Volume 147, No. 166 covering the 1st Session of the 107th Congress (2001 - 2002) was published by the Congressional Record.
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.
“THE HISTORY OF NAFTA AND TRADE PROMOTION AUTHORITY” mentioning the Environmental Protection Agency was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H8827-H8833 on Dec. 4, 2001.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE HISTORY OF NAFTA AND TRADE PROMOTION AUTHORITY
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2001, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I was a little disappointed a moment ago when my colleague, the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Cantor), spoke on this floor in support of the Trade Promotion Authority.
We all, including viewers of these proceedings, Members of Congress in their offices, Members of Congress that stop by and watch these proceedings, and others that tune into C-SPAN, see often Members of Congress simply talking about issues. They tell their side for an hour or 30 minutes, and the other side tells the other side, sometimes by party, sometimes by issue.
It is too bad that we did not get a chance today, as I would have liked to, to engage in a discussion as my colleague from Virginia began on his side a discussion of NAFTA and what the North American Free Trade Agreement has meant to this country.
There is so much to talk about with the North American Free Trade Agreement. While that passed back in November of 1993, my first year in this institution, and took effect in January of 1994, a couple of months later, what has happened with the North American Free Trade Agreement is very, very significant in this body today. That is because on Thursday the issue my friend, the gentleman from Virginia, was just talking about, the Trade Promotion Authority, which used to be called Fast Track until Fast Track became so singularly unpopular a term, after this body had defeated Fast Track not once but twice, in fact, in the late nineties, nonetheless, President Bush is bringing back Fast Track in a new cloak, only a new name, not much different, called Trade Promotion Authority. Trade Promotion Authority mostly is simply about taking NAFTA and all of its pluses and minuses and extending NAFTA to the rest of Latin America. I think that most people in this country, if NAFTA came to a vote, would say, I do not think we really want to expand NAFTA to the rest of Latin America, the President's flowery words notwithstanding and the flowery words of my friend, the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Cantor), notwithstanding.
Mr. Speaker, the issue of NAFTA can be encapsulated in a story that I would like to tell. Back when Congress in the late nineties considered expanding NAFTA to the rest of Latin America, considered what was then called Fast Track, now granting Trade Promotion Authority to this President, I, at my own expense, flew to McAllen, Texas, rented a car with a couple of friends, and went to Reynosa, Mexico, to see what the face of the free trade future looked like; how was NAFTA working, since it had been 5 years or so; and how were people in Mexico doing under NAFTA.
I went to the home of two people who worked at General Electric, one of America's and one of the world's largest corporations. They were a husband and wife, and lived in a shack not much bigger than 20 feet by 20 feet. This shack had no running water, no electricity, a dirt floor. When it rained hard, this floor turned to mud.
Now, these were two people who worked at General Electric at 90 cents an hour, they each made, 3 miles from the United States of America. Behind their shack was a ditch about 3 feet wide. Across that ditch was a 2-by-4 people could walk across to get to shacks on sort of the next block, if you will.
This ditch, flowing through this ditch was some kind of effluent. It could have been human waste, it could have been industrial waste, and likely it was both. Children were playing in this ditch. The American Medical Association, the Nation's doctors, called the border along the United States-Mexican border a cesspool of infectious diseases. They claimed that this area is perhaps probably the worst place for infectious diseases in the western hemisphere.
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Now, when you visit the colonias where these Mexican workers, almost all of whom work for major American corporations, where in this country those workers are paid $15, $10, often $20 an hour working under generally safe working conditions protected by government regulation that keeps these workplaces safe, generally those companies dispose of their industrial waste into the air or into the water properly, so it does not pollute in the neighborhood very much. All of those companies in Mexico tend not to follow these rules. They tend not to install worker safety regulations and worker safety protections in the workplace. They tend not to dispose of their waste properly for the healthy well-being of their employees and the neighbors. Of course, the wages are one-tenth, one-fifteenth, one-twentieth as much, 3 miles from the United States.
As you walk through these neighborhoods, these colonias, you usually can tell where the worker works because their homes are constructed, the roofs and walls, the homes are constructed of packing materials that come from the companies where they work. They unload equipment. They unload supplies. They unload components from a supplier and they take those boxes home. They might take boxes from General Electric or General Motors, wherever these companies are, wherever these employees work, they might take those boxes home. They might be wood crates, whatever, and they construct their homes with these crates and boxes and packing material.
As you walk through the colonias in these neighborhoods where the husband and wife are both working 10 hours a day, 6 six days a week for big American corporations, making 90 cents an hour, they live in shacks with dirt floors, no electricity, with no running water, shacks made of packing materials coming from the company where they work.
This is the picture of the free trade. This is the picture of the future under NAFTA and a picture of the future under extension or expansion of NAFTA to Latin America through the Trade Promotion Authority proposal.
Food Safety
Mr. Speaker, I would like to talk a little bit about food safety tonight, because one of the things I learned as Congress has passed NAFTA in 1993, I think not a good reflection on this body, but nonetheless Congress passed NAFTA in 1993, what I found interesting about food safety is under NAFTA one of the things that has happened with food safety and with trade law is that pesticides that we have banned in this country, a chemical company might make something like DDT; it is still legal to make the pesticide in our country, it is simply illegal to apply those pesticides to fields in our country or to gardens or to lawns or anything.
