the idea of overthrowing Saddam is not an idle fantasy--or, if it is, it's one that has lately occupied the minds of many American officials, including people close to George W. Bush.'' But the intellectual case for regime change, argued during the Clinton years by some Democrats and notably by Paul Wolfowitz, then the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, shifted clearly toward operational planning after the destruction of the World Trade Center. For much of the public this case for war against Iraq rested on an assumed connection (though this was never demonstrated, and was officially disavowed by the President) between Saddam Hussein's regime and the terrorist hijackers. Within the government the case was equally compelling but different. September 11 had shown that the United States was newly vulnerable; to protect itself it had to fight terrorists at their source; and because Saddam Hussein's regime was the leading potential source of future ``state- sponsored'' terrorism, it had become an active threat, whether or not it played any role in 9/11. The very next day, September 12, 2001, James Woolsey, who had been Clinton's first CIA director, told me that no matter who proved to be responsible for this attack, the solution had to include removing Saddam Hussein, because he was so likely to be involved next time. A military planner inside the Pentagon later told me that on September 13 his group was asked to draw up scenarios for an assault on Iraq, not just Afghanistan. Soon after becoming the Army Chief of Staff, in 1999, General Eric Shinseki had begun ordering war-game exercises to judge strategies and manpower needs for possible combat in Iraq. This was not because he assumed a war was imminent. He thought that the greater Caspian Sea region, including Iraq, would present a uniquely difficult challenge for U.S. troops, because of its geography and political tensions. After 9/11, Army war games involving Iraq began in earnest. In his first State of the Union address, on January 29, 2002, President Bush said that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea were an ``axis of evil'' that threatened world peace. ``By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States.'' By the time of this speech efforts were afoot not simply to remove Saddam Hussein but also to imagine what Iraq would be like when he was gone. In late October of 2001, while the U.S. military was conducting its rout of the Taliban from Afghanistan, the State Department had quietly begun its planning for the aftermath of a ``transition'' in Iraq. At about the time of the ``axis of evil'' speech, working groups within the department were putting together a list of postwar jobs and topics to be considered, and possible groups of experts to work on them. one year before the war: the ``future of iraq'' Thus was born the Future of Iraq project, whose existence is by now well known, but whose findings and potential impact have rarely been reported and examined. The State Department first publicly mentioned the project in March of 2002, when it quietly announced the lineup of the working groups. At the time, media attention was overwhelmingly directed toward Afghanistan, where Operation Anaconda, the half-successful effort to kill or capture al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters, was under way. For several months before announcing the project the State Department had been attempting to coordinate the efforts of the many fractious Iraqi exile organizations. The Future of Iraq project held the potential for harnessing, and perhaps even harmonizing, the expertise available from the exile groups. It was also in keeping with a surprisingly well established U.S. government tradition of preparing for postwar duties before there was a clear idea of when fighting would begin, let alone when it would end. Before the United States entered World War II, teams at the Army War College were studying what went right and wrong when American doughboys occupied Germany after World War I. Within months of the attack on Pearl Harbor, a School of Military Government had been created, at the University of Virginia, to plan for the occupation of both Germany and Japan. In 1995, while U.S. negotiators, led by Richard Holbrooke, were still working at the Dayton peace talks to end the war in the Balkans, World Bank representatives were on hand to arrange loans for the new regimes. Contemplating postwar plans posed a problem for those who, like many in the State Department, were skeptical of the need for war. Were they making a war more likely if they prepared for its aftermath? Thomas Warrick, the State Department official who directed the Future of Iraq project, was considered to be in the antiwar camp. But according to associates, he explained the importance of preparing for war by saying, ``I'm nervous that they're actually going to do it--and the day after they'll turn to us and ask, `Now what?' '' So he pushed ahead with the project, setting up numerous conferences and drafting sessions that would bring together teams of exiles--among them Kanan Makiya, the author of the influential anti-Saddam book, Republic of Fear, first published in 1989. A small number of ``international advisers,'' mainly from the United States, were also assigned to the teams. Eventually there would be seventeen working groups, designed systematically to cover what would be needed to rebuild the political and economic infrastructure of the country. ``Democratic Principles and Procedures'' was the name of one of the groups, which was assigned to suggest the legal framework for a new government; Makiya would write much of its report. The ``Transitional Justice'' group was supposed to work on reparations, amnesty, and de-Baathification laws. Groups studying economic matters included ``Public Finance,'' ``Oil and Energy,'' and ``Water, Agriculture and Environment.'' In May of 2002 Congress authorized $5 million to fund the project's studies. In the flurry of news from Afghanistan the project went unnoticed in the press until June, when the State Department announced that the first meetings would take place in July. ``The role of the U.S. government and State Department is to see what the Iraqis and Iraqi-Americans want,'' Warrick said at a conference on June 1, 2002. ``The impetus for change comes from [Iraqis], not us. This is the job of Iraqis inside and outside.'' That same day President Bush delivered a graduation speech at West Point, giving a first look at the doctrine of pre- emptive war. He told the cadets, to cheers, ``Our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for pre-emptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.'' Later in the summer the doctrine was elaborated in a new National Security Strategy, which explained that since ``rogue states'' could not be contained or deterred, they needed to be destroyed before