Intelligence Authorization Act For Fiscal Year 2007--Continued

Floor Speech

INTELLIGENCE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2007--Continued -- (Senate - April 17, 2007)

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Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I wish to echo much of what Senator Dorgan has said and thank him for his leadership on trade issues. I came to the House of Representatives in 1993, elected in 1992. Our trade deficit was fairly large in those days, we thought: $38 billion. Today, as the Senator said, depending on whether you count services in addition to manufactured products, it exceeds $800 billion.

Interestingly, if you add the aggregate trade deficit from 1992 through 2006--that means the amount of imports we have brought into our country versus the amount of exports we have going out of our country--we have had a $4 trillion trade deficit in the aggregate. That is $4 trillion of wealth having gone out of our country.

To understand what $4 trillion is, because nobody can really understand that, if you spent $1,000 every second of every minute of every hour of every day--if you spent $1,000 of every second of every minute of every hour of every day--to spend $4 trillion, it would take you 135 years. That is the kind of wealth we have seen go out of our country. But to understand that in more human terms, let me just share a story, if I could, for a moment.

About 7 or 8 years ago, after the North American Free Trade Agreement, unfortunately, passed the House and Senate--Senator Dorgan voted against it in the Senate; I voted

against it in the House, a dozen or so years ago--I flew to McAllen, TX, at my own expense and rented a car and went across the border with a couple of friends and visited Reynosa, Mexico, to see what NAFTA had brought to the border areas and to the country of Mexico--at least that part of Mexico.

I went to the home of two General Electric workers--General Electric, Mexico. Both made about 90 cents an hour. Both worked pretty much 60 hours a week, 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. They lived in a home maybe 20 feet by 15 feet, with no running water, no electricity. They had dirt floors. When it rained hard, the floors turned to mud.

When you went outside their home--these are people who worked 60 hours a week each for an American company, a Mexican subsidiary of an American company, 3 miles from the United States of America in Reynosa, Mexico--if you went outside their home, there was a ditch behind their house, maybe 4 feet wide, with 2 by 4s across the ditch. Children would be playing in this ditch with human waste, industrial waste--who knows what was going through it. The American Medical Association said the Mexican-U.S. border is the most toxic place in the Western Hemisphere. And these children were playing in whatever this human and industrial effluent waste was in this neighborhood.

As you walked through this neighborhood, you could tell where the workers worked by the construction materials from which their homes were built--packing materials and cardboard boxes from the companies for which they worked or from the suppliers to the companies for which they worked. They used that as roofs and walls to build their shacks.

Again, these are people who hold full-time jobs for General Electric, Mexico, 3 miles from the United States of America.

Then, nearby, within a mile, I visited an auto plant--an auto plant that looked just like an auto plant in Lordstown, OH, Avon Lake, OH, with modern technology, even more modern than what we have often in auto plants in Ohio, unfortunately. They had clean floors and hard-working workers who were very productive.

There was one difference between the Mexican auto plant and the auto plant you would see in Cleveland. The difference was there was no parking lot in the Mexican auto plant because, simply put, the workers have not shared in the wealth they produce for their company.

You could go halfway around the world. You could go to a Motorola plant in Malaysia, and the workers are not paid enough to buy the phones they make. You could come back halfway around the world to Costa Rica to a Disney plant, and the workers do not make enough money to buy the toys they make for their children. You could go back halfway around the world to China, and the workers at the Nike plant are not paid enough to buy the shoes they make. The difference in their economy and ours, and these trading partners where we have huge trade deficits, is the workers are not sharing in the wealth they create.

But that is starting to happen in the United States. In the last 30 years, the wealthiest 20 percent in our country, the wealthiest 5 percent, the wealthiest 1 percent are seeing their wealth go up while wages are stagnant for the rest of the country. That is why the middle class is shrinking, because people who are working hard and playing by the rules simply are not sharing in the wealth they create.

They are more productive than they have ever been. We are setting productivity records in this country. Yet wages are stagnant or worse. Companies are outsourcing, companies are going overseas. Senator Dorgan said those same companies are getting tax breaks and all kinds of advantages, as this body and, across the Capitol, the House of Representatives continue to pass these job-killing trade agreements that outsource our jobs, that betray our middle class, that mean layoffs of police and fire and teachers and people who make our communities healthier, as families are hurt by these layoffs or as families are hurt by stagnant wages.

