The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“CAFTA” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H4377-H4384 on June 13, 2005.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
CAFTA
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, at a White House news conference 2 weeks ago, President Bush called on Congress to pass the Central American Free Trade Agreement this summer. Last week in this Chamber, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay), the most powerful Republican in the House, promised a vote by July 4. Well, he actually promised a vote last year, and then he promised a vote again in May, but this time he means it, I think, and we are going to actually vote on this by July 4.
I am joined tonight by the gentleman from Niles, Trumbull County, Ohio (Mr. Ryan) and the gentlewoman from Toledo, Ohio (Ms. Kaptur), two of my colleagues from my State; and there will be the gentlewoman from Illinois (Ms. Schakowsky) and others coming along later.
Mr. Speaker, many of us who have been speaking out against the Central American Free Trade Agreement have a message for the President, and that is we should renegotiate CAFTA.
President Bush signed CAFTA more than a year ago. Every trade agreement negotiated by this administration has been ratified by Congress within 2 months of its signing. Australia, Singapore, Chile, Morocco, each of those trade agreements the President signed was passed, was ratified, was voted on by Congress within a couple of months. CAFTA, however, has languished in Congress for more than a year without a vote because this wrong-headed trade agreement offends both Republicans and Democrats. It offends small manufacturers and labor. It offends environmentalists and food safety advocates. It offends religious organizations in Central America and in our country.
But most importantly, Mr. Speaker, look at what our trade policy has brought us. In 1992 the United States trade deficit, in other words, how much we import versus how much we export, our trade deficit was $38 billion, the year I first ran for Congress, in 1992. Last year this trade deficit was $618 billion. It went from $38 billion to $618 billion in literally a dozen years. It is hard to argue our trade policy is working when the deficit goes from $38 billion to $618 billion in just a dozen years.
Tomorrow, Mr. Speaker, the Senate Finance Committee is scheduled to take up CAFTA in what is called a mock markup. In tomorrow's mock markup, 10 legislators from Central America will attempt to offer statements on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of Central Americans who oppose this dysfunctional cousin of the North American Free Trade Agreement. I say these legislators will ``attempt'' because they have not been asked nor, the word we get, will they be allowed to offer any official remarks at any hearings on CAFTA.
Instead, the administration and CAFTA supporters in Congress crafted a one-sided plan to benefit multinational corporations at the expense of U.S. workers and businesses, U.S. farmers and ranchers, and Central American workers and businesses and Central America's farmers and ranchers. Opponents to CAFTA know it is simply an extension of NAFTA, which clearly, as the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) has pointed out on this floor for a dozen years, has not worked for our country.
It is the same old story, Mr. Speaker. Every time there is a trade agreement, the President says it will mean more jobs for the U.S., it will mean increased manufacturing in the U.S., increased exports of American-produced goods to other countries, and better wages for developing countries.
But look at this chart, Mr. Speaker. The States here in red are States that in the last 5 years have lost 20 percent of their manufacturing. Michigan, 210,000 jobs, more than 20 percent of their manufacturing base; Illinois, 224,000; Ohio, 216,000; Pennsylvania, 200,000 jobs; North Carolina, 228,000; Mississippi and Alabama combined, about 130,000 jobs. In State after State after State, we have lost 20 percent of our manufacturing base. In many of the other States, we have lost thousands of jobs also.
So they continue to promise more jobs, more manufacturing, more exports, a higher standard of living in the developing world. But with every trade agreement, their promises fall by the wayside in favor of big business interests that send U.S. jobs overseas and exploit cheap labor abroad. In the face of overwhelming bipartisan opposition, the administration and Republican leadership have tried every trick in the book to pass this CAFTA.
As I said earlier, we in this body could agree on a Central American Free Trade Agreement, but not one that is tilted against American workers, not one that is tilted against workers in Central America, not one that is tilted for the drug industry and against the environment and against worker rights.
But this year, because nothing else seems to be working in convincing Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, the administration is linking CAFTA to helping democracy in the developing world. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary Zoellick, both have said CAFTA will help in the War on Terror. I am not sure how. They have never really explained that. But that is what they claim.
Ten years of NAFTA, Mr. Speaker, has done nothing to improve border security between Mexico and the United States; so that argument does not wash. Then in May, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in one of their famous junkets that we hear more and more about from some of our friends in this body, flew the six presidents from Central America and the Dominican Republic around our country, hoping they might be able to sell CAFTA to newspaper editors, to our country's voters, to our country's Congress. They flew to Albuquerque. The Chamber of Commerce flew these six presidents to Albuquerque and to Los Angeles; to New York; to Miami; to Cincinnati, my home State of Ohio.
Again they failed. And after the trip, the Costa Rican President broke off from the group and announced that his country would not ratify CAFTA unless an independent commission could determine the agreement will not hurt the working poor.
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In addition, Mr. Speaker, we have seen demonstration after demonstration in Central America, 45 demonstrations with more than 150,000 workers, opposing this agreement. Some of their Presidents might be for it, some of them might be, but their workers certainly are not. In this case, this was in Guatemala, when the police went up against 8,000 workers, two of these workers were killed by their country's security forces.
Now the administration is trying something different. They have opened up the bank. Desperate after failing to gin up support for the agreement based on its merits, CAFTA supporters now are attempting to buy votes with fantastic promises. If history is any example, should the promises fail, they will try and force votes their way with outrageous threats.
