Justice For Victims of Trafficking Act of 2015--Continued--

Floor Speech

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Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I objected to the unanimous consent request to waive rule XXVI to allow the Finance Committee to pass a fast-track bill because I think it is time we slowed down fast-track.

This trade agreement, I think everybody acknowledges, is of enormous consequence to working people all over this country. We need more transparency. We need to know what is in this legislation, and we need to involve the American people in this discussion.

I must say I am extremely disappointed that on a piece of legislation which involves 40 percent of the world's economy, that is the largest trade agreement in the history of the United States of America, much of the major media has virtually ignored this issue.

Now, you may be for the agreement, you may be against the agreement. I am strongly against it--and I will tell you why in a moment, but I would hope we could all agree this is an enormously important issue that deserves significant discussion on the part of the American people and their elected representatives.

I find it incomprehensible that, to the best of my knowledge, ABC--the ABC television network--has had zero coverage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, zero; CBS television, zero coverage; NBC, zero coverage. PBS has had three mentions of the TPP. CNN has had zero coverage, FOX television has had four mentions, and MSNBC--mostly because of the excellent work of Ed Schultz--has covered it on 33 occasions, and all of this since January of 2015.

So here we are engaged in a discussion--some people are for it and some people are against it--but how do the American people know what is going on if the major networks are virtually blocking out any serious discussion, any mention of the agreement?

Supporters of the fast-track bill have told us over and over again that unfettered free trade will increase American jobs and increase American wages, but they have been proven dead wrong every single time we have had a trade agreement. In other words, we hear the same rhetoric: vote for NAFTA, vote for CAFTA, vote for the free-trade agreement with China. It is going to increase jobs in America, improve life for the middle class. Yet every single time the rhetoric around these past trade agreements has been proven to be dead wrong.

I was in the House of Representatives in 1993 and 1994 during the debate over NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. I remember all of those people who supported that agreement telling us how NAFTA was going to open the Mexican economy for products made in the United States of America and how it was going to create all kinds of good-paying jobs in this country.

On September 19, 1993, President Bill Clinton said the following:

I believe that NAFTA will create 200,000 American jobs in the first two years of its effect. ..... I believe that NAFTA will create a million jobs in the first five years of its impact.

That was President Bill Clinton, who strongly supported that agreement.

But it wasn't only President Clinton who made those claims. The Heritage Foundation, one of the most conservative think tanks in this country, said in 1993: ``Virtually all economists agree that NAFTA will produce a net increase of U.S. jobs over the next decade.'' That is from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

Further, during the debate over NAFTA and the Senate in 1993, the distinguished Senator from Kentucky, Mitch McConnell, who is now the majority leader, said: American firms will not move to Mexico just for lower wages.

That was Senator McConnell. Virtually every major newspaper in America had editorials saying: Support NAFTA--the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal. Support NAFTA; it is good for the American worker.

Well, it turns out that NAFTA, which, of course, was supported by every major corporation in America, supported by Wall Street, supported by all of the Big Money interests--well, it turns out that all of those projections regarding NAFTA turned out to be dead wrong.

According to the well-respected economists at the Economic Policy Institute, NAFTA has led to the loss of more than 680,000 jobs--not the creation of 1 million jobs, the loss of 680,000 American jobs.

In 1993, the year before NAFTA was implemented, the United States had a trade surplus with Mexico of more than $1.6 billion. Last year, the trade deficit with Mexico was $53 billion.

I quote what the Economic Policy Institute says about NAFTA:

[President] Clinton and his collaborators promised [NAFTA] would bring ``good-paying American jobs,'' a rising trade surplus with Mexico, and a dramatic reduction in illegal immigration. Instead, NAFTA directly cost the United States a net loss of 700,000 jobs. The [trade] surplus with Mexico turned into a chronic deficit. And the economic dislocation in Mexico increased the flow of undocumented workers into the United States.

Further, I quote an article that appeared in the New York Times yesterday:

Mexico has become the most attractive place in North America to build new automobile factories, a shift that has siphoned jobs from the U.S. and Canada. ..... In the past two years, eight automakers have opened or announced new plants or expansions in Mexico. ..... Low labor costs and fewer tariffs are the swing factors.