Certain pesticides that are banned are banned for use in this country, but American companies still make pesticides and they export some of them to Mexico. So when we buy strawberries and raspberries from Mexico, in many cases those strawberries and raspberries would have had applied to them pesticides that are illegal in this country to use, but were made in this country and exported to those countries for their farmers to use.
Many of those farms are owned by large companies where there is not high regard for the workers' health, where there is not high regard, frankly, for the end product in terms of its safety for consumers' dining room, breakfast room tables.
So what happens, Mr. Speaker, is so often a pesticide will end up sold to Mexico, made by an American company, applied by dirt-poor, underpaid farmers, barely making a living, jeopardizing their health, because putting these pesticides on the land is every bit as dangerous, if not more so, because of the amounts they use, the volume they use, perhaps more dangerous than the ultimate consumption of those fruits and vegetables.
Mr. Speaker, after the pesticides are produced in the United States, sold to Mexico, applied on food, to strawberries and raspberries in Mexico, those fruits and vegetables are then sold back into the United States. And, frankly, it is pretty certain that pesticide residues are still on those vegetables or strawberries and raspberries and other fruits. So rest assured, in some cases as these fruit and vegetables come across the border, generally dismantled by the Gingrich years in this congressional body, our food safety and food inspection measures at the border are so weakened or so unsubstantial, if you will, that this creates some danger for American consumers.
In fact, it is three times more likely that fruits and vegetables in the United States, imported fruits and vegetables are contaminated, three times more likely contaminated than those grown in the United States.
Instead of our passing trade laws that say we do not allow these pesticides in our country, we will buy your fruits and vegetables but you are not going to allow those pesticides to be used either, we do not do that. We simply say come on in, bring them in.
Let me talk about food safety and what is happening. In 1993, 8 percent of fruits and vegetables coming into the United States were inspected at the border. Today that figure has dropped to one-tenth that amount. Seven-tenths of 1 percent of fruits and vegetables coming into the United States are inspected at the border. That means, if my math is right, that means for every 140 truckloads of broccoli, one truckload is inspected. For every 140 crates of broccoli, 1 crate is inspected. For every 140 bunches of broccoli, 1 bunch is inspected.
That does not bring a lot of confidence to the American public, the consuming public, the eating public, if you will, as we eat the fruits and vegetables coming from these countries.
When I went to the border, and I am joined by my friend, the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) who is one of the premier experts in this Congress and in this country in agriculture. She is the ranking Democrat on the agriculture Committee on Appropriations. She knows food safety in and out.
Before I yield to her, I want to tell another story about that same visit to Mexico where I stood at the border and watched the inspection of broccoli. I mentioned broccoli earlier because it is so in my mind from watching this inspection.
The FDA inspector who was doing his job, doing his best, he in those days was inspecting 2 percent of vegetables coming in. Since then, because of budget cuts that this Congress continues to do on public health issues and public safety issues, and nothing is more important to public health and public safety than a clean food supply, he was inspecting 2 percent then, it is one-third that amount now, about .7 percent.
He took a crate of broccoli off a truck, put it down next to him, took broccoli in his hand, took a bunch in each hand and slammed it down on a steel grate and was looking for pests, for insects to fall out of that broccoli, presumably dead or alive insects. If there had been insects that were alive that fell out, he would have put the whole truckload into a machine that would have sprayed the broccoli to make sure any of the pests were dead. If the pests were already dead, I am not sure what he would have done.
The FDA has only 750 inspectors, spends $260 million to scrutinize 60,000 food plants, inspect 4\1/2\ million imported food items each year.
As I said, in 1993 when NAFTA was passed, 8 percent of fruits and vegetables were inspected. Today that number is down to .7 percent, seven-tenths of 1 percent of fruits and vegetables are inspected.
We do not have the equipment on the border to check for E. coli. We do not have the equipment on the border to check for microbial contaminants. We do not have the equipment on the border to check for pesticide residues. You cannot hold broccoli and you cannot hold strawberries at the border for 2 weeks until the lab tests come back. So basically our food inspections at the border simply do not work right.
Now, Mr. Speaker, today we had a news conference to discuss this, and I want to mention one more thing before I yield to my friend, the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur).
The executive director, Mohammed Akhter, a physician, is the executive director of the American Public Health Association. He said in no uncertain words that fast track Trade Promotion Authority will undoubtedly mean more fruits and vegetables into the United States and a smaller and smaller and smaller percentage of those fruits and vegetables inspected. There is no doubt, because we have passed NAFTA on the cheap. We did nothing for truck safety, nothing for food safety, nothing for drug interdiction when we passed NAFTA. As traffic and congested increased 4 times, 400 percent along the border, we did nothing to prepare. There is nothing to prepare in the Trade Promotion Authority that the President is asking for to prepare for food safety inspections. We still are not doing our job. Especially the director of the American Public Health Association, the highest-ranking public health official in the country is saying that passage of Trade Promotion Authority, in his words, will mean more unsafe food in the United States, more outbreaks of disease, more infectious disease in the American people.
Last year 5,000 Americans died from food-borne illnesses, not all of them from imports to be sure, but it is three times more likely imports cause disease than locally grown produce. Not that we do not need to do better in both; 5,000 people died of food-borne illnesses, 80,000 people went to the hospital from food-borne illnesses; 300,000 people were sick from food-borne illnesses.