they could attack. Whenever National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was interviewed that summer, she talked mainly about the thinking behind the new policy. When Vice President Dick Cheney was interviewed, he talked mainly about Saddam Hussein's defiance of international law. But when Secretary of State Colin Powell was interviewed, he constantly stressed the value of an international approach to the problem and the need to give UN arms inspectors adequate time to do their job. War with Iraq was not inevitable at this point, but it seemed more and more likely. Daily conversation in Washington, which usually reverts to ``So, who do you think will be the next President?,'' switched instead to ``So, when do you think we're going to war?'' It was in these circumstances that the Future of Iraq project's working groups deliberated. Most of the meetings were in Washington. Some were in London, and one session, in early September, took place in Surrey, where representatives of a dozen mutually suspicious exile groups discussed prospects for democratic coexistence when Saddam Hussein was gone. (Along with Chalabi's INC the meeting included several rival Kurdish groups, Assyrian and Turkomen organizations, the Iraqi Constitutional Monarchy Movement, and others.) The project did not overcome all the tensions among its members, and the results of its deliberations were uneven. Three of its intended working groups never actually met-- including, ominously, ``Preserving Iraq's Cultural Heritage.'' The ``Education'' group finally produced a report only six pages long, in contrast to many hundreds of pages from most others. Some recommendations were quirky or reflected the tastes of the individual participants who drafted them. A report titled ``Free Media'' proposed that all Iraqi journalists be taken out of the country for a month-long re-education process: ``Those who `get it' go back as reporters; others would be retired or reassigned.'' A group that was considering ways of informing Iraq about the realities of democracy mentioned Baywatch and Leave It to Beaver as information sources that had given Iraqis an imprecise understanding of American society. It recommended that a new film, Colonial America: Life in a Theocracy, be shot, noting, ``The Puritan experiments provide amazing parallels with current Moslem fundamentalism. The ultimate failures of these US experiments can also be vividly illustrated--witch trials, intolerance, etc.'' But whatever may have been unrealistic or factional about these efforts, even more of what the project created was impressive. The final report consisted of thirteen volumes of recommendations on specific topics, plus a one-volume summary and overview. These I have read--and I read them several months into the occupation, when it was unfairly easy to judge how well the forecast was standing up. (Several hundred of the 2,500 pages were in Arabic, which sped up the reading process.) The report was labeled ``For Official Use Only''-- an administrative term that implies confidentiality but has no legal significance. The State Department held the report closely until, last fall, it agreed to congressional requests to turn over the findings. Most of the project's judgments look good in retrospect-- and virtually all reveal a touching earnestness about working out the details of reconstructing a society. For instance, one of the thickest volumes considered the corruption endemic in Iraqi life and laid out strategies for coping with it. (These included a new ``Iraqi Government Code of Ethics,'' which began, ``Honesty, integrity, and fairness are the fundamental values for the people of Iraq.'') The overview volume, which appears to have been composed as a series of PowerPoint charts, said that the United States was undertaking this effort because, among other things, ``detailed public planning'' conveys U.S. government ``seriousness'' and the message that the U.S. government ``wants to learn from past regime change experiences.'' For their part, the Iraqi participants emphasized several points that ran through all the working groups' reports. A recurring theme was the urgency of restoring electricity and water supplies as soon as possible after regime change. The first item in the list of recommendations from the ``Water, Agriculture and Environment'' group read, ``Fundamental importance of clean water supplies for Iraqis immediately after transition. Key to coalition/community relations.'' One of the groups making economic recommendations wrote, ``Stressed importance of getting electrical grid up and running immediately--key to water systems, jobs. Could go a long way to determining Iraqis' attitudes toward Coalition forces.'' A second theme was the need to plan carefully for the handling and demobilization of Iraq's very sizable military. On the one hand, a functioning army would be necessary for public order and, once coalition forces withdrew, for the country's defense. (``Our vision of the future is to build a democratic civil society. In order to make this vision a reality, we need to have an army that can work alongside this new society.'') On the other hand, a large number of Saddam's henchmen would have to be removed. The trick would be to get rid of the leaders without needlessly alienating the ordinary troops--or leaving them without income. One group wrote, ``All combatants who are included in the demobilization process must be assured by their leaders and the new government of their legal rights and that new prospects for work and education will be provided by the new system.'' Toward this end it laid out a series of steps the occupation authorities should take in the ``disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration'' process. Another group, in a paper on democratic principles, warned, ``The decommissioning of hundreds of thousands of trained military personnel that [a rapid purge] implies could create social problems.'' Next the working groups emphasized how disorderly Iraq would be soon after liberation, and how difficult it would be to get the country on the path to democracy--though that was where it had to go. ``The removal of Saddam's regime will provide a power vacuum and create popular anxieties about the viability of all Iraqi institutions,'' a paper on rebuilding civil society said. ``The traumatic and disruptive events attendant to the regime change will affect all Iraqis, both Saddam's conspirators and the general populace.'' Another report warned more explicitly that ``the period immediately after regime change might offer these criminals the opportunity to engage in acts of killing, plunder and looting.'' In the short term the occupying forces would have to prevent disorder. In the long term, according to a report written by Kanan Makiya, they would need to recognize that ``the extent of the Iraqi totalitarian state, its absolute power and