CAFTA
CAFTA -- (House of Representatives - July 11, 2005)
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Ms. KAPTUR. I thank my dear colleague the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) who has brought us together this evening to discuss the pending vote on CAFTA, godchild of NAFTA, and my dear friend the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pascrell) who has been such a leader on all economic concerns that face our country, and indeed they are daunting, this one among them.
As I listened to the gentleman from New Jersey and the gentleman from Ohio discuss this pending CAFTA vote, I could not help but think NAFTA. In a bullet, 1 million lost jobs for our country, of jobs all over this country, Ohio, New Jersey, California, Oregon. The list goes on and on. I think Ross Perot talked about the great sucking sound 10 years ago, and we certainly have seen that. This is going to be the last few inches left in the tub, are going to go down to Central America now on this continent.
I usually talk about the economic dimension of NAFTA and CAFTA, but tonight for just a brief moment I wanted to talk a little bit about the political issues involved, most importantly freedom. If America's goal really is to export products, that is a good secondary goal. The first goal ought to be exporting freedom and finding a way to make sure that any agreement that we enter into advances the cause of freedom globally. If we look at NAFTA as a model of what happened economically, this chart very clearly demonstrates every single year since NAFTA's signing, we have moved into greater and greater job loss and greater movement of the deficit with Mexico as well as Canada. So it is negative; negative, negative, negative in exponential proportions. This is just an example in the automotive industry post-NAFTA. We had many more cars coming into our country from Mexico than exports going out. So it is pretty clear what it did economically.
But politically, we ask ourselves, will CAFTA support growing democracy in Central America? Will we export freedom first? Do we consider trade more important than freedom?
This agreement is going to undermine democracy in our neighboring Central American countries. Central America without question faces serious challenges in the consolidation of democracy and the protection of human rights. Peace accords in some of the countries that the gentleman from New Jersey and the gentleman from Ohio have been talking about tonight, peace accords in El Salvador and Guatemala and the end of the Contra war in Nicaragua signaled the beginning of a hopeful era for Central America, but the implementation of reforms there has been incomplete, and many democratic institutions remain weak. Increasing political violence, in Guatemala in particular, is a grave reminder that the conflict of previous decades has not been laid to rest.
Just last week in another country, as high school and college students in El Salvador protested an increase in bus fare, Salvadoran riot police attacked the protesters, seriously injuring and detaining high school students. Riot police followed students as they retreated inside the gates of the university, setting off bombs of tear gas at them and opening fire on the students with what they claim were safe bullets. Four high school students were hospitalized, and others were arrested. To even try to freely assemble in these countries is met with great resistance. Still, civil society in Central America struggles to gain voice, and hundreds of thousands of small farmers, workers, women and young people have gathered in these countries to protest this CAFTA agreement as not contributing to the advancement of freedom in those nations. In recent months, there have been 10 significant protests in Guatemala. You have to be very courageous to demonstrate there. Thirteen in El Salvador. Twelve protests in Honduras. Six protests in Nicaragua. Seven in Costa Rica. They have ranged in attendance from 10,000 to 250,000 people. The people of these countries are saying: United States, pay attention. This agreement will not help us. Hear our voices. Still, their voices are ignored by their own legislatures. They are doing this in order to try to get our attention.
CAFTA passed under very undemocratic procedures in Honduras and Guatemala and El Salvador; with an early morning surprise vote in Honduras, we had parliamentarians from Honduras who just came here and told us that; and an emergency session in the Congress in Guatemala because, if they had considered it under regular order, it simply would not have passed. The public would have come into those chambers. They would have stood around the buildings and made their voices heard.
Not only does CAFTA do nothing to promote democracy among our neighbors, but in fact, it undermines democratic processes here at home. For example, CAFTA's chapter 10 undermines our ability to uphold our living standards because, under this proposed agreement, corporations have the right to sue a government directly if they feel their ability to earn a profit has been undermined, for example, by a public health law or regulation. Is safe drinking water not important? Not having streams polluted, is that not important?
CAFTA's chapter 10, which is modeled on NAFTA's investor right provisions, goes way beyond the rights granted to U.S. companies in the law. Under NAFTA's rules, indirect expropriation and loss of future profits constitute grounds for a NAFTA case. These rules have been reproduced in CAFTA, and they threaten a wide array of legitimate public health and environmental protections.