That is something we should not be proud of. Those numbers are going up more every single year. Those numbers will keep going up. In the words of the executive director of American Public Health Association, those numbers will just sky rocket if we pass Trade Promotion Authority, simply because we are not prepared at the border to do what we need to do to preserve food safety for the American public.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Toledo, Ohio (Ms. Kaptur), who has been to Mexico, who has seen all of these food safety issues. She, I believe, will talk about some other things with Fast Track also. I yield to my friend from Lucas County, Ohio (Ms. Kaptur).
Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown), the very able Member from the Lorain, Ohio region, for asking me to join him in this Special Order this evening. I do not want to consume an undue amount of his time, and want to say that we are a better country and world because of his involvement and leadership on this issue in the area of trade, jobs, the betterment of the working conditions of America's workers and workers around the world. It is my great pleasure to join him this evening.
I am reminded of the former Governor of Texas, Ann Richards, who used to always say, ``You can put lipstick on a pig and call it Monique, but it is still a pig.''
In thinking about what is called Trade Promotion Authority, I am reminded of the trade debates we have had here in the Congress where the administration always changes the name. We know it is Fast Track. They tried to do that to us before where they bring a trade measure before the Congress and we have no opportunity to amend it. Through the Committee on Rules, they take away the constitutional rights of this Congress to amend and to involve itself in trade-making. It is right in the Constitution. Pick up a copy of it and read it.
So Fast Track basically handcuffs the Congress of the United States and takes away our constitutional power to make the trade laws for this Nation, because it says any president can negotiate an agreement with 59 other countries and not have to negotiate with us. Just bring it up here and try to fast track it through.
So when that ran into trouble, and the gentleman might recall this, when we became involved with China, they could not call it Fast Track. They had something called Most Favored Nation. They could not use Most Favored Nation, so then they changed the name. They said we will call it Normal Trade Relations with China. Well, no relations with China are normal. We are not dealing with a country that even recognizes any democratic rights, no worker rights, no religious rights, corruption at every level, state-owned companies, prison labor. And they want to have normal trade relations. So they changed the name.
Now we are back to, we had the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA; like a treaty, and we were not allowed to amend. It was either up or down inside here, and I will talk about that in a second. Now they are talking about this Fast Track agreement for all of Latin America, not just Mexico, but adding Brazil and Argentina and a lot of other countries; but they do not want to call it Fast Track. No, we cannot call it what it really is. No amendment by Congress to a trade agreement negotiated by the President. We are going to call it Trade Promotion Authority. That sounds like homogenized milk. Who can be against that?
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Reclaiming my time, it is interesting that they have done that, because even though almost every newspaper editor, most of the large newspapers have supported all of these free trade agreements, because they are very conservative and very close to many corporations, and all the reasons newspaper editors do. And even with all of that and the President being for it and the business leaders being for this trade agreement, even with all of that, the American public clearly oppose NAFTA, clearly oppose Most Favored Nation status with China, clearly oppose what we do in the World Trade Organization, clearly oppose Fast Track.
Each one of these issues the public opposes. So as the public builds its understanding of these issues, they always, as my friend from Toledo points out, they always change the name. So Most Favored Nation status became PNTR. What is that? Fast Track Authority became Trade Promotion Authority. What is that? So they continue to try to confuse the public, and the public always catches up and understands it. You can bet 3 years from now when they are trying this again after we defeat it on Thursday, they will try it next year and the year after. They will come up with a new name because Trade Promotion Authority will not be a very acceptable name to the public.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur).
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Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, that is correct and the reason that the public does not support any of these is because they have been hit directly. That means they have lost their jobs.
In this country, ask the Brachs Candy workers in Chicago where their jobs are moving, already to Argentina, because of the way in which sugar is produced in Argentina, and Brachs uses a lot of sugar. So they cannot have farmers producing sugar, and the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) talked a lot about foreign policy in agriculture; but because they can have plantation style sugar production, where workers earn nothing, where there are no environmental standards, where one does not have to dispose of field waste in an environmentally responsible way, and then companies like Wal-Mart, the largest purchaser of Brachs Candy, can set the price it wants.
That is what is going on in the world. Ask the workers at Phillip's Electronics in Ottawa, Ohio, whose jobs are being moved to Mexico; ask the workers at Fruit of the Loom in Mississippi. One can go State by State, region by region; and one can see the outsourcing of manufacturing and of agricultural jobs in this country, and it is the reason that the census bureau and all the income statistics that have just come out have shown that the wages of ordinary Americans for the last 10 years have not risen. When one discounts for inflation, people have been running in place and falling behind and losing their benefits, as the workers at Enron just did as it went bankrupt this week and they lost their 401(k) plans and lost everything that they had worked for.
This trade regime that has been set in place, that disempowers this Congress to represent our constituents has produced an economic policy that is drumming down the middle class in this country and forcing people around the world to work for almost nothing.
I would be pleased to yield.