That was the New York Times yesterday. In other words, despite all of the rhetoric about how this unfettered free-trade agreement with Mexico was going to create jobs in this country, it turned out--not too surprisingly, I voted against NAFTA--to be exactly the opposite. Those people who told us how great the agreement was going to be were dead wrong.

Why were they wrong? Well, for obvious reasons. When you have workers in low-wage countries, people who are prepared to work for 50 cents an hour, $1 an hour, $2 an hour, it doesn't take a Ph.D. in economics to figure out that corporations will shut down in America, move to those countries, pay workers pennies an hour--not have to worry about environmental regulations, not have to worry about, in some cases, trade unions. You don't have to worry about that stuff.

So what would American corporations do? Of course they would go to those countries. That is exactly what they have done.

I talked for a moment about NAFTA. What about permanent normal trade relations with China? I don't think I have to elaborate on the fact that when Americans go shopping and they walk into a department store--just look at the labels. Look at where the products are manufactured. Time after time, the products come from China, China, and China.

As unbelievable as it may sound, back in 1999 and 2000, we were told--this is again what we were told--that permanent normal trade relations with China would open up the huge Chinese market to all kinds of American-made products. The argument was, look, China is the largest country in the world. If we can just have an unfettered free-trade agreement with them, think about all the products manufactured in America that would be sold to the huge population in China.

That was the argument. I think it is important for the American people to hear what the supporters of permanent normal trade relations with China--free trade with China--had to say back then and whether those arguments turned out to be right. In other words, if we are going to look at TPP today and hear what people are saying now, it is important to hear what people said about these other free trade agreements back then.

Here is what President Bill Clinton said about PNTR with China back in 1999:

In opening the economy of China, the agreement will create unprecedented opportunities for American farmers, workers and companies to compete successfully in China's market.......This is a hundred-to-nothing deal for America when it comes to the economic consequences.

That was President Bill Clinton.

In addition, this is what the conservative economists at the Cato Institute--a very conservative think tank--wrote back in 1999:

The silliest argument against PNTR is that Chinese imports would overwhelm U.S. industry. In fact, American workers are far more productive than their Chinese counterparts.......PNTR would create far more export opportunities for American than Chinese concerns.

In other words, we had a liberal President, President Clinton, saying PNTR--free trade--with China would open up great economic opportunities in America, create new jobs, and raise wages. We had a conservative think tank say exactly the same thing. We had all of corporate America, all of Wall Street, all of the big-money interests saying: Oh boy, what a great opportunity for the United States. We can create all these jobs.

Well, were they right or were they wrong? I think everybody knows--the facts are pretty clear--they were, once again, not wrong, they were dead wrong. The Economic Policy Institute estimated that PNTR with China has led to the net loss of over 2.7 million American jobs. The trade deficit with China has increased from $83 billion back in 2001 to a recordbreaking $342 billion in 2014. I note that my Republican colleagues often talk about our national deficit, which is an important issue, but I don't hear much discussion about our huge trade deficit, especially with China, which was at $342 billion in 2014.

After all of the talk on the floor of the Senate and the floor of the House, after all of the editorials written in the major newspapers throughout our country, after all of the discussion and expositions of Wall Street and the big-money interests, it turned out that the trade agreement with China was an unmitigated disaster for American workers.

PNTR was passed in the year 2000. A couple of years later--and this kind of tells you everything you need to know about unfettered free trade--Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, one of our large corporations, was quoted on this subject at an investor meeting 1 year after China was admitted to the World Trade Organization, and this is what Mr. Immelt said:

When I am talking to GE managers, I talk China, China, China, China, China. You need to be there. You need to change the way people talk about it and how they get there. I am a nut on China. Outsourcing from China is going to grow to $5 billion. We are building a tech center in China. Every discussion today has to center on China. The cost basis is extremely attractive. You can take an 18 cubic foot refrigerator, make it in China, land it in the United States, and land it for less than we can make an 18 cubic foot refrigerator today ourselves.

What Mr. Immelt was saying is what virtually every major corporation CEO was thinking, and it is not hard to understand why. In China, wages are very, very low. Environmental regulations are almost nonexistent. It is hard to find a trade union to negotiate for workers. Why wouldn't a company shut down in America and run to China? And that is exactly, of course, what they have done.

