America is Saddled with Bad Trade Deals

Floor Speech

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Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, how does America get saddled with these bad trade deals?

If we look at our free trade agreements, we see a 425 percent increase in our trade deficit with those FTA countries. You get that statistic if you include NAFTA, which, of course, is the granddaddy of all of our free trade deals, and that doesn't even count our worst deal, which was granting most favored nation status to China.

So how do we end up with such bad deals?

First, the elites convince themselves that it is good for the country. They do this because they love the theory of the economic textbook and don't feel comfortable looking at the practice of how business actually works.

Second, the elites benefit from these deals. These deals help economists and Wall Street and attorneys, so they convince themselves that they are good for the country as a whole and create a subcultural echo chamber in which it is a subcultural norm that all smart people realize that these are good trade deals. In having convinced themselves to support these deals, they use a combination of condescension, false appeals to patriotism, and sneaky tactics to saddle the American people with these trade deals.

Take a look at the effect on working families. America needs a raise. To get it, we need a severe labor shortage. We would have millions of additional jobs, a desperate labor shortage, if only we had balanced trade with the world.

Let's look at TPP and its inclusion of Vietnam. We were told that the Trans-Pacific Partnership will give us free access to the Vietnamese market. There is only one problem: in Vietnam, there is no freedom and there is no market. In fact, we will not have access except as the Communist Party of Vietnam decides to grant it on the basis of crony capitalism, but our workers are going to have to compete against 40- cent-an-hour Vietnamese labor.

Now, we are told that in Vietnam, under this deal, it won't be illegal to organize a union. They won't put you in jail for organizing a union. What they will do is they will plant drugs on every union activist and arrest them for that. You are not going to see free unions in Vietnam, and that will hurt working families in the U.S.

So how do they sell it? They claim that it may take jobs away, but it is a necessary sacrifice because we have to contain China. As the ranking member of the Asia and the Pacific Subcommittee, I am here to tell you the TPP is great for China.

First, we are told, well, we get to write the rules. No. These are Wall Street's rules. They are not the rules of the American working family.

Second, TPP enshrines the idea that currency manipulation is just fine. So China gets the single most important change in the rules of international trade.

Finally and most obscurely, there are the rules of origin. Now we know that, under this deal, goods that are made in Vietnam or Japan come right in to the United States with no tariffs. What you don't know is the goods that are 50, 60 percent, 70 percent made in China then go to Vietnam or Japan where they can put a made-in-Japan sticker on it and send it to the United States--that is when they admit that it is 50 or 60 percent made in China.

As a CPA, I will tell you, if you are in a position to admit that your goods are 60 percent made in China, that means they can be 90 percent made in China. So China gets to fast-track their goods into the United States, no tariffs, and we get no access to the Chinese markets. So it is a really bad deal.

How do you pass it? You use sneaky tactics. They don't have the votes to pass it now. The American people would rise in opposition to try to pass it now. So they are going to wait for the lame duck and then have a group of retiring Members of this body shaft the American people with the TPP.

We do have a solution. We need to get all three remaining Presidential candidates to declare, if sneaky tactics and lame duck sessions are used to impose TPP on America, that they will, in their first month in office, pull us back out of TPP. Unless we hear that clearly from the three Presidential candidates, all of whom oppose TPP, that they not only oppose it, but they will erase anything that happens in a lame duck session, then the elites will prevail. We will lose jobs again. Our workers will have to compete with 40-cent-an-hour labor. Chinese goods will be fast-tracked into the United States with ``Made in Japan'' and ``Made in Vietnam'' stickers on them.

It is time for the Presidential candidates to go beyond saying they are against it. They have to declare that they will make sure that any lame duck approval of TPP that happens in December will be erased the following January.

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