Instead of wasting time with toothless side deals, U.S. Trade Ambassador Portman should negotiate a CAFTA that will actually pass Congress. Republicans and Democrats, small manufacturers and labor groups, farmers, ranchers, faith-based groups in all seven countries, religious leaders, environmental human rights organizations and workers are all speaking with one voice: Renegotiate CAFTA; give us a CAFTA, but one very different from this.
This CAFTA will not enable Central American workers to buy cars made in the district of the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) or the district of the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur.) They will not enable Central American workers to buy software developed in Seattle, or prime beef in Nebraska.
A Nicaraguan worker, Mr. Speaker, earns $2,800 a year. The combined economic output of the Central American nations is equivalent to that of Columbus, Ohio, or New Haven, Connecticut, or Orlando, Florida, or Memphis, Tennessee. Workers in the United States make $38,000 a year on average.
Workers in Costa Rica make $9,000; Dominican Republic, $6,000; Nicaragua and Honduras, the average makes significantly less than
$3,000 a year. They are not going to buy the cars made in the district of the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) or the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur). They are not going to buy steel made in my district. They are not going to buy apparel made in North Carolina. They are not going to buy software from Seattle, or prime beef from Kansas. They simply cannot afford to do this.
This CAFTA is not about exporting American products. It is about U.S. companies moving plants to Honduras, paying $2,600 a year; outsourcing jobs to El Salvador, where workers make less than $5,000; exporting cheap labor in Guatemala where workers make $4,000 a year.
Mr. Speaker, when the world's poorest people can buy American products and not just make them, then we will know that our trade policies are working.
Mr. Speaker, we should renegotiate; defeat this Central American Free Trade Agreement, start again and renegotiate a CAFTA that will lift up workers and environmental standards in all the involved countries.
I would like to yield to my friend from Toledo, the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur), and thank her for her terrific work for years on trade issues.
Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the able Member the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) for spearheading this Special Order this evening and for the great work he always does, and the gentleman from Youngstown, Ohio, and the surrounding areas, for being so much a part of our efforts to change America's trade policy so it again works for America's communities, America's workers and America's farmers.
If you loved NAFTA, you are going to love CAFTA, and I cannot think of a single American that really loves NAFTA, because we have lost so many jobs, nearly 1 million jobs, since that agreement was passed in 1993.
It is really amazing to me to think about everything that is needed in this country and what the Bush administration is trying to push through this Congress. Just look at rising gas prices. Is this administration and Congress really trying to do anything to help America become energy-independent again? No, not really. We continue to become more dependent on imported petroleum than before this administration took office.
All of our pension funds are underfunded. The Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, which is supposed to undergird all of our Nation's pension funds in private industry, needs over $23 billion to try to restore just the current needs in that bill. Are we getting a bill to fully fund the Nation's pension guarantee fund? No. The bill is not coming up here on that.
What about Social Security? Well, their answer is privatize it. Try to divert money from the regular trust fund, rather than finding a way to make sure that Social Security is healthy long term.
Health care, is anything really being done to insure America's families and to try to take care of all those in our nursing homes who do not have enough nurses at bedside? No, that bill is not coming up here.
Or veterans, to make sure we have enough money in the accounts of this country to take care of all the disabled veterans returning home? We see our Family Assistance Centers having to raise money to buy special access ramps to people's houses and to try to take care of families because we lack TRICARE when our veterans come home. No, we are not getting a bill to do anything about that.
What we are getting is we are getting a bill that would expand NAFTA to include five more countries, actually six more countries if you count the Dominican Republic. What it would do is add over 50 million more people into this NAFTA union, people who have hands to do work, but who through that work cannot really increase their own standard of living, as the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) has said, who could buy the goods that are made in this country, because they do not earn enough to afford them. But it would add 50 million more people to this trade effort.
That means that our jobs, as happened with NAFTA, would continue to be outsourced, shipped out, even in greater quantity than they already are, to Guatemala, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, all these places so very far from home, and more of our agricultural production as well.
So we are literally being asked in this agreement to add a State the size of California, 50 million people, or four States the size of Ohio, actually five Ohios, if you look at the population of the countries that they are trying to add to this DR-CAFTA agreement, add that many more people to our union and then say it is all going to work.
This is an example of what has happened since NAFTA was passed back in the early 1990s and what has happened to our trade deficit, if you add NAFTA, if you add the special agreement with China and all these other trade agreements. We have fallen every year into deeper and deeper and deeper deficit. We are now over half a trillion dollars a year more goods coming into this country than exports going out.
I just wanted to place the record as I begin my comments this evening that in the last official count in March-April of this year, the overall U.S. trade deficit in goods and services rose another 6.34 percent from March to April, climbing from $53.6 billion to $57 billion overall, on top of all of the deficit we already had from last year, and this represents the fourth highest combined monthly deficit on record for our whole country.
The deficit with Mexico in that period of time rose to $4.4 billion, up another 3.29 percent, and the deficit with Canada rose to $5.4 billion, just for that month, another 8.9 percent increase.
If I could just demonstrate these other two charts as I begin this evening, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) referenced the trade deficits in various countries.
With Canada, since NAFTA was signed, the proponents said, just like they are saying now, if we sign this agreement, we are going to have all the trade. Except it is modeled after the NAFTA accord. And after we signed NAFTA with Canada, though we already had a deficit with NAFTA, after the signing of NAFTA it just went deeper and deeper to where it doubled and tripled, more production in Canada than here in the United States. With Mexico, the very same pattern.
