Vote "No" on the Central American Free Trade Agreement

VOTE "NO" ON THE CENTRAL AMERICAN FREE TRADE AGREEMENT -- (House of Representatives - May 11, 2005)

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Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, that is the way it has turned out to be, and I want to thank the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) for his great leadership and vision and taking this CAFTA fight to the American people. It is a great privilege also to join with the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland), our esteemed colleague from south and southeastern Ohio, who I know will be adding remarks and great insight as the evening proceeds; the gentlewoman from Illinois (Ms. Schakowsky); the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Carnahan); and we had the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kucinich) from the Cleveland area here a little bit earlier.

It is really amazing to me when you have a trade agreement like NAFTA, that is so absolutely a failure, that now there is a new trade scheme, and they have got a name that rhymes with NAFTA. I just, I cannot believe it. I cannot believe they are over there. They have got a cookie-cutter system, and they are not paying attention to results.

If we look at the recent history of our country, going back to the mid-1970s, when the first so-called free trade agreement was signed, every single year the United States has begun to develop trade deficits. That means we ship out more jobs abroad than we create jobs here at home. And we end up taking our income and paying somebody else to do the work that we used to do, and we accumulate these growing trade deficits. And they get worse with every decade.

When NAFTA passed in the early 1990s, we actually had a trade surplus with Mexico, which immediately turned into a trade deficit; and with Canada we have doubled the deficit that we already had. When we signed the agreement with China, which those of us who were here voted against, we did not get any more jobs. We did not get any more income. All we got was more trade deficit. It is so deep America has never been in this kind of deep water before. In fact, this year the trade deficit will accumulate at over half a trillion dollars. America has never faced this kind of loss. So it is amazing to me that they name an agreement to rhyme with one of the biggest failures.

And here are some charts, I think, that tell a fuller story about what has happened with the NAFTA agreement. When NAFTA was signed in 1994, we had accumulated trade deficits with Canada; but then every succeeding year, they got deeper and deeper and deeper. So, with Canada, we have not really benefited.

And with Mexico, the surplus we had turned into a gigantic and growing deficit. And now what is happening with Mexico, of course, some of those jobs are being shifted to Latin America and to China. So NAFTA has been a negative.

And what has been going on in terms of the United States, just take the auto industry which is the primary category of deficit with Mexico. We were already getting imports from Mexico prior to NAFTA's signing. Now it is just an avalanche coming the other way. And what we predicted has come true. Mexico has turned into an export platform to the United States. And what we are doing is actually creating a world system where people work for poverty wages or starvation wages. We have high-productivity poverty rather than high-productivity prosperity.

And, finally, if one looks at the China agreement which has a relationship here because this is the same cookie-cutter approach that they are giving us with China, the deficits were growing, but then when permanent normal trade relations, if you can call an abnormal trade deficit normal, I have never understood the words they use. We are just hemorrhaging with China. And just one company alone, Wal-Mart, takes 10 percent of the exports that China sends around the world.

So my basic point here this evening is, why should we have more of the same? Why should we believe them when they say it is going to be all right?

And, indeed, I would like to place in the RECORD an article that was in the New York Times this week where the President of Costa Rica actually said he wants to postpone legislative review on this so-called CAFTA, which is an expansion of NAFTA, until an independent committee finds that it will not harm the poor. Well, it surely will harm the poor. And that is why, in nations like Mexico, we have historic demonstrations in Mexico City for example, of farmers, of peasants, of people just demonstrating and saying we cannot take it anymore; particularly in the countryside, the people are saying we cannot take it anymore.

So I want to thank my colleague for bringing this issue to light. I think we have to be careful of the administration and their efforts to try to come in here and try to buy votes and say, what kinds of transportation project do you like? Oh, how much do you want? Do you need a bridge? Which way do you want it to go, east west, up, down, you know, below the ocean floor? I mean, we will do it for you. What else do you need? Do you need a base? We are moving a few bases around. That is what happened during NAFTA at the very end. The American people would have won that debate, but it was bought. It was bought and sold. And now look at the negative yield that it has produced for the American people.

So I thank the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) for highlighting this this evening. And it has been a pleasure to join my colleagues tonight.

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Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, very briefly, we had visitors from two nations, El Salvador and Honduras in our community. Some of our church groups brought them in. These were young women workers in some of those textile plants down there. They held up t-shirts that they made for which they received 12 cents, and then we took them to stores in our community. They found the very same t-shirts on the rack, and they were priced at $20. And I remember the expressions on their faces. They could not believe it. And yet those that are brokering in their poverty wages and exacting high prices here, $20 for a t-shirt, are making enormous amounts of money off of this kind of bonded labor and control of our marketplace without proper government intervention.

So I also remember the gentlewoman from Chicago, Illinois (Ms. Schakowsky) when we were down in Ciudad Juarez, I can remember the tear coming down her cheek when she saw that family living in those packing crates. I can remember that. When it pierces your heart, you never forget it.

Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Mr. Speaker, I do not want to monopolize this conversation. I do feel so strongly that, as the greatest country on the face of the Earth, the wealthiest country, the country that has the capacity to create jobs, to help people, to lift our own people and people around the world, to help lift them out of poverty, to set a standard that would at least work towards that goal. What a shame that we have before us a trade agreement that, as the gentlewoman said, my sister, the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur), just a repeat of NAFTA, and we know the devastating results both here in the United States and in Mexico and in Canada, that it did not do anything for us.

So I just am encouraged actually that we are seeing growing bipartisan opposition to this. Let us go back to the drawing board and come up with a real trade agreement that is going to achieve the goals that we want, that is going to be helpful to us and to our neighbors around the globe and certainly our closest neighbors here in Central America in the Dominican Republic.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, if I could interject here, the company that the gentlewoman mentioned from Illinois, Galesburg, Maytag. I actually own Maytags. What happened to the workers from the Galesburg plant? Were they transferred? Did they get other jobs? Were they just without work?

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Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Mr. Speaker, if I could, it is bad enough I suppose that usually these workers are paid such low wages, but should those workers try to organize themselves into a union to try and stand up for better working conditions and better wages, we know that in those countries that human rights violations for people who want to form a union are rampant; and the problem with CAFTA is that it really does virtually nothing to protect those workers who want to organize.

We hear in CAFTA, ostensibly it requires enforcement of the local labor laws, both that may exist in the country. Of course, those could change, but even then the penalties are very, very weak. Violations of core labor standards cannot be taken to dispute resolution, and the commitment to enforce domestic labor laws is subject to remedies weaker than those available for commercial dispute.

So every time we put the rights of capital, the rights of intellectual property, the rights of the corporations up here and the rights of workers even to stand up for themselves to try and collectively bargain for better conditions or wages, and it is often at peril of their lives that they do that, not just job loss, but we find in many of those countries that it is very dangerous to be a labor organizer. You can find those people dead.

The other thing is we spend a lot of time around here talking about illegal immigration; and, again, if you think about it in human terms, people do not generally want to leave their homeland. They would prefer to stay there, the place where they are born, where their families live, where their ancestors are, where they have roots. Why do they leave those countries to come to the United States, to risk crossing that river, risk crossing that border? It is because they cannot make a living. They cannot provide any kind of a decent life for their family, and they are willing to do anything to do that and so they come here.

If we want to be able to protect our borders and to have good trade policies, then we have to look at things that will help to lift those workers in other countries so that they can prosper in their homelands.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, I want to follow on that point because if one looks just at NAFTA and Mexico, and the inability when we were debating that to include provisions for those that were going to be displaced from their farms in Mexico, what is propelling U.S. immigration is NAFTA because every year now we have over 450,000 individuals from Mexico coming over our border, the vast majority illegal.

You say, well, why would they do that? Because they are in desperate circumstances. Desperation propels them, just as the gentlewoman from Illinois (Ms. Schakowsky) says. Imagine being willing to die going across the desert in Arizona to get here, a place you do not even know, and what is at the root of it?

The root of it is that their land is no longer productive. The big corporate interests down there buy imported corn, and these people were given no way of transitioning. They had a heartless government, and I think because they did, we might see the first massive historic change in Mexico's elections next year. I hope so, and I want to say to the gentleman from Portsmith, Ohio (Mr. Strickland), when he talked about the churches and the synagogues and the temples and the mosques, they are doing some of the most important work in these trade agreements. They are trying to reach out to people, just like you said, and whether it is fair trade coffee or whether it is quilts or whatever they are buying, they are trying to bring it in and pay people a decent price for whatever that product is and to cut out these middle extortionists, I call them, people in the middle that are trading on that squalor and that exploitation.

Also to say that one of the greatest religious leaders I ever met said ultimately God's judgment would demand not just individual morality for us as persons, but in a rich and powerful Nation like America, justice of us as a Nation. So we are judged not just as persons within our own family, but the kind of society and country we create. We will be judged on many levels; and I think these trade agreements are, as you said, immoral because those who are the least among us are hurt the most.

I think of Norma McFadden from Dixon Ticonderoga in Sandusky, Ohio, who worked there her whole life and was about my age and then was told you get a pink slip, even though the company was profitable, and moved to Mexico. What happened to Norma? What happened to Norma was she could not afford health benefits because under the Federal program, COBRA, it costs about $800 a month. Well, she lost her job. She could not afford the $800 for COBRA. So at 55, 58 years of age, she went back to school to become a phlebotomist to learn how to take blood, and she had to drive to work in her old ramshackle car to try to go to school and ultimately tried to get a job at a hospital as a receptionist and just trying to tread water there in the years when really she should have some peace of mind because she has been a working woman her whole life, she has raised her family.

So, to me, these trade agreements are some of the most anti-life measures that I have ever seen. They hurt people all over our world, surely those in our country who just do not have another leg to stand on; and I think God will judge America very harshly for what we have done because we are in the power position in negotiating these agreements.

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