Authorizing the Limited Use of the U.S. Armed Forces in Support of the NATO Mission in Libya-Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so ordered.

INTERNATIONAL TRADE

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, international trade is one of the best ways to create more good-paying jobs for our people--as long as our workers and our companies are treated fairly in the tough global markets in which they compete.

That is not the case today. Chinese trade cheats, after being found guilty of dumping their goods in America, now launder these goods by illegally shipping them through Korea and other countries. This illegality is undercutting our workers, undercutting our companies, and is driving hard-working Americans out of jobs. All this is taking place under the sleepy eyes of America's so-called trade enforcement agencies.

Because this trade rip-off is growing and the Senate will soon take up trade agreements that could fix this problem, I wish to take just a few minutes this afternoon to make clear how this scam actually works. The reason I have this information is because as chairman of the Senate Finance Subcommittee on International Trade, my staff set up a dummy company that intervened directly with suppliers in China in order to learn firsthand how the Chinese firms brazenly shirk America's trade laws.

First, after a thorough and substantial investigation, what happens is that the U.S. Department of Commerce imposes antidumping duties on certain Chinese merchandise that was shown to be dumped, which is to say the merchandise is being sold at below-market prices. The next thing that happens is the Chinese supplier of the merchandise is tagged with the antidumping duties. Rather than stop selling and dumping goods into the United States, the Chinese essentially shore up their American buyers by soothingly conveying that these

duties are not going to impact their prices. The suppliers sometimes characterize complying with U.S. trade law as merely a political issue.

After that, the Chinese goods are shipped into Korea, for example, where the goods are repacked into boxes that say ``Made in Korea.'' The documentation then follows the merchandise that is also going to be altered or forged to suggest that the merchandise indeed originates in Korea rather than China. From there, the merchandise enters our country, often at the Port of Long Beach in California, and U.S. Customs officials declare the goods to not be subject to antidumping duties because, purportedly, if one looks at all the labeling, they don't originate in China.

This transshipment is laundering, plain and simple, and it is a rip-off of the American worker.

My concern is once the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement goes into force, Korea would become a supermagnet for this kind of merchandise laundering. Why would any Chinese supplier launder merchandise through Singapore, for example, when doing so through Korea would bless their merchandise with the duty-free status that the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement provides? The answer is obvious. They wouldn't.

That is why the Congress needs, through legislation, to send clear instruction to the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection--and these are our cops. They are the commercial cops at America's ports. They need to be instructed about how to identify and combat the invasion of America's trade laws. In my view, this is absolutely critical to ensuring the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement is not a tool that further empowers unscrupulous Chinese exporters.

For almost a century, our trade laws, the antidumping and the countervailing duties, have been enforced by Democratic and Republican administrations. They represent the frontline defense that protects our American workers. They are the laws that protect our businesses and our families from unfair and unscrupulous trade practices employed by foreign competition. But what we are seeing around the country is that these antidumping and countervailing duties are being evaded, and the problem is growing. What we have seen is, it takes years for the government to look into and conclude investigations on merchandise laundering. During this period of foot-dragging, our companies get hammered by foreign trade cheats, and when the cheats get caught, the enforcement agencies have almost never taken the steps necessary to ensure that the duties that are owed are actually collected.

The discrepancy between how much the U.S. Government is owed by these foreign trade cheats and how much is actually collected is embarrassing. We are collecting something on the order of 20 percent of what is owed to our government, and that is only from the companies that actually got caught and were prosecuted. The fact is, there are many more that are missed every year.

So I hope colleagues, as we go to the trade debate, understand that the point of trade agreements is, it is possible to export more of our goods and services around the world. What we want in trade agreements is to grow things here. We want to make things here. We want to add value to them here, and we want to ship them somewhere. So we want to export our goods and services, not export our jobs. But, unfortunately, again and again, as a result of our competitors evading the trade laws, we have a broken enforcement process.

That is why three Democrats and three Republicans in the Senate have joined me in introducing a piece of legislation that puts the teeth back in our trade laws. Senators Snowe and Blunt and McCaskill and Brown of Ohio and Portman and Schumer and I all joined--three Democrats and three Republicans--to introduce S. 1133.

This legislation requires Customs to quickly and transparently investigate duty evasion. It requires the Customs agency to use existing law to ensure that it can collect the correct duties on merchandise. The legislation requires Customs to appropriately share this information with other Federal agencies because we have seen, again and again, that often one of the agencies doesn't talk to the other. Finally, it requires the appropriate agencies to make sure that in the future, they are going to report to the Congress promptly on what is being done to fully address the problem.

Let me wrap up--I see colleagues on the floor--by simply saying that I believe trade agreements create more jobs for our people, but the fact is trade agreements without enforcement can cost our people jobs. So this time, as the Congress goes forward with considering trade legislation, it is important to show the American people that as our trade agenda moves forward and moves forward aggressively in the days ahead, instead of major trade competitors laundering merchandise, as we have seen in our committee's investigation, to avoid the trade laws, our trade laws would finally be fully enforced.

I yield the floor.

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