This type of accord provides America with lost jobs, lost income, more imports coming in here than exports going out. With Mexico when NAFTA was signed, we actually had a little trade surplus with Mexico. We have fallen into heavy, heavy deficit, now nearly $50 billion a year in the hole with Mexico.
Finally, before I yield back the time the gentleman was kind enough to give me, we already have today a $1.9 billion deficit in goods with these nations already. All CAFTA is going to do is push those numbers further down, which means more lost jobs in Ohio, more workers who cannot afford to own their home, these increasing bankruptcies we see across our country, and the same-old-same-old being thrust upon the American people voted on here in this Congress by some of the most powerful economic interests on the face of the globe.
So I am very thankful that the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Solis) was speaking earlier this evening, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gene Green), now the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown), the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan), to talk about, you know what, it is time to draw a line in the sand and say if an agreement has been out of whack, seriously in deficit for more than 3 years, it ought to be renegotiated, and we should not add any more pain to the American economy than we already have.
I want to thank the gentleman for allowing me to speak this evening.
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank my friend for her terrific work representing American workers.
I yield to my friend the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan).
Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) and the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) for their leadership on this issue. For years and years you guys have been at the forefront of this issue, and now it is becoming a little more trendy, a little more popular, to be against some of these trade agreements. I would like to thank you as a new Member, second term. I am a lucky guy to have two Members in the Ohio delegation with such strong leadership on this issue.
As we talked about the trade deficits, whether they are with one country or the overall trade deficit, I think it is important, and this is the real disconnect that I think the administration and many of the people who are supporting CAFTA are missing. The disconnect is with those people who are in our district, those people who lose manufacturing jobs, those people who lose textile jobs, whether in the Southern States, those are the people we are here to represent.
If the trade agreements that we have been signing, whether it was NAFTA or PNTR or Most Favored Nation with China over years and years and years, if they are not working for everyone, then they are not good trade agreements for the United States of America.
I am sure both of you represent counties that probably have the same kind of situations that the counties in my districts have. They cannot pass a sales tax; they cannot pass police and fire levies, library levies, school levies. I think two-thirds of the school levies that were on the ballot in Ohio last year failed, two-thirds.
So years ago we were promised when we had the debate, we are going to pass NAFTA, but we are going to invest in education. We are going to trade with the Chinese, but we are going to make sure that our workers are the most skilled, educated and healthiest workers on the planet. We failed to do that on this end, and at the same time we sign agreements that do not have the labor standards, do not have the environmental standards to help lift these people up.
As the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) pointed out earlier, with the average wage of a Nicaraguan worker, what are they going to buy here? What are they going to buy that comes out of the United States? Not a Jeep from Toledo, not a Cobalt from Lordstown, Ohio. They cannot afford it. It would take them 10, 15, 20 years to come up with the kind of money that they would need to just buy a car coming out of the United States of America.
I think it is important, because it is not just about CAFTA. If we take a step back and we try to look at how the world is going to look in the next 10 or 20 years, we have high-tech jobs making their way to India and China, and we have a lot of our manufacturing going to China that has come from Mexico, first it went down to Mexico and then over to China, and everyone keeps talking about this new economy and what is it going to be.
Well, we do not really know what it is going to be. Nobody seems to know what this new economy is going to be like. We are going to have the high-tech jobs, and our people are going to work, and it is going to be great. It will be like America is going to be one big country club. Everybody is white collar, everybody gets to golf and go to the swimming pool, and it is going to be great. That was the idea they were trying to pitch to us in the 1990s, and it did not work out that way.
So it is important for us, I think, not only those of us against the trade agreements, but as Democrats, to say this train is so far down the track, we do not even know how much we are going to be able to stop it. I think it starts with CAFTA would be a good place for putting our stake in the ground and trying to go in another direction.
But at the same time, we have got to invest in education, we have got to make sure we have healthy citizens. Eighty-five percent of the students that go to Youngstown city schools qualify for free and reduced lunch. That is probably the same, if not higher, in Cleveland and Toledo. Fifty or sixty percent of those kids live in poverty.
So even if we just, for the sake of argument, say these trade agreements are great, let us all compete; let us educate our kids; let us do what we have to do to compete with them, free markets, which we do not always buy, but let us for the sake of argument say that. How are we going to have the kids in Youngstown able to compete against these workers in the other countries if we are not investing in education and not making sure they are healthy, lifted out of poverty and on the playing field?
I will say this before I yield back: We are going on the global field of competition with less than half a team because these kids are not getting the kind of education, the kind of health care that they need.
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So here we are trying to compete with the Chinese, now we want to do it with some other countries, and we just are not making the proper investments to even come to the point where we are going to be able to lift all of our citizens up to compete with over a billion Indians and 1.3 billion Chinese. And until we do that, fix these trade agreements and make those investments, we are going to see these trade deficits continue, we are going to see other countries like the Chinese and the Indians outpace us with engineers, computer scientists, and all of these other high-tech workers and, eventually, every community is going to be like some of the communities we represent, struggling to fund their schools, struggling to fund basic police and fire, libraries, the basic services that government needs to provide.
So I am happy to join my colleagues here tonight, and I thank the gentleman again for his leadership, and I yield back.