control exercised from Baghdad, not to mention the terror used to enforce compliance, cannot be overestimated in their impact on the Iraqi psyche and the attendant feeling of fear, weakness, and shame.'' Makiya continued, ``These conditions and circumstances do not provide a strong foundation on which to build new institutions and a modern nation state.'' Each of the preceding themes would seem to imply a long, difficult U.S. commitment in Iraq. America should view its involvement in Iraq, the summary report said, not as it had Afghanistan, which was left to stew in lightly supervised warlordism, but as it had Germany and Japan, which were rebuilt over many years. But nearly every working group stressed one other point: the military occupation itself had to be brief. ``Note: Military government idea did not go down well,'' one chart in the summary volume said. The ``Oil and Energy'' group presented a ``key concept'': ``Iraqis do not work for American contractors; Americans are seen assisting Iraqis.'' Americans are often irritated by the illogic of ``resentful dependence'' by weaker states. South Koreans, for example, complain bitterly about U.S. soldiers in their country but would complain all the more bitterly if the soldiers were removed. The authors of the Future of Iraq report could by those standards also be accused of illogical thinking, in wanting U.S. support but not wanting U.S. control. Moreover, many of the project's members had a bias that prefigured an important source of postwar tension: they were exiles who considered themselves the likeliest beneficiaries if the United States transferred power to Iraqis quickly--even though, precisely because of their exile, they had no obvious base of support within Iraq. To skip ahead in the story: As chaos increased in Baghdad last summer, the chief U.S. administrator, L. Paul ``Jerry'' Bremer, wrestled constantly with a variant of this exile paradox. The Iraqi Governing Council, whose twenty-five members were chosen by Americans, was supposed to do only the preparatory work for an elected Iraqi government. But the greater the pressure on Bremer for ``Iraqification,'' the more tempted he was to give in to the council's demand that he simply put it in charge without waiting for an election. More than a year earlier, long before combat began, the explicit recommendations and implicit lessons of the Future of Iraq project had given the U.S. government a very good idea of what political conflicts it could expect in Iraq.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I am inserting in the Record today an article which appeared in the Washington Post on Sunday, February 8, 2004. The article is about the price that is paid by Chinese workers for Wal- Mart's low prices. But, in fact, the article has far broader implications for American workers. The article makes clear that low prices offered by Wal-Mart are built on a foundation of injustice for Chinese workers. But more importantly, for American workers the article demonstrates how the race to the bottom for workers wages and benefits occurs in this country. By implication, it illustrates that if today Wal-Mart and companies like it produce lower wages by squeezing their own workers wages and benefits, that creates pressure on competitors to do the same thing. Every Member of Congress and every American ought to ask whether America really wants to follow the Wal-Mart economic model. [From the Washington Post Foreign Service, Feb. 8, 2004] Chinese Workers Pay for Wal-Mart's Low Prices (By Peter S. Goodman and Philip P. Pan) Shenzhen, China.--Inside the factory, amid clattering machinery and clouds of sawdust, men without earplugs or protective goggles feed wood into screaming electric saws, making cabinets for stereo speakers. Women hunch over worktables, many hands bandaged and few covered by gloves, pressing transistors into circuit boards. Most of the 2,100 workers here are poor migrants from the countryside who have come to this industrial hub in southern China for jobs that pay about $120 a month. A sign on the wall reminds them of their expendability in a nation with hundreds of millions of surplus workers: ``If you don't work hard today, tomorrow you'll have to try hard to look for a job.'' The calculations driving production here at Shenzhen Baoan Fenda Industrial Co. are no different from those governing global capitalism in general--make more for less--but it is applied with particular vigor on this shop floor. Sixty percent of the stereos coming off the line are for one customer: Wal-Mart Stores Inc., whose mastery at squeezing savings from its supply chain made it the world's largest company. ``The profit is really small,'' said Surely Huang, a factory engineer, speaking of the 350,000 stereos that Fenda agreed in March to supply to the retailer for $30 to $40 each. Huang said they sell for $50 in the United States. ``We have to constantly cut costs to satisfy Wal-Mart.'' Yet this factory and thousands of others along China's east coast have decided, with China's leaders, that the deal is worth the price. Wal-Mart provides access to vastly more store shelves than they could ever reach by themselves, a way to build a brand from Fort Worth to Frankfurt. Meeting Wal- Mart's strict requirements could improve the factory's efficiency and make it easier to land contracts from other major retailers. As capital scours the globe for cheaper and more malleable workers, and as poor countries seek multinational companies to provide jobs, lift production and open export markets, Wal-Mart and China have forged themselves into the ultimate joint venture, their symbiosis influencing the terms of labor and consumption the world over. With sales of more than $245 billion a year, Wal-Mart is the largest retailer in the United States, still the ultimate consumer market. China is the most populous country, with 1.3 billion people, most still poor enough to willingly move hundreds of miles from home for jobs that would be shunned by anyone with better prospects. The Communist Party government has become perhaps the world's greatest facilitator of capitalist production, beckoning multinational giants with tax-free zones and harsh punishment for anyone with designs on organizing a labor movement. More than 80 percent of the 6,000 factories in Wal-Mart's worldwide database of suppliers are in China. Wal-Mart estimates it spent $15 billion on Chinese-made products last year, accounting for nearly one-eighth of all Chinese exports to the United States. If the company that Sam Walton built with his ``Made in America'' ad campaign were itself a separate nation, it would rank as China's fifth-largest export market, ahead of Germany and Britain. Back in its home market, Wal-Mart's vast appetite for Chinese imports has placed it at the center of a sharp debate over whether the influx of low-cost products from China is good for Americans. Domestic manufacturers, labor groups and some politicians point to China's record trade surplus with the United States, estimated to have totaled $120 billion last year, and accuse Beijing of manipulating its currency, condoning the exploitation of its workers and competing unfairly, resulting in the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs. But Chinese officials counter that nearly two-thirds of the country's exports are shipped from factories wholly or jointly owned by foreign investors, with Wal-Mart often cited as the prime example, supplying Americans with a steady flow of low-cost, high-quality goods. With its near-religious devotion to the pursuit of ``everyday low prices,'' Wal-Mart illustrates why U.S.