Before PNTR with China passed, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce told us it would create jobs. But just a few years later, on July 1, 2004, the Associated Press ran an article with the headline ``Chamber of Commerce leader advocates offshoring of jobs.'' The article quotes Thomas Donohue, the president and CEO, who, by the way, just yesterday was before the Senate Committee on Finance advocating for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. This is what the AP article said back in 2004:

Mr. Donohue urged American companies to send jobs overseas as a way to boost American competitiveness ..... Donohue said that exporting high-paid tech jobs to low-cost countries such as India, China and Russia saves companies money.

So the dirty secret is that of course these guys like these free-trade agreements--not because they are going to create jobs in America. No one seriously believes that. When they are honest about it, they understand and they say that if companies shut down plants in America, throw millions of people onto the streets in this country and move abroad--when they do that, their profits go up. And they are right. I give them credit for that. That is right. That is what unfettered free trade has meant in this country.

And on and on it goes. It is not just Mr. Immelt, the head of General Electric; it is not just Mr. Donohue, the head of the chamber of commerce; it is major corporation after major corporation. It is Wall Street. It is all of the moneyed interests. Before the agreement, they tell us as part of the discussion how many good jobs NAFTA is going to create, how many good jobs free trade with China will create, how many good jobs the Korean trade agreement will create. After the agreement, word comes out: Hey, this is a good opportunity. Shut down in America, go abroad, pay people pennies an hour, and bring your products back into this country.

In 2011, we were told we just had to pass the South Korea Free Trade Agreement because of all the jobs it would create. Same arguments--another free-trade agreement that is going to be great for the American worker. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce told us this free-trade agreement could create some 280,000 jobs in America. Instead, the South Korea Free Trade Agreement has led to the loss of some 60,000 jobs and the trade deficit with our country has gone from $16.6 billion in 2012 to $25 billion in 2014.

Now the administration, Wall Street, and the largest corporations in this country are saying: Trust us. Forget about everything we said about all of these other trade agreements. Yeah, maybe we were wrong on NAFTA. Maybe we were wrong on CAFTA. Maybe we were wrong on the China Free Trade Agreement. Maybe we were wrong on the South Korea Free Trade Agreement. But trust us, on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, it is different. This one really, really, really--cross our fingers--really is going to be different.

This one will support about, they say, some 650,000 American jobs. You know, it is one thing to be fooled once. It is another thing to be fooled twice. It is another thing to be fooled three times. But there comes a point where the American people are catching on that one of the reasons why the middle class of this country is disappearing, one of the reasons why most or many of the new jobs being created are low wage and part time, one of the reasons why real inflation-accounted-for wages for American workers has plummeted is because of these disastrous free-trade agreements. So you can fool me once. You can fool me twice. Maybe I am dumb and you can fool me three times. But there does come a limit to how many times you think you can fool the American people.

When we talk about why the middle class of this country has been in decline for the last 40 years, one of the important reasons is that since 2001 we have lost nearly 60,000 factories in this country. Over that same time period, we have lost over 4.7 million manufacturing jobs. In 1970, 25 percent of all jobs in the United States were manufacturing jobs. Today, that number is just 9 percent. In January of 2001, there were 17.1 million manufacturing workers in this country. Today, there are only 12.3 million manufacturing workers.

In my small State of Vermont, we have lost 34 percent of our manufacturing jobs over the past 14 years. In January of 2001, Vermont had 47,000 factory jobs. Last February, it was down to 30,700. And that is true for virtually every State in this country.

Why is this significant? It is significant because historically manufacturing jobs paid the highest wages available to blue-collar workers. If you had a job at a manufacturing plant, if you had a union, the likelihood was that you would earn decent wages, have decent benefits, and you could actually support your family. You earned the wages that enabled you to take good care of your family. With the decline of manufacturing, what has happened is we have seen a huge increase in service industry jobs--McDonald's, Walmart--where wages are low, benefits are nil, and American workers who work there are having a hard time surviving economically. Manufacturing goes down, people lose their jobs, wages go down, and new jobs are being created that pay significantly less than the jobs people used to have.

The fact is that TPP is just a new and easy way for corporations to ship jobs overseas and force Americans to compete with low-wage workers in Vietnam and other countries. The minimum wage in Vietnam is 56 cents an hour. What this trade agreement says to American workers is, you are now competing against people who in some cases will be working for 56 cents an hour. I think that is grossly unfair. We should not force American workers into a race to the bottom.