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan). One of the things that the gentleman pointed out is talking about school kids in Youngstown or talking about police and fire in his community, and we do a lot of talking about statistics and numbers and the trade deficit going from $13 billion to $618 billion in a dozen years, but then we think about what this means. When President Bush, Senior, said for every billion dollars in trade surplus or trade deficit, that translated into 12,000 jobs; for every billion-dollar trade surplus, it is 12,000 more jobs for our country; for every 12 billion-dollar trade deficit, it is 12,000 fewer jobs, many of those manufacturing jobs.
So when we have this kind of trade deficit of $618 billion, you multiply that times 12,000 jobs, according to President Bush, Senior, however you do the math, these are a lot of people that lose jobs, communities that experience plant closings, a lot of police and fire who protect our communities who get laid off when these plants close. These are a lot of cuts to public education. As the gentleman from Ohio
(Mr. Ryan) says, you then need to pass school levies and it is so hard to pass school levies when people have lost their homes and lost their jobs and are barely able to make ends meet, and have taken a job where they were making $35,000 a year and are now making $17,000 a year, and they cannot afford a property tax increase, so schools lose out and kids lose out, and it is just a downward spiral.
So when you see these numbers, you think about people in our communities, it does not matter if they are Democrats or Republicans, because these job losses, as we have pointed out, these job losses in manufacturing alone, particularly throughout the Midwest and the south, North and South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and States from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Illinois, up into Wisconsin, think of these 200,000 per State manufacturing job losses is a whole lot of people, a whole lot of bread winners and families that come home to their kids and cannot do what they were able to do before they lost their jobs. Their schools are hurting, their public safety is hurting, they are not able to send their kids on to school, all the kinds of things that go with lost jobs. That is why this is so important.
Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman makes a great point. The whole idea of us representing the whole country is that these agreements are benefiting the very few people who are doing really well, and they are the same people who are qualified for the tax cut that goes to the top one percent. So there is a philosophical debate here: is the legislation and the trade deals that come out of this Chamber going to represent everyone, going to be good for everyone, or are they going to be good for the very few.
That is the kind of philosophy. It has been divide and conquer down here for the last few years, and hey, if you get screwed out of your job, then so be it, that is where you are; my friends are doing good and they get to donate to my campaign, so we are just going to ignore you.
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I would point out that the States in white, and there are two of them, actually had manufacturing job growth. In these two States, total population is about 2 million people out of a country of 280 million, so these two States represent less than one percent of our country. Not that they are not important if you live in those two States, but they are the only States that have had manufacturing job growth.
All of the States in red have lost 20 percent of their manufacturing, 20 percent, hundreds of thousands of jobs in many of these States. The States in blue have lost up to 20 percent, 15 to 20, so it is State after State after State has just been hurt badly by this. And as we have all talked, it clearly translates into people's lives.
Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, people in our country intuitively know something is wrong. They go to the store and they try to buy something and they see ``made in China,'' or they see ``assembled in Mexico.'' And they also know that the quality of production is going down, that the metals that are used are not as good as they used to be; that the clothing is comprised of fabrics that do not breath as well and they do not wear as well. People know this.
Shoes. They know that the shoes, most of which are imported now, they are not good quality. There is not rubber on the bottoms anymore on good leather. Now we have these combination fabrics and your feet hurt.
We think about, and at least I, of the three this evening who are talking, am old enough to remember when America made American-made, quality goods. We used to even make American flags. And when they had that rally over here, the Speaker handed out flags made in China.
Mr. Speaker, I can remember an America where there really was an America here, where we really made things, and we were proud of what we made. When you have these kinds of trade deficits that are massive, over a half a trillion dollars a year in deficit, more imports coming in here than exports going out, you are displacing production.
I had an experience this past week in my district where I went through an old power plant, and the innards are being taken out because it is passe, its technology is passe. I said, well, now, where are we sending the copper to be reprocessed and used? They said oh, the copper was bought up by China. I said, oh. Well, what about the turbines? Well, the turbines are going down to Argentina. I said, you mean there is nobody in America that even wants to use the scrap metal?
We look at the prices of steel and, in terms of coking, there are no coking operations here. The Chinese have us around the neck because they have been charging $43 a ton for coke and making steel production so expensive in our country. We are seeing parts of us being dismantled and sent somewhere else.
I was down in North Carolina talking with some of the producers of hogs and turkeys and chickens down there, and the grains, rather than coming from the Midwest, is coming from Argentina delivered at the Port of Wilmington. The farmers in North Carolina and South Carolina want to buy grain from the Midwest, but yet it is coming from Argentina. It is very interesting to think what is happening to our country.
Then, on the side of some of these nations, take the Dominican Republic. We had a couple of young people come to Toledo from the Dominican Republic a couple of years ago from one of our church groups, and they actually worked in a company making apparel; it was a South Korean contractor on contract to the government of the Dominican Republic, and these young women were making T shirts that were to be sold in the United States, all of their production came here. They were paid 12 cents a T-shirt. They worked 14 to 18 hour days, 7 days a week; they had absolutely no say in their company, nothing, forget it. They were just bonded workers. If they spoke up, they were fired. They worked behind barbed wire fences and gates, the plant was inside, it was like a reservation, actually.