-based multinationals with operations here have not joined in the chorus for protectionism. ``For the benefit of the consumer, we should buy merchandise where we get the best value,'' said Andrew Tsuei, managing director of Wal-Mart's global procurement center in Shenzhen. Joe Hatfield, president of Wal-Mart's Asia operations, noted that many of the goods his company buys in China--toys, furniture, textiles and holiday ornaments--have mostly not been made in the United States for years. The Bush administration has pressed China to increase the value of its currency, which some argue makes China's goods unfairly cheap on world markets. Hatfield rolled his eyes. ``That would be a travesty to do to the consumer in the United States,'' he said. ``You do that and the cost of living is going to go up.'' For Wal-Mart and other multinational companies doing business in China, a stable currency, political peace and a compliant workforce are nearly as important as low costs. ``There might be places in other parts of the world where you can buy cheaper, but can you get [the product] on the ship?'' Tsuei said. ``If we have to look at a country that's not politically stable, you might not get your order on time. If you deal in a country where the currency fluctuates, everyday there is a lot of risk. China happens to have the right mix.'' Labor activists in China and abroad say that mix includes the ruling party's ban on independent trade unions--workers may join only the party-run union--as well as courts and regulatory agencies controlled by local party officials who are often willing to overlook labor violations to appease businesses that can be milked for taxes, fees and bribes. The activists argue that as Wal-Mart pits suppliers against one another and squeezes them for the lowest price, the workers suffer. ``Wal-Mart pressures the factory to cut its price, and the factory responds with longer hours or lower pay,'' said a Chinese labor official, who declined to be named for fear of punishment. ``And the workers have no options.'' In the city of Dongguan in southern Guangdong province, where Wal-Mart suppliers are concentrated, a 27-year-old worker who gave her name as Miss Qin complained that she can rarely afford meat with her $75-per-month wages at Kaida Toy Co. ``Every day we eat vegetables, mostly we eat vegetables,'' she said, leaning over a plate of fried carrots in a dingy restaurant. Qin helps make plastic toy trains for Wal-Mart, but says she cannot afford to buy toys for her 9-year-old son. ``In four years, they haven't increased the salary,'' she said. Kong Xianghong, the No. 2 official for the party-run union in Guangdong province, acknowledged that low wages, long hours and poor conditions are common in factories that supply Wal-Mart and other U.S.-based corporations. ``It's better than nothing,'' he said. ``Labor protections, working conditions and wages are related to a country's level of economic development. Of course, we want better labor protections, but we can't afford it. We need the jobs. We need to guarantee people can eat.'' Still, Kong said, the party-controlled union has been frustrated that Wal-Mart has refused for three years to allow it to set up branches in the 31 Wal-Mart stores in China-- even though he has assured the company that the union wouldn't help workers struggle for better pay. Wal-Mart has also fought efforts to unionize its U.S. stores. Wal-Mart's China headquarters is a monument to its frugality--a low building covered in white tile. The linoleum conference table is pockmarked with gaps where the plywood shows through. Tea is served in plastic cups. In Hatfield's office, where he presides over Wal-Mart's Asia operations, the rusty window frame is open, the sound of car horns washing in from the street. Wal-Mart portrays itself as a force for good in China. The company says it enforces labor standards for its suppliers and insists that they comply with Chinese law. ``We look at safety. We look at health, and this comes with a cost. We ensure people get paid above minimum wage. They have to have fire extinguishers, fire exits,'' Tsuei said. ``There are people out there who cannot have those things and offer a lower price. We do not do business with those people.'' Wal-Mart employs 100 auditors who annually inspect every supplier's factory. Last year, the company suspended deals with about 400 suppliers, primarily for exceeding limits on overtime, Tsuei said. Another 72 factories were blacklisted permanently last year, he said, almost all for employing children under China's legal working age of 16. But Wal-Mart does not conduct regular inspections of smaller factories that sell goods to the company through middlemen. Nor does it inspect all its suppliers' subcontractors or the Chinese manufacturing operations of U.S. suppliers such as Mattel Inc. and Dell Inc. ``The inspection system is not effective,'' said Li Qiang, a labor organizer who has been in contact with workers at more than a dozen factories that supply Wal-Mart, and who worked in one himself before leaving China three years ago. ``The factories are usually notified in advance, and they often prepare by cleaning up, creating fake time sheets and briefing workers on what to say.'' Li said these factories often require employees to work as many as 80 hours per week during the busy season for $75 to $110 per month, violating Chinese labor laws. If Wal-Mart really wanted to monitor conditions among its suppliers, Li said, it could do so with surprise visits, longer inspections and independent auditors. ``But if they did that, prices would definitely go up,'' he said. Wal-Mart is such a big player in China that it does not have to go looking for suppliers; the suppliers come to them, jamming a reception area at the procurement center. Yu Xiaoma of Guangzhou Kangaroo Leathers Co., which makes handbags and wallets for Wal-Mart and other multinationals, said: ``You can't make much money from Wal-Mart. They demand the lowest, lowest price.'' Amy Gu, vice manager for exports for Goodbaby Corp., which makes baby strollers near Shanghai, said the company sometimes takes orders to supply Wal-Mart at or below