Under NAFTA's investor provisions, several attacks have already been made on our democratically passed laws. For example, and I will just go through two of these, a Canadian gold mining company under NAFTA recently sued the United States to escape the cleanup and reclamation of a mine site in the United States, claiming this would have interfered with the Canadian company's profits. Well, too bad. Why should they leave behind squalor in this country or any other one? Another example, a Canadian company challenged California's right to ban the gasoline additive MTBE. California banned that ingredient because it leaks from underground gasoline storage tanks and polluted drinking and surface water throughout that water-short State. The Canadian company, Methanex, sued California for almost $1 billion because, they said, their profits were allegedly harmed by California's MTBE ban. Now, what sense does that make? Do we not have a social compact here? Do we not have the right to protect people and under freedom's institutions make sure that our laws reflect that?
CAFTA aims to constrain local and national procurement laws that could otherwise address off-shoring, which I know my colleagues are concerned about, or promote economies that serve our communities, promoting living wage jobs and healthy ecosystems. What is wrong with that?
In closing my opening remarks today, I guess I would have to say, what is next? What will be left of our democracy here at home after more trade agreements like CAFTA? What kind of model are we exporting, where freedom is shortchanged, where profits are given the green light? We should only have free trade among free people. We should use trade as a lever to raise living standards, and we should place freedom first. It is truly a joy to be with my colleagues here this evening and to try to fight in freedom's cause.
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Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. I yield to the gentlewoman from Ohio.
Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I want to compliment the gentleman for his passion and for placing the net result of the architecture of NAFTA and all succeeding agreements that follow in its path like this proposed CAFTA because what we see is a system, an economic system, that is really very cruel, foisted upon societies that do not have the legal system nor the financial system nor the political systems to really allow the voices of the people to be heard in their chambers of government.
In Mexico, after people's wages were cut by 40 percent, the value of their buying power down by 40 percent post-NAFTA, nearly 2 million people in the countryside thrown off their land, what happened there, they got so angry, there have been protests in Mexico City of a million people. A million people. That is three times as many people as live in the major city that I represent. They could not have their voices heard any other way. There was a group of farmers that got on their horses from the different states in northern Mexico and central Mexico. They literally rode into the parliament to try to say stop it, this is hurting us too much.
That is about all they can do to make their voices heard unless they can change over their government. They come here and say to us, America, do you not realize what you are doing to us, whom you are in partnership with? They are begging us to help them improve their societies. Do we not have the greatness as a Nation that believes in freedom and the liberty for all people that we would use our powers, political, economic, moral, whatever they might be, to help these poor people? What is wrong with us? We have been hurt ourselves greatly by our jobs moving to Mexico and other places. We know how tough it is.
Mr. PASCRELL. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey.
Mr. PASCRELL. Mr. Speaker, may I suggest to the gentlewoman from Ohio that it is not the Congress that is making the trade agreements. I have pointed that out before. We have surrendered that right, that power. I do not even think it is the President. What do my colleagues know about that? We have surrendered to many multinational corporations. They are making the trade deals at our expense.
Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman from Ohio would continue to yield, I think what the gentleman from New Jersey said is absolutely accurate, and they expect that through the institutions that are set up, these NAFTA tribunals or CAFTA tribunals or TWO or they meet in places that most people had never heard of. Right? Davos, who can get there? Do people want to go to a meeting somewhere on the west coast of Mexico around Cancun or whatever that was? The roads are blocked off.
They tried to pass something here on GATT. When did they do it? In a lame duck session after midnight. In these countries, by special session, early in the morning, late at night, and the people in those societies even have less opportunity to try to impact the legislative process, as I have spoken about this evening. So we have surrendered, we have surrendered to the largest, most powerful private corporations on the face of the Earth: oil companies, automotive companies, electrical companies, and agricultural companies, people that need cheap labor whether it is to make clothing or whether it is to pick sugar beets, whatever it is. What we have done is we have let that big bulldozer ride over all of us.
And here we stand in the citadel of freedom this evening and we say to ourselves, is this the best we can do? Is this the best we can do, a Nation that rebuilt Europe after the Second World War, a Nation that worked for 50 years to see the collapse of the Soviet regime? Is this the best we can do in the modern age in the 21st century?
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Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. I yield to the gentlewoman from Ohio.
Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from New Jersey for so effectively raising that issue this evening because I do not think the public fully understands who can take whom to court and how our basic legal rights are undermined through the NAFTA agreement and the CAFTA agreement. We basically abdicate that to these bodies that have no transparency. They have no regular right for an individual citizen, for example, to take a claim. We end up with big corporations taking the laws of the State of New York to court or the United States of America to court.
I mentioned the instance where a Canadian company, a company, challenged California as a State their right to ban MTBE from their gasoline because it was polluting their water, of which they have a limited amount.
Mr. PASCRELL. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will continue to yield, there is no question in my mind that we are surrendering the sovereignty of this Nation if we vote "yes" on this legislation. There is a legitimate debate in this Nation about what public interest functions are inherently governmental. Governments choose at what times and with what vendors they wish to procure goods and services. The procurement issue is a very central point in the CAFTA debate. The votes are there to outsource some tasks and not there for others. They are there to purchase locally made products in some cases, import services in other cases. On a State and local level, these same debates are considered every day as the Constitution properly allows them to be considered. Democracy lives.
But under CAFTA, under CAFTA, whether a state privatizes its auto inspection program, whether we give preferences for a local construction firm, whether a city privatizes its water system, Nicaragua, is not necessarily a local decision. It is potentially an international case. How can we accept these conditions?
Globalization is here. We do not and cannot deny that fact. But that does not mean we must give up the values we hold dear to us. That does not mean that we must take what we are given by this administration. Congress has rights too. I thank my friend from Ohio, my two friends from Ohio. Why is it that folks from Ohio are always there to protect the American worker? And I thank each of them for all they have done through all of these years.
We are not going to take one step backwards on this deal. We are going to say this is the end of it.
Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. I yield to the gentlewoman from Ohio.
Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman so effectively raises the issues of sovereignty and of protecting our legal system based on a rule of law with individual rights embedded in those very deeply, and I wanted to thank him for his constant leadership, as well as the gentleman from Ohio's (Mr. Brown) leadership in this whole anti-CAFTA effort, and say that, in addition to the sovereignty issue, following on something the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) said, I think one also has to look at the morality of what is being done here, and his reference to the religious leaders that are coming here from Central America this week, certainly I think of the Roman Catholic Guatemalan cardinal and his tremendous letter that he wrote.
But according to Christian teaching, we remember the words: "As you do unto them, the least of my brethren, so you do unto me." And we, as the most powerful Nation in the world, have to think about the impact of what we are doing as a country on the least among us not just at home but abroad. And without question, as the gentleman from Ohio has stated, the net income and the earning power of those in these Central American countries, in El Salvador, Guatemala, we put them all together, they are so poor. They are so low income. Our predilection should be to have a preference for the poor, that, in fact, we should make it no worse than they already have it.
And we can see the women who are working in those banana packing houses who earn pennies a day, bitten by spiders, and they are told to pack 40 boxes; no, pack 50 boxes an hour; no, pack 100; no, pack 200, until they wear out, and then there is another person lined up. They have no rights.
And how about in the places that sew clothing? Those are largely women workers. They have no voice. They earn pennies. It takes them 2 weeks of work to even afford one pair of the trousers they make that are sold in this country for $39. What is right about that?
What about those people? Are we not to think about them as well? Yes, those jobs were lost in South Carolina or Mississippi, or they moved somewhere from this country, and we fought that with these unfair trade advantages that some of these multinationals have.
Now, what this is doing is it is putting a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on a system that we know is so exploitative. It is bad for our people and horrendous for those doing the work in these packing sheds and these hot, dusty textile companies that no one will ever see.
I remember hearing a letter written by one woman working in a company that was headed by a South Korean who was making the women work faster and faster and faster and faster with no rights. That is where our country was 70 years ago, and we got rid of that kind of sweatshop condition, or at least we got the laws on the books to allow people to have some dignity in their work.
We should not be giving any Good Housekeeping Stamp of Approval to a system which will approve that kind of sweatshop labor that is going down in Central America, which this will exacerbate.
We should listen to the people, listen to those who are demonstrating, listen to those traveling here, listen to their religious leaders and using our power, which is our marketplace. They all want to take their stuff in here. So let us lift standards elsewhere as a condition of market entry, and let us make sure, by raising living standards, we do not keep washing out jobs in this country more and more.
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