When they came to Toledo, we took them to a couple of shopping centers to try to find the shirt that they had made and, sure enough, we did. We found the T shirts hanging on a rack. This young woman, she just went up to it, she pulled it off and then we looked at the price tag. It was $20. I cannot forget her face. She just stood there. She said, you mean in America it is sold for $20 and I earn 12 cents? She could not even, she could not even fathom it.
I said, yes, and let us think about who made the money off the sweat of your brow. This was actually sweat shop goods coming into the United States from the Dominican Republic by way of a special contract signed with the South Korean manufacturer who is doing business and, really, whose practices cannot be monitored well, and these young women were earning nothing.
Now, is that the kind of world that we want to create? We are.
Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, we hear the word ``freedom'' come out of this Chamber a lot. Is that young girl free? She is trapped. She is an indentured servant just like there has been throughout the history of, many times in this country, and many others. She is not free.
So we use freedom when it is convenient for us, but in the instance where it may hurt some corporation to reduce their profits, freedom does not mean anything.
Ms. KAPTUR. As the gentleman says, it ought to be called not free trade, because it is not free trade. It is not good trade, we know that. It certainly is not positive trade, because all we are yielding are deficits. Maybe we should call it sweat shop trade or indentured trade. There is some other word that should go here.
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) mentions freedom. Another word or phrase that is thrown around here a lot is Christian values and fair play and morality. And when we pass a trade agreement that throws American workers in these numbers out of jobs and then exploits a worker that the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) talked about making 12 cents that makes a product that sells in the United States for $20, what kind of exploitation, what kind of family values, what kind of morality that does describe our actions?
Yet, it is pretty clear to an awful lot of people in this body, I think, and it is pretty clear to a whole lot of Americans that the values that we hold dear, no matter what your religion or your faith, if your religion or your faith is based on our country doing the right thing, it simply does not fit, to pass a trade agreement that costs people these kinds of jobs, that exploits the most defenseless people in the developing world, the people that the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) says are trapped, the women that the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) describes, and then go home and talk about practicing our faith and family values and morality. It just does not work.
Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, we may have developed a new word or new phrase. We are advocating for value-centered trade, trade that represents our values and, hopefully, what we are trying to spread around the world, value-centered trade.
Ms. KAPTUR. And part of that I think is the development and sustenance of the middle class.
We know that the workers in these other countries, because of the way the countries operate, are not creating a middle class. They are endowing the very top. In fact, they have a word for this, they call it oligarchies or plutocracies, they are endowing the wealthy, and the vast majority of people are poor. In Mexico, post-NAFTA, more people are poor today than before NAFTA was passed, and many of their small businesses were drummed out of existence, and many of their independent farmers are wandering across North America trying to find even enough to eat.
In our country, we have been druming down the middle class. These other countries do not have a chance to build a middle class. Who is really benefiting off of the pain that is felt by the workers of our country and these other countries? It is very clear. There are a few extraordinarily powerful corporations that are trading workers off against one another.
And we as a Congress have a responsibility to stand for the development of the middle class and trade agreements that sustain the middle class in our country and help these other countries develop economies where their wealth comes from demand-led growth inside their own countries, not exporting everything they make to other places, paying their workers nothing, and then charging us high prices for those goods here in this country.
We do not have that kind of trade regimen. That is why we need to stop CAFTA and go back and renegotiate NAFTA, and any other trade agreement where we have sustained massive deficits over the last 3 years. That ought to be the priority of the President of the United States and of this Congress.
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, CAFTA specifically protects, if you look at the text of CAFTA, it specifically protects the prescription drug companies, but offers no real protection to workers. It specifically protects and supports Hollywood films and CD-ROMs, but does not have protection for the environment and for food safety. I mean, if that does not tell us something about values; we will write a trade agreement that will help the most privileged, wealthiest people in both our country and the six CAFTA countries, but we will not protect the workers, we will not protect and help and enhance the environment, food safety, safe drinking water, clean air, all of that.
We are joined by my friend, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Stupak) who also has been in this Chamber, came with me in 1992 and has been a part of these discussions on trade for many, many years, and I thank the gentleman for joining us.
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Mr. STUPAK. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) for asking me to come down and speak with him and speak out against the Central America Free Trade Agreement called CAFTA. I am pleased to be here with the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) and the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur), all from the great State of Ohio. As we continue to look at just your map there, the job loss is 216,000 in Ohio, 210 in Michigan.
Just one slight correction, if I may, on your map. The Upper Peninsula of Michigan still belongs to Michigan, not to Wisconsin. But anyone saw me down here arguing this from my district and knowing that I live in the Upper Peninsula, they would say, whoa, what happened here?
Mr. RYAN of Ohio. If the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Stupak) would yield, we left Ann Arbor in Michigan.
Mr. STUPAK. But, you know, if CAFTA passes, there might as well not be an Upper Peninsula of Michigan just because we have lost so much. In fact, Michigan, right now our unemployment remains the highest in the State at about 7 percent. The small and the medium-sized manufacturing jobs are gone. We just have great difficulty with it.
One industry we still have left in Michigan, and a little bit that it is, but it is vitally important, a new part of my district down there by the thumb area, as we call it, is the sugar industry. And CAFTA will just really wipe out the sugar industry in Michigan.