cost through a partnership with a Canadian distributor, Dorel Industries Inc. ``Dorel will tell us, 'Well, Wal-Mart has given us this price, we need a factory cost of this much,' `` Gu said. ``And we have to find a way to deliver it.'' Wal-Mart says such arrangements benefit both sides. Hatfield said the company has made distribution more efficient and fair by cutting out middlemen and resisting corruption. In a country where transportation remains unreliable, WalMart's distribution network has given manufacturers access to customers around the country and the world. He touted the case of a Guangdong factory that began supplying Wal-Mart stores in Shenzhen with a drink made of milk and egg yolk, delivering 25,000 units the first month. It proved popular. By September, Wal-Mart was shipping 1 million units a month across southern China. ``They can just drop it at our distribution center and we take care of the rest,'' Hatfield said. ``Now it's a national brand.'' Yet those who run the factory that produces the drink, Weijiasi Food & Beverage Co., say they haven't yet shared in the success. ``In the beginning, we made money,'' said a manager reached by telephone, who gave his name as Mr. Li. ``But when Wal-Mart started to launch nationwide distribution, they pressured us for a special price at below our cost. Now, we're losing money on every box, while Wal- Mart is making more money.''

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Emanuel). (Mr. EMANUEL asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2\3/4\ minutes to the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur), the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration and Related Agencies.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the distinguished minority whip.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 12 minutes. Mr. Speaker, this bill is a pitiful Christmas tree with such a bad smell that it smells more like a garbage truck than something appropriate to Christmas. It spectacularly insults the judgment of both the House and the Senate on a number of items. Both Houses of the Congress voted to provide overtime protections for workers because the administration is trying to take those protections away from 8 million workers. This bill, without one minute of comment in the conference committee, arbitrarily at the instruction of the Republican leadership rips out those protections. Both Houses voted on a bipartisan basis to cap the number of television stations that could be owned by media conglomerates around the country. In the Senate, that amendment was offered by a Republican, Senator Stevens, and in the House it was offered by me. The House and Senate adopted both of them. Despite that fact, again, without a moment's discussion in the conference committee, at the instruction of the leadership, this conference committee has ripped out the judgment of both Houses on that score; and they have come back with a nice cozy insider arrangement that protects all of the major media giants from having to do anything inconvenient. So much for pluralism and democracy. This House voted to instruct the conferees to allow for drug reimportation. This conference committee has stripped that out. This House earlier reached a compromise in the DOD bill and in Interior on outsourcing. This conference again arbitrarily changes that bipartisan agreement. Fifthly, there are incredible numbers of American workers who have been unemployed for an extended period of time, and yet this Congress refuses to, in this same omnibus bill, extend long-term coverage for the unemployed. This Congress ought to be ashamed of itself on that score. This bill gratuitously amends and guts a key provision of the Clean Air Act. And then on funding levels, this bill on education falls $7 billion below the amount promised under the No Child Left Behind Act. It falls $350 million below the Republican-passed House budget resolution in the funding level it provides for title I, which is the main education program that helps disadvantaged children to try to improve their academic performance. And it falls $1 billion below the amount that was promised in the House budget resolution for helping to educate handicapped children. In the National Institutes of Health, the committee pretends that it is above the bill that left the House; but by the time you take into account the across-the-board cut that is required in the bill and other financial transactions, this bill is in reality $118 million below the President for the National Institutes of Health, $145 million below the House-passed bill, and $182 million below the Senate-passed bill. It on substance short-sheets and shortchanges some of the most basic obligations of government. Yet this conference finds room for over 7,000 individual Member pieces of pork which cost the taxpayers over $7.5 billion. In 1995, the last year that I chaired the Committee on Appropriations, the House provided virtually no earmarks in the Labor- Health-Education bill. There are well over 1,200 of those special earmarks this year. In the VA-HUD bill, we have a $1.1 billion plug for projects. $1.1 billion is being spent for earmarked projects. One-quarter of the amount that is reserved for the House goes to three Members, one from New York, one from West Virginia, one from Alaska. If you take a look at the way these projects are distributed, if we distributed the earmarks evenly with every Member getting an equal amount in the Labor- Health-Education bill, for instance, there would be about $2 million per constituent provided for each Member's district. But it is not provided equally. So if you are from Indiana, if we simply went by basic formulas, Indiana would get about $18 million in special earmarks, but it does not. In this bill, Indiana taxpayers get about 62 cents per capita by way of special earmarks. If you represent Oregon, you bring home to your constituents in this bill about 64 cents per capita in earmarks. North Carolina, you bring home about 85 cents per capita in earmarks. California, about a dollar. But in that same Labor-Health bill, if you are from Alaska, you bring home $47 per person. And then if you look at what else Alaska gets, they get $123 per person in the VA-HUD bill, they get $192 per person in the Transportation bill, and they get $220 per person from the Commerce-Justice bill. That means that special grants to Alaska wind up totaling $638 per person in comparison to the table scraps that I just explained for States like Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina, California and the like. Mr. Speaker, the appropriations process used to be the main task of government. The main task of the Congress each year was to pass the 13 appropriation bills which funded all of the financial activities of government. The appropriation bills used to provide an opportunity for a debate on priorities. Instead, what