Employing People Who Were Displaced by Hurricane Katrina
Kucinich gave the following speech in Congress on September 8, 2005:
"Mr. Speaker, for the people of the Gulf Coast region who were stricken by Hurricane Katrina, there is less to the emergency supplemental than meets the eye. I mean that exactly zero dollars of the $50 billion Congress will send today for emergency relief and temporary construction will be used for employing people displaced by Hurricane Katrina. However, the administration is not withholding anything from Halliburton. Halliburton received a no-bid contract immediately after the hurricane. Yet the CBO estimates 400,000 people were made unemployed by the hurricane with no hope in sight of regaining their former jobs because their workplaces were destroyed.
"For the region, the economic devastation is on par with the effects of the Great Depression. At that time President Roosevelt asked for a National Industrial Recovery Act with which the government put millions of people back to work rebuilding the country's infrastructure. That is what the hurricane-demolished region needs today. The people of the region who have lost their livelihoods should be given a preference in hiring for the Federal dollars spent, and the Federal dollars should be conditioned on local hiring targets.
"But this is not a New Deal administration. Instead of leveraging Federal tax money to put people back to work, this administration is content to send Halliburton billions of dollars in no-bid contracts."
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