We recently just have been declared a disaster area because of higher than normal temperatures in the region, where we lost 200,000 tons of sugar. That cost $33 million to our farmers. But now if we pass this trade agreement, and if it goes into effect, U.S. markets will be flooded with sugar imports, striking an even greater blow to our Michigan economy, especially our agriculture and sugar. And sugar actually ranks fourth in the country in production, Michigan sugar does. So we have a vital stake in the sugar industry in this Nation, being fourth in the country in production.
And our sugar comes from sugar beet. And the sugar beet economy in Michigan, if you will, is about 2000 farms, employs thousands of people, and annually it is a $300 million product to agriculture in Michigan. Michigan farmers know how damaging CAFTA would be to them. We will also endanger many of the thousands of jobs at the mid-Michigan-
based Michigan Sugar Company. That is a cooperative, and they have worked very hard to maintain their jobs. And if CAFTA goes through, we think the Michigan Sugar Company would be history.
We in Congress we need to send a strong signal to the Bush administration that this is one instance where sugar, if you will, does not belong on the table, so to speak.
What can we expect from CAFTA? And I know all my colleagues here joined me in that fight in NAFTA about some 10 years ago. A significant job loss. Over the past 10 years we have 766,000 jobs lost here in the United States. And where did they go? They went to Mexico and other places for lower wages and labor standards that are appealing to big corporations.
How many more American jobs can we afford to lose as a result of CAFTA? Why would CAFTA, under the same labor and environmental framework as NAFTA, be anything better for our manufacturing industry, our sugar industry or the American worker?
CAFTA would allow foreign corporations to challenge U.S. environmental laws once again by establishing a three-member panel of international judges who meet behind closed doors with the power to award billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayers to multinational corporations.
CAFTA's environmental provision is a sham. The agreement says that nations would simply enforce existing environmental laws, even though many of those laws are inadequate. Even that provision, the environmental provision, even that one fails to have a meaningful enforcement mechanism. CAFTA does not ask other nations to better preserve or protect their environments. It just says whatever laws you have is fine.
In the U.S. we have many environmental laws to protect our food, other residents, our natural resources. Yet if CAFTA passes, we will import goods from countries that do not have the same safety standards.
We all know about the food. I know the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) has helped on the Energy and Commerce Committee where we both sit on food safety issues, whether it is tomatoes out of Mexico versus Florida tomatoes. In this country we still, we pass every year a labeling law to label our food. So we could say, okay, these tomatoes are from Florida. We know what standards they are grown by. These are from Mexico. We do not know what standards they are grown by. We pass it, but yet it is never implemented by the current administration. People are willing to pay a few extra pennies, if you will, on their fruits or vegetables or beets or seafood just to know where it comes from, because our standards, our environmental standards, our consumer standards, our health standards, our safety standards are so much greater in this country than elsewhere.
So CAFTA, in a way, wipes out all these protections for the American worker, for the American homeowner, for our American family. CAFTA also fails to protect Americans workers. It fails to offer protections to Central American workers who fall victim to their country's own diminishing standards.
CAFTA does have its benefits. The only benefits I can find are to companies that would leave the U.S. to exploit cheap labor in countries with minimal protections. We need to be promoting business development and jobs in the U.S., not sending more of them overseas.
Michigan, as I said, has lost, and on the gentleman from Ohio's chart there, 210,000 manufacturing jobs. Just since NAFTA alone, we can draw a direct line between NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and 130,000 manufacturing jobs, just manufacturing jobs in Michigan. Companies are practically crawling all over one another to leave the U.S. for cheap labor in countries with little protection for their workers or the environment.
Now I want to be clear, and I am sure all of us here tonight, we support fair trade agreements; however, CAFTA is unfair at its worst. It is unfair to workers both at home and in Central America. It is unfair to small businesses. It is unfair to our communities, unfair to our environment. So I would urge the administration and this Congress to stop the exodus of jobs from the U.S., stop the challenges to our environmental protection laws.
And when I came down here tonight to join you, you were talking a little bit about what about a faith base or a moral basis for some of these agreements, especially here in the United States. When you take a look at the United States Catholic Conference and the United States Catholic Bishops and the Catholic Relief Services have all come out opposing this trade agreement on basic fundamental human rights issues. Trade is all about people, their livelihood and how they live their lives. And they found CAFTA, you know, Catholics for Faithful Citizenship, they found that CAFTA is a trade investment agreement negotiated between the United States and six countries, and they are, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Dominican Republic. And the President wants us to pass this trade agreement. But before we go ahead and do it, just from a moral and faith-based perspective, we have to ask questions like how will CAFTA address the needs of small and medium-sized manufacturing and farms here in the United States and Central America?
How will CAFTA protect the rights of worker and the environment?
How will CAFTA impact the lives of people throughout this hemisphere, be it U.S. and Central America?
What is the intellectual property provisions for protection of your intellectual property? What does CAFTA have? Very little.
What is CAFTA's purpose, or how does CAFTA promote really human development and human rights, especially amongst poor people in Central America?
If you start asking these questions, it is very clear this trade agreement is not negotiated in the best interests of the American people. It is not negotiated in the best interests of faith-based people. It is not negotiated in the best interests of people who come to this floor or go to work every day with a moral purpose of what they do.
I have always been taught you work hard, you play by the rules, and good things will happen. Unfortunately, with these trade agreements, you work hard, you play by the rules, not only do you lose your job, but your job is shipped overseas, and it is sort of a race to the bottom, because the job you had before, now you earn so much less when you try to pick up a new job because there is just not the jobs there.