Let's be clear. The TPP is much more than a free-trade agreement; it is part of a global race to the bottom to boost the profits of large, multinational corporations and Wall Street by outsourcing jobs, undercutting workers' rights, dismantling labor, environmental, health, food safety, and financial laws, and allowing corporations to challenge our laws in international tribunals rather than our own court system.

The TPP is poised to be the largest free-trade agreement in history, encompassing 12 nations that account for roughly 40 percent of the global economy. That is why it has been referred to as ``NAFTA on steroids.''

Incredibly, while Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, and major media companies have full knowledge as to what is in this treaty, the American people and Members of Congress do not. They have been locked out of the process. While the full text of the TPP has not been made public, there have been some leaks of what is included in it, and what I have seen is very disturbing.

It has been estimated by outside experts that the United States would lose more than 130,000 jobs to Vietnam and Japan alone if the TPP goes into effect. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. At a time when corporations have already outsourced over 3 million service sector jobs that were in the United States, the TPP includes rules that will make it even easier for corporate America to outsource call centers, computer programming, engineering, accounting, and medical diagnostic jobs. So these are not just manufacturing jobs; these are all kinds of other jobs which, if they can be done cheaper in other countries, will be sent there.

Under TPP, Vietnamese companies would be able to compete with American companies for Federal contracts funded by U.S. taxpayers, undermining American laws. The TPP will undermine U.S. sovereignty by giving foreign corporations the right to challenge any law in this country that threatens their expected future profits before international tribunals. In other words, if we pass an increase in the minimum wage, under the TPP, Vietnamese companies that invest in America could sue the United States in an international court full of corporate lawyers if they believe it will hurt their profits. By the way, that is what this whole agreement is about--maximizing the investment profits of corporations from the United States and all over the world.

If localities--local governments, state governments, federal governments--stand up and say: You know what, we want to protect health, and we want to protect the environment--if that impinges on the future profits of the corporation, it can take legal action against that local, state, or federal agency. That may sound kind of crazy, but that is exactly what has already happened in Egypt after it signed a free-trade agreement with France. In 2012, a French utility company sued Egypt in an international tribunal for 82 million euros. And what was Egypt's crime? For what were they being sued? They were being sued because they had increased their minimum wage, among other things. The French company saw raising the minimum wage for Egyptian workers--which is very low--as an impingement on their ability to make profits.

Further, large pharmaceutical companies are working hard to ensure that the TPP extends the monopolies for their prescription drugs by extending patents that already can last for 20 years or more. Doctors Without Borders--a heroic organization of doctors who go to some of the most difficult, the poorest, the most dangerous parts of this world to treat people who desperately need medical care--they are very brave people. They wrote that ``the TPP agreement is on track to become the most harmful trade pact ever for access to medicines in developing countries.'' In other words, what the big pharmaceutical industry wants is for countries all over the world to have to pay top dollar for prescription drugs. They want to be able to maintain their patents for as long as possible and prevent those drugs from going generic, where the prices would be significantly lower. The problem is that people in poor countries cannot pay a lot of money for their prescription drugs. So if this agreement goes through and the pharmaceutical industry can force poor countries to pay high prices for prescription drugs, people will suffer and people will die.

After one disastrous trade agreement after another, I think it is time for the American people and their elected officials to reassess how we do trade in America. It is time to say we need trade agreements that work for working people in this country and not just trade agreements that work for the CEOs of large, multinational corporations. It is time to say to corporate America: If you want us to purchase your products, it is time you started manufacturing those products here in the United States and not in low-wage countries all over the world.

The evidence is overwhelming. For decades, our trade policies have been responsible for lowering the standard of living of tens of millions of Americans. People today all over this country are working longer hours for lower wages. Most of the new jobs being created are low-wage jobs, and many of them are part-time jobs.

We need to rebuild our manufacturing sector. To do that, we need a fundamental revision in our trade policies. NAFTA has failed. CAFTA has failed. Permanent normal trade relations with China has failed. The Korea trade agreement has failed. It is basically insane to keep going with the same type of trade policy that has failed and failed and failed.

I hope very much that here in the Senate and in the House we can defeat this TPP and come back to the table and develop a trade agreement that works for American workers, works for people all over the world, and not continue these disastrous trade agreements.

I yield the floor.

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