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. As my friend, the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur), says, the biggest reason that wages have been stagnant in this country, understand for the 10 or 20 percent on top, salaries have gone up, but for most of the public, in the last 10 years, at a time of supposed economic growth, wages have not risen; and one of the major reasons for that is that company after company after company simply threatens to go to Mexico or threatens to go to Haiti or threatens to go to Honduras or threatens to go to China; and workers then are much less likely to demand wage increases, and in many times, many cases will give due wage give-backs so the company will stay there.
York Manufacturing in O'Leary, Ohio, was faced with threat after threat after threat of moving production to Mexico. Their wages stagnated for several years. Even then finally the company closed, moved part of its production to another place in the United States and most of its production to Mexico. So those wages were stagnant for several years, then the factory was closed and the wages became zero.
Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I hope that every worker in America who has lost their job because of one of these trade agreements will write the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) or myself, will tell us who they are because we are going to keep a list of who they are because there are now millions and millions of Americans who have been hurt by these misguided trade agreements.
I heard some of the prior speakers saying how great this would be for trade and it is going to create all these great exports and cheap imports, and the truth of the matter is that is not happening either way.
First of all, in terms of exports, take Argentina and beef. Argentina now exports more beef before this authority even voted on, and wait until after it is passed, than we export to them. We are already a net importer of beef from Argentina.
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. In China, during the PNTR, remember, the Most Favored Nation Status that we talked about, they changed it to Permanent Normal Trade Relations to confuse as many people as possible, during that debate the administration promised, the supporters and the Republican leadership and others here promised, that American farmers would sell grain to China. They said China only had, if I recall, some 12 or 13 million metric tons of grain in their storage facilities in China; they would be importing grain.
What happened? Well, they actually had 50-some million metric tons of grain stored in China, and China since PNTR passed is now known to be a grain exporter. So every time we have a trade agreement, the agriculture community, family farmers like the Snyder family in Richland County where I used to work as a kid on a family farm, family farmers like that are promised that they are going to be able to export more grain, they are going to be able to export more fruits and vegetables all over the world because these trade agreements create all kinds of new markets.
The fact is, rarely, if ever, does American agriculture benefit. Some of the big American grain companies benefit, but almost never do family farmers benefit, whether they are corn farmers, whether they are tomato farmers, especially if they are tomato farmers, winter vegetable farmers, fruit and vegetable farmers in Florida where the price of tomatoes went up and Mexico has increased their tomato production exports to the United States and American farmers have gone out of business and Americans are paying more for tomatoes.
So we get it three ways: we lose jobs, prices often go up, and small farmers, even in Mexico, are put out of business, also.
Ms. KAPTUR. The gentleman raises an excellent point; and if there are farmers listening to us this evening, this Member of Congress' opinion is that the answer for increasing income to America's farmers does not lie in the export market. Rather, it lies in recapturing the market that we have lost here at home and moving our production to higher value-added products, including the production of new fuels.
If one looks at what is going on in Minnesota, with the corn growers in Minnesota, they have raised the price they are getting per bushel by the production of ethanol in southeastern, southwestern Minnesota by one dollar. In other words, they are at a low per bushel cost, about a
$1.65, which is lower than we have in Ohio. They have actually added a dollar, not through exports, but through producing for the people in their own State; and we have to look toward new uses of agricultural product by our consumers here in this country; and we here at the Federal level, including our Department of Agriculture, our Department of Energy, have to help our farmer reposition in an international marketplace in which they have been forced to become the low-price producers, and they are not able to make ends meet.
They have got it backwards. We ought to be helping our farmers here at home invest here in order to recapture new markets in value-added markets here at home. And I wondered if I just might put some facts on the record because they are so staggering they often get lost in the debate, but they are important to talk about.
Let us talk about Mexico, and a lot of us were here and fought against NAFTA. It actually broke my heart because I knew how many people would be displaced here at home, and in Mexico; the wages had been cut in half. They had been cut in half. So one can ask who is making the money off a system where workers like Phillips workers in Ohio, thousands of them, lose their jobs and those jobs are moved to Mexico and the people down there, their wages have been cut in half. So who is making the money off this? That is the real invisible hand. That is the invisible hand that we need to identify.
If one looks at the U.S. trade balances with Mexico, prior to NAFTA's passage, the black bars represent trade balances, we had a trade surplus with Mexico. That means we sent them, sold them, more than they sold us. The minute NAFTA was signed, our trade balance began to turn into trade deficits. That means they are selling us more than we are selling them. That is a negative on the international trade ledger; and it is a very, very serious one.
I wanted to point out a couple of other points. It is not only a deficit. It is a growing huge deficit. Prior to NAFTA's passage in 1993, we had a $51.7 billion surplus with Mexico. That has now turned into a $24 billion annual record deficit. With Canada, which was also a party to NAFTA, we had before NAFTA a problem already. We had a $10 billion trade deficit with Canada. Guess what, since NAFTA passed we have a $50 billion trade deficit with Canada, the worst in the history of this continent.
So NAFTA has really had a reversal of fortune for our country and in one very important sector, and I just want to look at the automotive industry for a second. They said this would be just terrific for jobs in America; we would create all these jobs. What we are doing is parts are being sent down to Mexico from this country, things are being done to them, they are being stamped, they are being bent, they are being this and that. They are put in cars that are sent then from Mexico to the United States. So prior to NAFTA's passage, we already had a stream of production where production was being relocated from our country not to sell cars to Mexico's consumers, because they do not earn enough to buy them, but they back-doored the production into Mexico in order to pay the workers almost nothing and then send those cars up here.