I mentioned Michigan at about 7 percent unemployment. A month or two ago it was 7.5 percent. The tourism industry is starting to take off, so we are starting to see a little bit of an improvement in our economy, but still at 7 percent. We just cannot. The auto industry is hurting terribly in this Nation, and as we ship more and more jobs south to produce more and more cars, to produce our sugar, to produce our meats, our vegetables, our fruits, what is left for the farmers?
And you cannot tell me these farmers in Central America are making the money. They really are going to be squeezed. The small and medium-
sized farmers will be squeezed out in these countries as the big international conglomerates will take over, and they will reap the profits, and these people will continue to live in poverty and in misery.
So when the United States Catholic Bishops and the Catholic Relief Services come out against a trade agreement because they do not believe it will do anything to lift the workers, the farmers, the peasants out of poverty in Central America, at the expense of U.S. jobs, that is a strong statement.
So I would hope people would take a very close look at CAFTA. Take a look at it from just your own job in our own district. Take a look what is does to the United States. But take a look at it from a moral and ethical perspective and say, is this the kind of trade agreement I can honestly vote for and go to church this Sunday and say, you know, I did the right thing?
I think when we examine the questions put forth by all of you here tonight, I think the American people would agree that this CAFTA is just a bad deal not just for U.S. sugar, but for all of the United States and all of our manufacturing, and does nothing to help the people it professes to help in the Central America region of this hemisphere.
So I would hope that people would not support this agreement. There is a lot of pressure being applied by the White House right now. There are meetings going on all the time. There is actually a picnic this Wednesday at the White House. I am sure they will be asking Members there in between their enjoyment to vote for this trade agreement. The President has sort of staked part of his administration upon it, and I hope we would see through all this and see what is done to our Nation, all these trade agreements that are really unfair. Again, not against trade agreements, but they have to be fair to both countries, to all the countries involved, and they have to be enforceable, and we are just not enforcing it.
I mentioned the intellectual property rights. We have had hearings in our committee on China where they just openly are manufacturing these games that we see that young people play, whether it is their Gameboy or all of these video games, openly doing it in front of the Chinese officials. And they say, yeah, but they will not crack down on it. The intellectual property rights. The movies. The intellectual property rights is one of the last few industries we have left in this country where we have world supremacy on it, but yet we cannot get countries like China to enforce it, to protect it, even though it is part of all these trade agreements. It is just amazing. It is just simply amazing that we have these trade agreements we know are being violated, nothing is being done.
Let us not do another trade agreement, this one being the Central America Free Trade Agreement, that is going to harm us not just from an agricultural point of view and manufacturing point of view, but even our intellectual property rights. If they cannot protect something like a video game, how are they going to protect your best interest when it comes down to these trade agreements? So I would hope that this House would reject this CAFTA. And remember, it is an agreement, and when it comes to the floor we cannot amend it, we cannot change it, we cannot alter it. It is either a yes or no vote.
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. I thank the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Stupak). And before calling the gentlewoman from Illinois (Ms. Schakowsky), I would like to reiterate a couple of things that the gentleman from Ohio
(Mr. Stupak) said, talking about people playing by the rules, and American workers who played by the rules and were involved in their community and raised their kids and worked their jobs and put their time in, that they lose their jobs; people who have played by the rules in Central America, who have been exploited in these jobs that have been outsourced; and all the groups, all the religious leaders and all six of these, the six Central American countries and including the Dominican Republic; and the United States religious leaders that oppose these because they know that people that have played straight and played by the rules have been hurt by these trade agreements in the past.
And I want to mention one thing before turning to the gentlewoman from Illinois (Ms. Schakowsky) because of what the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Stupak) said and the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan), and the opposition to these agreements from the public. People know they are getting hurt by these agreements, people in Niles, Ohio, that work at Lordstown, people in Lorain or in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan or in Chicago that have been hurt by these agreements, people in Central America that have been hurt by these agreements. Because of that it is clear if this vote were to come to the House today, there is no doubt that we would defeat this trade agreement by 30 or 40 votes. But that is today. And the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Stupak) pointed out the White House is beginning all kinds of ways to convince this Congress to do something to vote for the agreement.
Just a couple of days ago Tom Donahue with the Chamber of Commerce told a bunch of Members of Congress, if you vote against CAFTA, it will cost you. Those kinds of threats. At the same time the President and his people are now putting out carrots, not just sticks. They are, in a sense, bribing Members of Congress with everything from promising highways and bridges and other kinds of pork to now saying that they are going to put $20 million in labor enforcement assistance into something called the Department of Labor's Bureau of International Affairs.
Now the administration cut the ILAB from $148 million in 2001 down to
$12 million, from 148- to $12 million. Now they are saying they are going to add 20 million to it, as if that is helping something, when they have no interest, they have written a trade agreement that does not enforce labor standards or provide labor standards. Now they are saying they are putting a little money in even after they have cut it. At the same time something called the International Labor Organization, which is a multinational group that sets labor standards, were one of, I believe, two countries out of 80 that said we are going to vote against the funding for that international body.
So it is pretty clear all the promises they want to make about enforcing labor standards, they wrote weak standards, they cut funding on enforcement. Now they are trying to buy off a few Members' votes by promising to put a little money in enforcing labor standards.
