We Need a Real Jobs Agenda, Not Another Round of NAFTA Style Deals

Floor Speech

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, you want to know why we have a budget deficit?

We have a budget deficit because we have a jobs deficit, and we have a jobs deficit because our Nation has been outsourcing millions of jobs for over a quarter century. White House after White House and Congress after Congress have allowed our manufacturing and jobs base to be whittled away through a trade regimen that outsources U.S. production and American jobs, financed by the same big Wall Street banks that caused the financial meltdown.

Year after year the United States continues to rack up enormous trade deficits with nation after nation. The numbers don't lie. They tell us that over 2.7 million manufacturing jobs alone were lost just during the Bush administration. Washington must finally confront our so-called free trade failed policies if we are going to be serious about creating jobs in order to balance the budget.

Last year, the trade deficit was another astonishing half a trillion dollars. Imagine a half a trillion, plus a half a trillion, plus a half a trillion, plus a half a trillion year after year after year. That equaled, just for last year, 7 million American jobs that were not created here because of our job-killing trade policies.

Rather than stopping this enormous outsourcing of America, we're being offered up more of the same, more failed free trade agreements, this time with Korea, Panama, Colombia.

Has Washington learned nothing, or are the economic powers that outsource these jobs bearing down on Washington so greatly that the American people can't be heard? The public's interest is being suppressed.

These agreements are another expansion of the same policies and processes that were enacted with NAFTA. We were all told in 1993 that NAFTA would create millions of jobs. Instead, we have seen exactly the opposite, millions of jobs decimated.

Our trade deficit with Mexico last year was over $66 billion in the red. In 1993, proponents of NAFTA, like Gary Huffbauer and economist Jeffrey Schott, promised we would have, and I quote them, ``an annual current account surplus with Mexico of about $10 billion through the 1990s.'' That was an absolute falsehood. Obviously, they were all wrong, dead wrong. Instead, we saw over a third of all manufacturing jobs in the United States disappear since we signed that agreement and $1 trillion accumulated trade deficit with Mexico. Not a single year since NAFTA's is passage was the U.S. in the black.

We heard the exact same fairy tale regarding China's Permanent Most Favored Nation Status. We were told that that agreement in 1998 would create millions of jobs in America. Instead, the result has been a cumulative $2 trillion trade deficit with China alone.

When you think about the budget deficit, you'd better think about the trade deficit because they are absolutely interlinked. You're not going to balance the budget until the American people go back to work, and they can't go back to work when their jobs are being sent elsewhere.

If you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you always got.

The Economic Policy Institute's analysis predicts that the agreement that's proposed with South Korea will cost us an additional 159,000 jobs in our country. Since this January, we have already rung up, look at the numbers, over $7 billion trade deficit with South Korea. With passage of the proposed agreement, do you think it's going to make the job situation better?

If you want to see just how poorly negotiated the Korea deal is, take a quick look at the auto provisions. There's no reciprocity. Last year, Korea sold nearly half a million cars in our country; 500,000 cars. The United States, you know how much we sell to them? Six thousand. What kind of deal is that?

And we'll be lucky if, under this agreement, where there's a hope that we might sell perhaps, 75,000 cars to Korea, so, they get a half a million, we get a handful? How's that a credible plan to create jobs in our country?

And then there are the other two proposed agreements with Panama and Colombia, the latest NAFTA expansion. What are the major commercial interests there?

The Government Accountability Office has identified Panama as a major haven for, guess what, tax avoidance. Panama is a popular destination for the very same multinational corporations that want to avoid paying their fair share of U.S. taxes by creating offshore subsidiaries.

And how about Colombia, which is the most dangerous country in the world if you care about labor rights, and no free country in the world does not have labor rights. Over 2,000 trade unionists, 2,000 have been assassinated there since 1990. What a pleasant place to do business. And there has been no justice for their victims and their families in the majority of those murder cases.

And what is the largest economic interest we have with Colombia? It has three letters. It isn't a place to export U.S.-made goods. Rather, it's more oil imports.

How can those that support these failed trade agreements want more?

We need to create jobs in this country again because, in order to balance the budget, you have to put the American people back to work, and you can't do that when you're outsourcing more of their jobs and importing more into our nation than we export.

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