has happened is that the number of earmarks, the number of pieces of pork have become so numerous that Members of Congress have changed their focus and today instead of asking ``Where's the beef?'' in terms of funding levels for education or for health care or for science, instead they are asking, ``Where's the pork and how much did I get?'' And what has happened is that these projects are now being used to entice Members into only asking one question: How much did I get in pork? Rather than what were we able to do to improve the program funding for education or health care or environmental protection or you name it. I think that fundamentally corrupts the appropriations process, I think it makes us all simply ATM machines rather than policymakers, and I think it does no credit whatsoever to the Congress as an institution. I want to point out, in a troubled agency like NASA, in 1995 there were two special earmarks that were provided. Today there are 104. Over the past few years since 1998, $1.7 billion has been diverted from regular NASA appropriations, a very troubled agency with serious safety problems; $1.7 billion has been diverted from those regular programs to industrial parks or museums or other local projects. In the Commerce-Justice bill in 1995, there were 45 projects costing the taxpayer $104 million. Last year, Mr. Speaker, there were 996, costing the taxpayer over $1 billion. There has been a 4,200 percent increase in earmarks for the Justice Department over that same period of time. So, Mr. Speaker, I am going to urge that we vote ``no'' on this bill. This bill is a gratuitous insult to every worker who is entitled to overtime pay. It is an outrageous neglect of the workers who ought to see their elected representatives pushing for expanded unemployment compensation for the long-term unemployed. This bill falls seriously short of the funding that this Congress itself promised in the Republican budget resolution just 5 months ago for education. It falls far short of where we need to be in the area of health care. It falls half a billion dollars short of where we ought to be in providing aid to our local and State levels of government for law enforcement assistance. And I think the way in which the earmarking process has gradually moved from something which was a tolerable and understandable effort on the part of the Congress to shift a small number of financing decisions to Congress into a decision-making process in which the total dominant consideration is simply congressional pork rather than substance in programs. I think when we do that, we fundamentally erode the confidence that each individual Member has in this institution, and I think we erode the confidence that every taxpayer has in this institution. I regret that. This bill is a spectacular example of legislation and political pressure run amuck, and I would urge a ``no'' vote on the legislation. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 5 minutes. Mr. Speaker, once again we have heard the gentleman in the well, on behalf of the Republican Party, try to make the case that somehow the Republican Party was responsible for the education budget increases of the last 2 years. For the Republicans to take credit for increases in education spending over the last 8 years, Mr. Speaker, is like Saddam Hussein taking credit for providing the Third Infantry Division safe passage to Baghdad. The fact is that the majority party leadership fought every step of the way to prevent us from being able to eventually add the $19 billion in education funding that we provided, because of Democratic pressure over the past 8 years, $19 billion above the amount that the Republicans tried to put in their own education bill when those bills were before the House. The Republican Party leadership fought us every step of the way. That increase in $19 billion happened over their dead bodies, politically speaking, and in spite of every trick that their leadership could concoct to stop it from happening. They refused to give the subcommittees an allocation that would allow meaningful increases. They broke every arm on their side of the aisle to force people to vote for lower funding levels when the bills went to the floor. When that technique failed, they refused to allow the bills to be considered on the floor. When that did not work, and when they finally had to go to conference, and often they had the conference legislation that had never even been considered in the House because of the inadequacy of their allocation, they then blocked the conferees from reaching agreement between the two Houses because the funding levels for education would be too high in their judgment. They relented only at the very last minute when conceding on education funding that increases that we were asking for was the only way to end the session and get the Congress out of town. On one occasion they even agreed to allow a funding level for education to be reported out of the conference and then decided they could not tolerate such a high level of support and forced the bill back into conference to strip out increases in education funding. For the Republican Party members of this House to claim that somehow they were responsible for those education budget increases, makes Pinocchio look like Honest Abe by comparison. The credibility gap that we have on the Republican side of the aisle has grown faster than Pinocchio's nose. So I just want to suggest, Mr. Speaker, that it is crocodile tears to hear the Republicans profess that they really are friends of education. I also would like to point out one other thing, a newspaper ad which appeared in the Washington Post today. It reads ``The most outrageous Christmas list in America.'' It says ``It's called the omnibus. No, it's not Santa's sleigh, but it is laden with presents. It's coming to Washington D.C. this week. And you better believe the Bush Administration's best friends have front row seats. ``Having failed to pass seven of the Federal Government's 13 budget bills, the White House and Republican congressional leaders have rolled them all into one massive package dubbed `the omnibus.' ``So who does President Bush think is naughty and nice? Apparently no one is more deserving than Rupert Murdoch and his fellow network moguls. Despite the wishes of Congress and the vast majority of Americans, the President insists the omnibus include a relaxation of media antitrust rules. Now, the biggest networks will be able to acquire more of the hugely profitable local stations they desire. ``American workers, on the other hand, must have been very naughty. The omnibus bill eliminates extended unemployment benefits for millions of jobless. And 8 million workers who currently have Federal overtime protection lose their right to extra pay for those extra hours.'' That is the problem with this bill, Mr. Speaker, and I urge a ``no'' vote. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman has two remaining speakers, I would ask him to use one of them now, and then I will close.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman has one remaining speaker?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I am waiting until the gentleman has one speaker. He does not have the right to two closing speeches. I have got the right to have the second to the last speech.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I understand the gentleman indicates he has two remaining speakers; so I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 3\1/3\ minutes. Mr. Speaker, I simply want to say that I agree very much with the remarks of the distinguished majority leader that this legislation is a fitting close to this session, because this congressional session has been marked from start to finish with an iron-hard determination to do what was necessary to deliver the most to those who have the most in this society. We started with tax cuts which aimed a huge percentage of the benefits to those who are most well-off in our society, giving huge benefits to the most well-off 1 percent who earn more than $330,000 a year. Yet this same Congress denied tax cuts to persons whose income is so limited that they had to apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit. They were not allowed to come to the table to get their share of the tax cut. This is the same Congress which, even as it walks out the door, having provided in the energy bill fiscal health to companies like Hooters, this is the same Congress that now says, ``Oh, but, by the way, no, we will not provide a last-minute bit of help to workers who have been out of work for an extended period of time.'' They refuse to allow States to provide additional unemployment compensation for the long-term unemployed. This truly is a fitting close to the Congressional Record, which we have sadly seen since the beginning of January. With respect to the gentleman's comments about this Congress being a paragon of fiscal responsibility and virtue, I simply want to announce that I am perfectly willing right here and now to give the majority leader the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, because this is the same Congress and this is the same White House that has shown so much fiscal responsibility that in 3 short years they have taken us from a $230 billion surplus to a record $375 billion-plus deficit. That is some fiscal responsibility. I think Mr. Webster would weep if we asked him to put that definition in the dictionary. I want to say one more time, Mr. Speaker, with all of the gifts that are given in the energy bill to the special interests, with all of the gifts that are given in this bill to many special interests throughout the land, with all of the gifts that were given to special interests in the tax bill, it seems to me that we could at least provide some additional benefits to the long-term unemployed. But, no, no, no, that does not fit in the Christmas plans for the Scrooges who are running the other party on the other side of the aisle. The motto for this Congress when it comes to working people ought to be ``Bah, humbug,'' because that is what the record looks like. Mr. Speaker, I ask for a ``no'' vote. Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record the following article from the December 8 edition of the National Journal's Congress Daily AM bulletin, which comments on the choice of the Appropriation process by the majority party. [From the Congress Daily AM, Dec. 8, 2003] The Triumph of Pettiness (By David Hess) The partisan bitterness that has suffused Congress over the past decade has reached a new level. Democrats have long grumbled about power-mad Republicans who will stoop to anything to exert their will. Republicans grouse about fault- finding, obstructionist Democrats and speak of getting even for long-ago Democratic abuses. But up to this point, in the rough and tumble of parliamentary skirmishing, both sides have largely refrained from sweeping, systematic legislative blackmail. Now the wraps are off even that. Furious about opposition to key spending bills, Republican leaders have dropped the hammer on hometown projects--known as ``earmarks''--sponsored mostly by Democrats but also by some Republicans who have balked at runaway spending in some of the bills. The first round of earmark trashing came in a big bill funding the Labor Department and HHS; that legislation contains about $180 million for local projects. The second came when the GOP leadership wreaked vengeance on 100 members of both parties who voted last summer against the VA-HUD spending bill; approximately $750 million in earmarks are in that legislation. After some finagling, House Labor-HHS Appropriations Subcommittee ranking member David Obey, D- Wis., managed to restore about $20 million worth of Democrats' projects and program enhancements in the Labor-HHS spending bill. But major damage to the House's sense of comity had been done. ``If they don't support the bills [in committee and on the floor], then they shouldn't expect to get their projects,'' said Rep. Ralph Regula, R-Ohio, a senior member of the House who chairs the Labor-HHS Appropriations Subcommittee. Coming from regula--who for 40 years has served with distinction from the Ohio General Assembly to the U.S. House and enjoys a reputation as a fair and decent legislator--that was a stunning remark. For it bespeaks a vindictive attitude, prevalent now in the House in both parties, that poisons the diminishing fount of civility in an institution at its best when each party respects the other's right to act in principled opposition--without fear of petty retribution--on the issues of the times. Beyond that, this brand of political blackmail is misguided. It is the scattershot tactic of ruthless partisans lashing out in fury to inflict damage on critics who have every right--if not the duty to their constituents' interests--to express their criticism of policy choices. And who exactly is being punished? Certainly not the members who dared oppose the legislation on policy grounds. The real victims are the folks back home, Republicans as well as Democrats and independents, taxpayers all, who stand to benefit from the earmarked projects. In Racine, Wis., for example, citizens will go without a $400,000 water-treatment process to screen out a dangerous pathogen, cryptosporidium, which causes serious and even lethal intestinal disease. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., the project's sponsor, had voted against the FY04 VA-HUD bill because it cut spending for veterans below the amount provided in the Republicans' budget resolution. Then there's the case of Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., a member of the Appropriations Committee, who in last year's Labor-HHS spending bill managed to secure funding for four projects--two for hospitals, two for universities--worth a total of $1.3 billion. This year he voted against both the Labor-HHS and VA-HUD bills, on policy grounds, when they reached the House floor. He paid a stiff price for his opposition votes. Only one project, $150,000 in the Labor-HHS bill to expand an emergency room in Newburgh's St. Luke's Hospital, made the cut. Hinchey is not even certain it would have survived, had New York's senators not supported the project. The lame excuse is often made that the exigencies of party discipline require stern measures to whip the members into line. But what about the power of good policy ideas and moral suasion to convince, rather than bludgeon, balky members who harbor reasonable doubts about the impact of pending legislation on their districts? Or the effect on principled advocates, liberal and conservative alike, who oppose on deeply felt philosophical grounds the options dictated by party leaders? Are the leaders so hell-bent on winning they must resort to strong-arm tactics, rather than persuasion and the often-small compromises that win over reluctant members? In reflecting on the head-bashing partisanship so manifest in Congress, this writer wonders what his later mother--a stalwart, lifelong Republican--would have thought about such behavior by the leaders of her party. The GOP embodied the values she held dear: individualism, self-dependence, fiscal integrity, personal enterprise, fair play and charity for the worthy. She would have given short shrift to the small- minded, mean-spirited, punitive and divisive tactics this sort of blackmail entails.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, I do so for the purpose of yielding to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) so that he may explain what changes this entails to the continuing resolution.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to take this time to comment on the legislation just filed. The legislation just filed would complete the work of the Committee on Appropriations and the Congress on a number of appropriation bills which were not able to get through the system one by one, as is the usual process. But in the process of putting together this omnibus appropriation bill, the House has, I think, reached a new low in terms of its willingness to reflect the will of the membership. We elect in this country 535 people to come to this Congress, 435 of them in this institution; and the idea is that those Members are supposed to vote on various issues, and after those Members have voted, then a conference committee between the Senate and the House is supposed to iron out whatever differences remain between the House and the Senate in the consideration of that legislation. That is really not what happened on this legislation this year. Time and time again, the conferees simply disregarded the will of Members of both Houses, went into a back room, and decided on their own, without consulting anybody but themselves and the White House, that they were going to cut the cards a different way and deal a new hand to everyone. So we find, for instance, that in the legislation just filed, even though both Houses of Congress in public, on-the-record votes made the decision to try to scale back the expansion of the ability of large businesses in the communications industry to own television stations, despite the fact that both branches of the Congress voted to put a 35 percent cap on the percentage of American homes that should be reachable by any one corporate entity in the television business, despite that fact, the conferees produced legislation just filed at this moment which changes that cap and raises it to 39 percent. No votes taken in either House to do that, just an arbitrary judgment because the White House said, ``If you do not do it our way, we are going to hold our breath and turn blue.'' So the conferees caved and went against the position of both Houses. I think that is a national scandal. This is a backroom deal to strengthen the hands of the national media giants against local control of television. It allows ABC and NBC to acquire additional stations up to the new 39 percent limit, and it takes Fox and CBS off the hook so that they do not have to divest as they would have had to if the will of the House and the Senate had prevailed. I am also concerned about what has happened here with the across-the- board cut that is being provided in this legislation because, as I understand the impact of that cut, that is going to mean a reduction of $178 million in crucial veterans medical care; and it is going to, as I understand it, severely hamper the VA in its ability to reduce the backlog in handling cases brought to them by veterans. It now takes about 157 days to process a veteran's claim; and this across-the-board cut in the operations of the VA will, I am afraid, result in seeing those delays expanded rather than contracted. I also want to take just a moment to point out that this institution has engaged in a very questionable practice with respect to congressional earmarks. In the past, there is no question that Congress had provided significant numbers of earmarks. But in the past 4 or 5 years, in my view, that has gotten incredibly out of control. There is nothing wrong with Congress deciding to take a reasonable number of projects through earmarks in order to give this institution an opportunity to define what activities it considers to be very important; but when the practice explodes to such a degree that virtually every university hires a lobbyist to try to obtain funds through the political process rather than the process of peer review, then the Congress abandons all pretext of taxpayers' moneys being used in rational fashion. The other problem, Mr. Speaker, is that when earmarks change in character from being a convenience to Members to a weapon in the hands of the majority party to punish Members of the minority party who oppose those appropriation bills, then we have, I think, fundamentally corrupted the appropriations process of the House, and I think it becomes a source of shame for the House in many ways. We have had a huge explosion in the amount of Member-directed earmarks over the past 4 or 5 years; and I would say that when that is accompanied by the idea that Members will be punished if they vote on the basis of substance, then I think this Congress ceases to be a body which can earn the respect of the American people. It seems to me that if we are going to allow earmarks to be used as a partisan threat, then what we will do is eliminate the ability of the appropriations process to be considered on the merits, and the only thing Members will be focused on will be their local pork projects rather than the broader welfare of the country; and I think that will demean the process of the Congress and demean the American people in the process.