In fact, the most popular car, the PT Cruiser, PT Cruiser costs about
$10,000 to make. Not a single one of those PT Cruisers is made in the United States of America. Every single one of them is made in Mexico, and when one goes down to Mexico, how many Mexicans do we see driving PT Cruisers? We do not see any. Why? They cannot afford them. They are sent up here, and the amount of automotive trade has just tripled between Mexico and the United States. Those are jobs that used to be here. They are now being made in Mexico, and our trade deficit in automotive has just exploded.
What it is, it is the relocation of production. So that is NAFTA, that is Mexico, and Trade Promotion Authority. We are going to see the same with Brazil, the same with Argentina, any country simply because they do not have systems of governance, and their economic systems are not developed in a way that ordinary working people can benefit from this kind of investment.
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, would the gentlewoman yield about autos for one second?
Ms. KAPTUR. I would be pleased to yield to the gentleman.
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I heard the gentlewoman say many years ago, before I made my first trip to Mexico to look at sort of what was happening in these industrial plants, that when one goes to Mexico and went to an auto plant where Mexican workers are making 90 cents an hour, roughly, that when one visited a Mexican auto plant it looked a lot like an American auto plant.
I remember the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) said this years ago, that for the first time, that its technology was up to date; the plant sometimes was even more modern than American plants, they are newer; the workers were productive, they were working hard and the floors were clean. Everything looked just like an American auto plant except for one thing: the Mexican auto plant did not have a parking lot because the workers could not afford to buy the cars.
One can go all the way around the world to Malaysia and go to the Motorola plant, and the workers cannot afford to buy the cell phones. One can come back to the New World, to Haiti and go to a Disney plant and the workers cannot afford to buy the toys or one can go back to China into a Nike plant and the workers cannot afford to buy the shoes.
The tragedy of these trade agreements is that workers are creating wealth for large corporations, and they are not sharing in the wealth they create. They are paid barely enough to live on. They will never be in the middle class, and as the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) said, they will never be able to buy American products. That is why the arrow always goes one way.
We send industrial components to Mexico. As a friend of ours, Harley Shaken, an economist in California, pointed out, they are industrial tourists. These components go from the United States to Mexico, almost like a San Diego teenager going to Tijuana for the weekend. The components go to Mexico for a couple of days; they are industrial tourists. They get assembled into cars and they come back into the United States. Everybody except for the large company loses. American workers lose their jobs; Mexican workers are paid subsistence wages and can never get off the bottom.
Ms. KAPTUR. The gentleman raises an excellent point because those are not real exports. They are U-turn goods. The gentleman is right. They are industrial tourists. They do not really create real wealth. They are merely there to try to exploit cheap labor, and this is happening all over the world, and the American people know it intuitively because when they go shop, it does not matter what one buys, it is all made someplace else.
In fact, trying to find something made in America is now an exception, rather than the rule; and that is draining out of our economy in a very invisible way to the ordinary person's experience the money that should be there for health benefits, the money that should be there for retirement benefits, the money that should be available in local regions to support the construction of schools, all these tax abatements that are being handed out left and right in all the 50 States to try to attract some of this investment that is moving to other locales around the world. They are not paying their fair share of property taxes and of taxes for education and all of the sudden education is being Federalized simply because local regions do not have the money to pay for the schools.
There are lots of costs for what we are seeing; and one of the biggest costs is America's image abroad, and let me give one example. Recently, I had a most compelling set of visitors in my district from the nation of Bangladesh, one of the poorest nations in the world, with over a hundred million people; and these were women workers. They did not speak English, but they came with a translator, and what did they do? Every hour, each of them makes 320 hats, ball caps and T-shirts, for places like Ohio State, the University of Michigan, all of our Big 10 schools, all these football teams and all around our country. For each hat that these women make, they are paid one and a half cents.
When those hats land in the United States, according to U.S. customs forms, the total cost of the material, the labor and the transportation is $1.
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The average cost of one of those caps at any one of our universities is over $17. So you ask yourself, who is making the money?
And what is going on with this kind of system is that the very big investors around the world, and they have always been there, it was true for women in the textile industry from the time of the Lancashire Mills in England, investment moves to an area where they can access cheap labor, and it is up to those in political life to hold them accountable for the communities in which they exist. They have no automatic right to be here. We allow them in our system to be here, and they had best respect the political system we have created because it is not continued by magic. It is continued because of the set of values and beliefs that we hold as a people.
With a nation like China with over $1.250 billion people, and we only have 270 million people in this country, when there is this kind of trade deficit, and that is what this chart represents, U.S. imports from China exceed our exports there by 6 times, by 6 times, the amount of trade deficit in any 1 year that we are amassing with China is over
$50 billion annually. That is $50 billion that is escaping communities in this country, workers' paychecks, workers' benefit checks, the taxes that would go into supporting our educational system, and it is getting worse.
The trade agreement that was signed with China has not made our trade accounts improve. They have only gotten worse every single year. So whether it is Mexico, whether it is China, whether it is Bangladesh, whether it is Argentina, it does not matter. The system is the same system.
