Transportation, Treasury, Housing and Urban Development, the Judiciary, the District of Columbia, and Independent Agencies Appropriations Act, 2006

TRANSPORTATION, TREASURY, HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT, THE JUDICIARY, THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, AND INDEPENDENT AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2006 -- (House of Representatives - June 30, 2005)

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AMENDMENT OFFERED BY MR. HINCHEY

Mr. HINCHEY. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

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Mr. HINCHEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

This amendment, Mr. Chairman, clarifies that the existing anti-propaganda section of the bill also includes contracting out for these services to publicity experts and others. Its intent is to simply prevent contracts with journalists and other publicity experts without authorization by the Congress, and it will prevent additional embarrassing reports in the future because it will prohibit these bogus news reports, generated by contracts between the government and those willing to take the money and spin the information.

Examples of administrative propaganda are numerous. Last month, The Washington Post reported that the National Resource Conservation Service paid a freelance writer at least $7,500 to write articles touting so-called Federal conservation programs and placed them in outdoors magazines. These articles were placed and not one of them disclosed the fact that the writer was under Federal contract and that these were not objective articles.

Last year, the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams was paid $241,000 by the Education Department to promote the administration's education policy. And columnist Maggie Gallagher received $21,500 from the Department of Health and Human Services to work on the administration's marriage initiative. Again, neither of these individuals informed the public that they were working for the government and that they were not writing objective articles.

Finally, it has recently surfaced that a semi-invisible PR group had received $200 million of taxpayers' dollars to spread anti-Saddam Hussein propaganda prior to the Iraq war. In fact, soon after the attacks on our country on September 11, 2001, the company received a $100,000-a-month contract from the Pentagon to offer media strategy advice. This was part of the misinformation campaign that led to the war in Iraq; and the result of that misinformation was that two-thirds of the American people thought that Saddam Hussein was actually behind the 9/11 attacks. We know, of course, that that was not the case. And eight out of ten Americans thought that Iraq had nuclear weapons because they were afflicted with this misinformation campaign.

While the administration has been embarrassed by their contracts, at least the ones that have been made public, the agencies knew what they were doing when they hired these people to promote these misinformation campaigns. Many have questioned the legality of all of these contracts. The GAO, in fact, is looking into the legality of Armstrong Williams and the Gallagher case, and that ought to determine whether or not the administration violated the ban on covert propaganda.

It is obvious, however, Mr. Chairman, that we need to make this statement with greater clarity and define more clearly what cannot be done by this or future administrations to misinform and mislead the American people by contracting out and engaging in a propaganda campaign using taxpayer dollars to misinform the American people.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. HINCHEY. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. OLVER. I yield to the gentleman from New York.

Mr. HINCHEY. Mr. Chairman, I find this inexplicable. This is the House of Representatives. We are here purposefully to protect the interests of the American people. There is no situation in which it is more clear as to where the interest of the American people lie than in the context of this amendment that has been offered today by the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey). I assume that is why it passed the Committee on Appropriations by such a strong vote.

But for political reasons, the Committee on Rules has decided not to protect the amendment, not to allow it to come out here and not be subject to the kind of opposition it received a moment ago from the gentleman from Florida.

This issue should be debated on the floor of this House. This amendment should be passed. Why? Because the credit card companies are increasingly putting American families deeper and deeper and deeper in debt. The average debt now, according to the Federal Reserve, the average debt of the average American family is 115 percent of income and the main reason for that is credit card debt.

The credit card companies attract consumers, often attracting them in at relatively reasonable interest rates, and then very rapidly for extraneous reasons and circumstances, increase those rates. And the debt that people owe to credit card companies is going up and up and up.

That is one of the reasons why this House of Representatives passed that atrocious bankruptcy bill not long ago, a bankruptcy bill which, in effect, in large part was influenced strongly by the credit card companies. What have we become? This House, which is supposed to represent the interests of the American people, the average American, the average American family, has fallen now to represent narrower and narrower special interests, and the obvious special interest in this case are the credit card companies which has become the fastest growing and one of the most lucrative businesses in America. And why? Because we are not doing our job. This House of Representatives is not doing what it is supposed to do: Protect the interest of the average family and not allow usurious interest rates to take place here over and over and over again.

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