I yield to the gentlewoman from Illinois (Ms. Schakowsky), who has been a stellar outspoken advocate for workers' rights and the environment, both internationally and in the gentlewoman's Illinois district and around this country.
Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Well, I thank the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) so much for the opportunity to join the gentleman tonight, and thank the gentleman for his leadership. As I have said, I have learned a lot from the gentleman. Actually wrote the book on trade agreements called the Myths of Free Trade. You can get it at a book store. If they do not have it, order it. It is a good read and educational.
What we are seeing right now is a growing bipartisan consensus that CAFTA is not a good idea.
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I realize there are all kinds of pressures going on on the side to get Members to vote for it, and I think the reason is very simple.
Why do we have trade agreements? Well, of course, we have now an increasing global economy. That is inevitable. It is going to happen as the world gets smaller, because of technology, because of our capacity to trade with each other across borders, and that is a good thing. But we are at a point now where we have to decide what are the beneficiaries, who are going to be the winners and the losers of this international trade.
Clearly, we are talking about businesses being able to sell their products and import products and to set a level playing field, but we want to make sure that it is not just multinational corporations, the huge companies that benefit from this global marketplace, but that it is consumers, that it is workers, and that at the same time we are not damaging our environment. The thing about trade agreements is that it is possible to craft trade agreements that are not only good for business, but they are also good for workers and that they do take into consideration the environmental impact.
We had a trade agreement with Jordan that, if we used it as kind of a template for how we write these agreements, could have been a model for how we do it around the world, but instead, this trade agreement speeds up or at least contributes to what we call the race to the bottom; that is, the kind of agreement that does nothing to lift the wages or the living standards of people in the Central American countries and the Dominican Republic, and makes it easier to actually lower the standards of workers here in the United States. It starts pushing down wages, pushing down working conditions, and that is not the kind of globalization we want, where the whole world is diminished in terms of its workers by these trade agreements.
I went to Cuidad Juarez right across from El Paso at the 10th anniversary of NAFTA, and it was a trip that was organized in large part by the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur). When I went there, what I saw were workers living in the packing crates of the products that they were manufacturing, often American companies, who had crossed the border and set up shop there so that they could pay very low wages to Mexican workers who were benefiting hardly at all.
I mean, yes, they wanted some kind of a job, but their standard of living was to live in packing crates without health care, without certainly any kind of a living wage. In fact, we saw children who looked pretty sick, but they could not afford to take them to the doctor or even to send their children to school.
Is this the kind of world that we want to help create with these trade agreements? Is this good for the people in Mexico? Is this good for Americans? Because then those jobs go to places where there are low wages and where it is dangerous to try and organize for higher wages and higher benefits. It is dangerous to talk about unions. In our country, every 23 minutes a worker gets fired for trying to organize a union. In some of those places, you can get killed if you try to organize a union. It can be very, very dangerous.
So the United States is the richest country in the history of the world. It could be a leader in saying we want to establish rules that lift all people, that make it possible for our workers to have a living wage here at home, to have our consumers be able to buy products from other countries where the people who produce them are not living in slave or near slave labor conditions. I feel bad because often it is posed, you are either for trade agreements or you are not; you are an isolationist; you do not want to.
It is not that at all. We could craft an agreement. We could go back to the drawing board, and we could craft an agreement that would work for workers here and workers there, too.
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Illinois
(Ms. Schakowsky). She is exactly right. I think the point she made is so important.
First of all, at the beginning of her comments, she said there is a growing bipartisan group, and it is clearly way larger than a majority of this Congress, large numbers of people in both parties, who do not like our trade policy, who see that we have seen this incredible growth in the deficit from $38 billion to $618 billion in 12 years. It is clear our policies are not working.
We have seen the kind of job loss that the gentleman from Michigan
(Mr. Stupak) and others have talked about, particularly in these red States, with losing 200,000 jobs.
She talked about that we are not against trade agreements; we are against this Central American Free Trade Agreement. We are against this trade agreement because we know who the winners and losers are. The winners have been the drug companies, the largest most powerful corporations. The losers are small manufacturers that are from my district and in Chicago or in the upper peninsula of Michigan. The losers are workers all over the country.
When these workers lose, it is not just 216,000 Ohioans who lost their jobs. It is the families. It is the children. It is the school districts, the police and fire protection, and the safety of these communities.
It is clear, Mr. Speaker, that we can simply do better, that we should reject the Central American Free Trade Agreement as presented to us for this vote; renegotiate CAFTA; come back here and pass a trade agreement that lifts standards up, that lifts workers' standards up in our country and Central America; that protects and preserves the environment; that speaks to food safety and all the things that matter in our lives.
In closing, I would add both comments from the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Stupak) and the gentlewoman from Illinois (Ms. Schakowsky) about what do we stand for as a Nation, what kind of values, and when I look at the fact that religious leaders in all seven of these countries, the six countries south of us and our country, religious leaders have spoken out saying they are not against trade either, but they can do better, they believe we can do better and come up with a negotiated trade agreement so that working families and the poor in these countries, the environment benefits, food safety benefits. We do better with all of those things that we care about.
So I thank my friends for joining us tonight, the gentleman from Ohio
(Mr. Ryan), the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur), the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Stupak), the gentlewoman from Illinois (Ms. Schakowsky), and just again saying we should renegotiate CAFTA, start again. It has been a year and a month since this agreement was signed by the President. We can do better. Let us start again and do it right this time.
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