I hear President Bush talk a whole lot about evildoers. People can be evildoers, but also economic systems and political systems can be evildoers. They can do harm in a very, very real way. Those women from Bangladesh came to my community and told me that they had to work 7 days a week, these young girls, 18, 19, and 20 years old. They would work 12-15 hours a day, sometimes 20 hours a day, sometimes 48 hours straight because they had to meet their production quota or their company would lose its contract. They would literally curl up and sleep under their sewing machine for 2 or 3 hours, and then they would get up and sew again. None of them were beyond the age of 29, and one girl was fired because she got a gray hair and they said, she is getting old, get rid of her. They are treated like dirt.
This is not the image that I want our country to portray internationally. And to most Americans, these are hidden activities that they never get a chance to see. But I hope retailers, some of whom are listening tonight, please, develop some conscience. Your actions have consequence. There is a moral order here that we ought to uphold. And the economic system that you are a party to does not treat people with respect. It is not just commodities you are buying, you are buying a chain of production, and there are people at every juncture along the chain, and the invisible hand should not be invisible any more.
If I might, I wanted to share again a chart here that shows the long history of our country and what has been happening with these trade deficits year after year after year, lopping probably about 25 percent off of our economic prowess in any given year because of the extent of it, over $300 billion. And back in, oh, 1974, and then moving into the 1980s, we began to move into deficit cumulatively with all these countries, and it has gotten worse and worse and worse every single year.
Now, some people talk about the budget deficit, where the amount of tax revenue that we take in as a country is not enough to pay for all our bills, our defense expenditures, our Social Security, and all the other things we have to pay for. Well, there is another deficit, and that is the trade deficit. It is not talked about a whole lot, and people often confuse the two, but the trade deficit is another number that is terribly important. Because when we have this deficit, how do we finance it? When other countries and companies make money off this marketplace, where do they put those earnings? They have been buying the U.S. Government debt.
When I first came to Congress, 12 percent of our debt was owned by foreign interests. In other words, every year we would have to pay them interest on the loans that they would make to us. Today, that has gone up to 42 percent of our Federal debt is owned by foreign interests. And every year we have to pay those interests, over $300 billion a year now, to pay for their loans to us.
So for the younger generation, this is not a stable situation in which to leave the Republic. If anything goes wrong in the international marketplace, collapse in Japan, collapse in Germany, whatever might happen in terms of the economy, the question becomes: Where are other investors going to be putting their money? How secure is the United States? Politically, yes, we are very secure; but economically we have some pretty big gaping holes in our hull and we best take care of it.
I think that people like my colleague, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown), and myself, those who will oppose us this week will say, well, you are not for trade. That is absolutely wrong. That is not even the issue. Those people who do not want to talk about the real issue will say that against us. But, in fact, we represent the northern part of Ohio. There is no part of America that trades more and is more dependent on free enterprise and the free market than northern Ohio, because we are heavily automotive, we are heavily agricultural, we have major ports, seaports, we have 24-hour-a-day air service out of our communities. We are the major spine of industrial America and also the crossroads of the Midwest.
Seventy-four percent of the American population is within a day's drive from my district alone. We are centrally located in our country. We must trade. But we want to trade in a system that respects democratic rights and freedom and the right of ordinary people to better themselves by the work that they do.
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. I thank my friend from Toledo. What she said about trading with democracies is so very important.
Last year, during the debate on Most Favored Nation status with China, what was euphemistically relabeled PNTR, executives and CEOs who normally do not bother with workaday Members of Congress, they normally only go to the leaders in each party, the Speaker, the minority leader, whatever; but CEOs were roaming the halls of Congress and repeating the mantra, we want access to China's 1 billion consumers; we want to sell our products to China's 1 billion consumers. But what they really cared about was access to China's 1 billion workers, who could work and sew those Ohio State baseball caps and those T-shirts from the University of Toledo or from Oberlin College or wherever. They wanted access to those workers who would work, had no choice really, would work for a few cents an hour.
In the last 10 years, and the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) mentioned buying products, trading with democracies, what has happened in the last 10 years is western investors, investors from France and England and Germany and the United States and Canada, they are not very interested anymore in investing in democratic developing countries, countries that are struggling but that are democratic and developing, still pretty poor but democratic; they are interested in trading and investing in developing authoritarian countries.
In other words, they are not all that interested in Taiwan anymore, because Taiwan, again on Saturday, had a free election, perhaps the third free election in Chinese history. So Taiwan is clearly a working democracy. It is successful. They have done all kinds of great things. One of the great success stories in the world in the last two decades. They are not so interested in investing in Taiwan, but they are much more interested in investing in Singapore because they have a totalitarian government there.
They are not much interested in investing in India, but they are very much interested in investing in China. Why? Because China's workforce is docile, it does not talk back, it is an authoritarian country with no democratic elections, with no ability to speak out, with no ability to change jobs, and with no ability to organize a trade union.
And that is really why the World Trade Organization, which once met in Seattle in 1999 and had all kinds of demonstrations and all kinds of people speaking out in opposition to these policies, that is why they went to a city called Doha, the capital of a country called Qatar. The trade ministers decided enough of this openness, enough of this freedom, enough of this people assembling and protesting and speaking out and having elections. They went to a country where they like to practice their business. They went to a country with no free elections; a country without the freedom of religion, unless you are publicly a Muslim, you are not allowed to worship any other religion; with no freedom of assembly; with no freedom of speech; with no free elections; with no freedoms at all that we are used to.
That is really what our trade policy has turned into. Our investors want to go to China where they have slave labor, where they have child labor, where there are no elections, where their workers are docile and do not talk back, rather than going to a free country where workers organize, where the environment might be protected, where worker rights are protected.
That is why many of these countries leave the United States to go to China. In this country, they pay a Social Security tax. That money is gone when they go to China. They pay into Medicare. That money is gone when these jobs go to China. They have to keep the environment clean in their businesses here. Do not have to do that in China. They have to pay living wages in this country. They do not have to do that in China. They have to have worker protections in the workplace. They do not have to do that in China.
Why are companies investing in China rather than staying in the United States? Why are they investing in China rather than India? Because India is a democracy, China is not. Why not in Taiwan? Because it is a democracy, Singapore is not. That is why it is so important that we in fact support trade.
My colleague and I both support trade, the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) and myself, and so do all of us that are against Trade Promotion Authority. We promote trade, we support trade, we advocate trade, but we want to see trade with democratic countries where workers can share in the wealth they create. Not a place like China, where the workers at Nike cannot afford to buy shoes; not a place like Haiti where the workers at Disney cannot afford to buy the toys they make; not a place like Malaysia, where the workers for Motorola cannot afford to buy the cell phones they make.
We want workers to share in the wealth they create. They will then join the middle class and buy American products, and we will see both countries raise their living standards. That is what trade is all about.
Ms. KAPTUR. While the gentleman was talking about democracy and about trying to have a trade regime that uses the power of the democratic republics of the world and the free enterprise systems with the rule of law that have developed over two centuries, and then invite in the nations that would wish to advance, to have a system that would use the strength of the democratic republics and bring the others forward rather than pit them against one another, which is what is happening now, I could not help but think of one of the opponents who often comes to the floor and speaks against the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) and myself, who usually says, well, we have got to trade because trade brings freedom. Trade brings freedom.
They use that phony argument. And I say, yes, we can have free trade among free people, but if we look at what is happening in the Middle East right now, there is not any set of nations that we have traded more with as a country than Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. Why? Because we are totally and stupidly dependent on imported petroleum.
Now, if trade had brought freedom, they would have the most lively democracies in the world. But trillions and trillions of our oil dollars, every time we go to the gas pump and we buy petroleum, we buy gasoline, half of the money we spend goes offshore to places like Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. And now they are drilling in Sudan.
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Right. Trade and economic activity did not bring freedom to Nazi Germany, to Fascist Italy. It has not brought freedom in any way, all the trade and supposed prosperity, to Communist China. And, as my colleague points out, it has not brought freedom to the Middle East, where we have all kinds of economic exchanges back and forth with Saudi Arabia.
Ms. KAPTUR. I have a story I want to put on the record. I know President Bush is very high in the polls, and I suppose one would be struck by lightning if they were to try to say anything that presents a different truth, but I have to present that truth because I personally experienced it.
As my colleague knows, a few months ago, before the terrorist attacks here in our country, President Bush brought the President of Mexico to my district, the Ninth District of Ohio. And one of the reasons he was brought in there was because, I am sure, President Bush would like to learn more about why people in our region, just like people in every region of America, oppose these trade agreements. So he brought in President Fox, and I had a chance to ride out there on Air Force One with both Presidents and had a chance to talk to them.
I had asked the White House, and I presented President Bush with a letter on the airplane confirming what I had called about, saying, you know, Mr. President, you and I do not agree on NAFTA, and many, many, millions of people have been hurt by NAFTA.
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But we have to figure out a way to improve it and to make it better. I would be willing to travel with you from any point in America where jobs have been lost to the places in Mexico where those jobs have been transplanted, and to talk to the workers in both locations with both Presidents and with Members of Congress and to try to figure out how do we work together as a continent in order to treat workers with the respect they deserve, whether in the industrial workplace or the agriculture hinterlands.
When we got on the airplane and he talked to us, I said, Mr. President, I proposed the trip and that we amend NAFTA to create an organization on an inter-continental basis for working life in the Americas. I said we could have a forum to deal with some of these poignant and deeply difficult and complex labor and environmental issues.
He said, no, he did not have a chance to read the letter I sent his staff a week before. I said, Mr. President, here is another copy of the letter. And I handed another copy to President Fox, and I had sent it to the Mexican embassy. President Bush said, It looks kind of thick. Is it single spaced? That is what he said to me.
I said it is single spaced, but the paper is folded. That may be why it looks a little thick. I said, I would appreciate if you would read it. He said it is single spaced, I have to use my glasses, and I cannot do it now.
I said, Mr. President, I appreciate an answer because I do not think anything that I am proposing is very radical. I did not get an answer from the White House. I can say September 11 happened and the world shifted, but I did receive a reply from President Fox.
Last night at the White House Christmas party, I occasioned to talk to President Bush, wishing him and his wife and all those who are involved in the war God's blessing.
I said, Mr. President, I do have to mention one item: you never did answer me on the letter from the airplane; remember we talked about it? He said oh, yes, and he kind of winked and smirked a little bit, and he said it must have gotten lost in the shuffle. It was not even said with seriousness, and it really hurt me because that is how workers are being treated. They are being lost in the shuffle, in this country, in Mexico, in places like Bangladesh. We are not fully conscious; we are not paying attention. We do not want to pay attention to the economic system that is hurting so many and not treating them with the human dignity that they deserve.
So much of world history is related to economics. I would say most wars, 74 percent, 75 percent of the reason we get in wars relates to economics. The history of this country, the Civil War, the pains of which and the scars of which we are still healing today, what did it have to do with? It had to do with whether or not we would extend the plantation system of the South to the West, and the plantation system with the slave labor with the kind of indentured servitude that characterized economic activity up until that point. It was about economics.
Even now to a great extent, in my opinion, the unrest and the hatred of so many in the Middle East toward us is due to the fact that because we have been trading with undemocratic systems that have not shared that vast wealth with the ordinary people of those countries, figured out some more representative system of government where all parts of the country could have roads and hospitals and children would have the ability to go to school, not just because you are the king's cousin or because you are Sunni as opposed to a Shiite, that there are divisions that do not get full representation, economics underpins so much of the trouble in the world today.
Mr. Speaker, I guess that is the reason we fight so hard because we know if we do not do it right in the first place, we are going to get a reaction down the road that will be like a boomerang.
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, one of the joys of this job, serving as one of 435 Members of this body that we call the House of Representatives, is that we are at an interesting time in our history. We are clearly the wealthiest Nation on Earth, the most powerful militarily. We clearly are a country that has the most opportunity to do good in the world. One of the ways we do that is using our economic prowess in trade agreements; we could do this, to lift up standards around the world.
Mr. Speaker, that means when we trade with Mexico, for instance, and I think we should trade with Mexico and do a lot of trading with Mexico, rather than pulling our truck safety standards down to Mexico's level or pulling our food safety standards down to Mexico's level, or pulling our safe drinking water and clean air and anti-pollution standards down to Mexico's level, that we can instead pull their standards up. We have the ability to do that. We can write trade agreements that say when an American company invests in Mexico, they have to dispose of their waste in the same way there that the Environmental Protection Agency makes them do in this country.
These companies, the chemical companies, the steel companies, the automobile companies, they do not do the right things in the environment in the United States because they are being kind, they are doing the right things because it is Federal and State law, and local public health department regulation that they dispose of their wastes in a certain way that keeps the environment cleaner and healthier.
We could say to American companies in Mexico that they have to follow the same environmental standards. Pesticides that we banned here are not made and sold to other countries by American companies. We could say in China, sure, we will trade with you in China. We will be glad to buy and sell and trade with the People's Republic of China; but in return no more slave labor, no more child labor, no more selling nuclear technology to Pakistan, no more shooting missiles at Taiwan because they are holding a free election.
We are a wealthy enough country to say if you want access to us, you cannot behave certain ways. If China wants to sell their products into the United States, and clearly they do because the U.S. buys 40 percent of China's export, and they cannot say we will sell it somewhere else, because they are already trying to sell as much as they can everywhere else. If we say we are not going to buy your goods anymore if you keep using child labor and if you exploit 15- and 16- and 17-year-old girls and break their spirits and bodies and souls, and throw them out on the streets when they are 22 and make them work in the sex trade and give them no other choice, we could do that; and that is why it is so disappointing that we pass trade agreements that do exactly the opposite.
Instead of lifting up environmental standards around the world, lifting up wages around the world and lifting up food and drug safety and auto safety, instead of doing that we are bringing our own standards down. As wages stagnate in this country because of threats to move abroad, as jobs are lost, as we weaken public health laws in this country closer to what they are in other countries, we are giving away so much that we fought for in this country for 100 years.
I have a pin that I wear that is a depiction of a canary in a bird cage. One hundred years ago mine workers used to take a canary down into the mines and if the canary died, workers got out of the mines. In those days, a baby boy born in the United States could live to be about 46; a girl could live to be about 48, the average life expectancy. Those workers had no protection from the government. Their only protection was the canary they took down in the mines.
But because of progressive government fighting against the gold mining companies, the coal companies, against other wealthy, rich advantaged interests in this country, we were able to pass minimum wages laws, worker safety laws, pure food laws, automobile safety laws, and all of the things that enabled people to live 30 years longer, enabled people to live better, longer lives through Medicare, through Social Security, all of the things that we in this body and in State legislatures and public groups and citizens' organizations have done to make the standard of living better in this country.
Mr. Speaker, I do not want to give that up as a Nation. That is why we need to defeat Trade Promotion Authority and write trade agreements that lift people up, not pull people down. That is the American way.
When U.S. Trade Representative Bob Zoellick, appointed by the President, when he says those of us like the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) and the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Bonior) and the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Stupak), when we oppose these trade promotion authorities, we are not helping them in the war against terrorism, implying that people like myself and the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) are soft on terrorism, implying that people like the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) and the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) are a little less patriotic because we are not supporting the administration on these agreements. The fact is the right side of American values is to lift people up around the world, not pull people down.
Mr. Speaker, it is important, as the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) and I discussed, that Members vote against trade promotion authority.
Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for allowing me to join him this evening in our great efforts to defeat Trade Promotion Authority and move toward more democratic trade agreements for the world.
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