That is why we need a very different trade policy--whether it is with Japan, whether it is with Mexico--a trade policy that lifts up the middle class and helps to strengthen the middle class, a trade policy that will help workers in the developing world instead of this trade policy that outsources our jobs, betrays our communities, and hurts our families.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, will the Senator from Ohio yield for a question?

Mr. BROWN. Yes.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, the Senator from Ohio has described automobiles as one part of his discussion. I wonder if the Senator from Ohio knows, for example, with respect to South Korea, we imported about 700,000 automobiles from South Korea in the last year. We were able to export about 4,000 American cars to South Korea.

Now, why the imbalance? Mr. President, 99 percent of the cars driven on the streets of South Korea are made in

South Korea. That is the way they want it. Once in a great while, we have a little burst. The Dodge Dakota pickup--all of a sudden, it looked like they were going to sell some Dodge Dakota pickups in South Korea. Just like that, the Government shut that down. Oh, they do it very subtlely, but they know what they are doing--just like that.

China is a good example. We did a trade agreement with China. China is now creating an automobile export market. They want to be a big automobile exporter and intend to export to this country. Here is what we said to China, a country with which we have a giant trade deficit: When you ship your Chinese cars to the United States, we will impose a 2.5-percent tariff on your cars. And we agree that for any U.S. automobiles we would sell in China, you may impose a 25-percent tariff. So to a country with which we have a giant trade deficit--we now have a $230 billion trade deficit with China--we have said: It is OK for you to impose a tariff that is 10 times higher than we would impose on your cars.

That is unbelievably ignorant, in my judgment, ignorant of our own economic interests.

If I may make one additional point. In Ohio, they used to make Huffy bicycles. I have spoken about that at some length on this floor. They paid people $11 an hour to make Huffy bicycles. Huffy bicycles are 20 percent of the American bicycle market. You can buy them at Wal-Mart, Kmart, Sears. The people at the plant in Ohio loved their jobs. They made the Huffy bicycles for over a century. They all got fired. They all lost their jobs. You can still buy a Huffy bicycle. They are all made in China.

But on the last day of work, after they were fired, these Huffy bicycle workers, as they drove out of the parking lot of the plant, all left a pair of empty shoes where their car used to sit in the parking lot. It was their way of saying to this company: You can ship our jobs overseas, but, by God, you are not going to fill our shoes. It was a poignant way for workers to say: This job mattered to me. We worked here for a century making bicycles as American workers. And now it is gone.

It is unbelievable, when you hear these stories and see what the consequences are of American companies that have decided: Do you know what, the new economy says, let's produce where we can pay people 30 cents an hour. Incidentally, that is how much workers get who are now producing Huffy bicycles. They are paid 30 cents an hour. They work 7 days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day. That is what the Ohio workers were told. You cannot compete against that, so you lose.

In my judgment, our country, this Senate--Senator Brown and I and others--has to begin standing up for the economic interests of our country and our workers. If we do not, we will surely see a shrinking of the middle class and a dramatic impact on the economy and future growth of this country. That is why this is such an important issue.

Again, let me just say how impressed I am with not only Senator Brown but especially Senator Brown and some others who have joined us in the Senate, who will be very strong voices on behalf of a sane, thoughtful, sensible protrade policy that is pro-fair trade and stands up for this country's economic interests.

I thank the Senator from Ohio for yielding to me.

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I reemphasize what Senator Dorgan says so often; that is, we want trade--plenty of it--we just want it with different rules. We want fair trade. Plenty of countries around the world practice trade, as South Korea does, for their own national interests.

We practice trade according to some economics textbooks some days, and other days we practice trade according to what is in the interests of these large corporations that outsource. But these companies--again I use the word ``betray''--they betray our families, they betray our communities when they do what Huffy Bicycles did because those jobs were good-paying union jobs in Shelby County OH, in western Ohio. As Senator DORGAN said, they have been there for hundreds of years.

In the far corner of northwest Ohio there is a company called the Ohio Art Company. The Ohio Art Company makes something that almost everyone who grew up in this country knows about: they make the Etch A Sketch. Some years ago, Wal-Mart went to the Ohio Art Company and said: We want to sell Etch A Sketch in our stores for under $10, and the Ohio Art Company couldn't make them for that price, so they pretty much moved most or all of their production to China.

It is that kind of betrayal by these corporations, with the concurrence of our Government, because our Government writes the rules for these trade agreements--our Government has consistently practiced trade and allowed our largest companies to practice trade not according--unlike other countries that don't practice it according to our national interests, and it is time that we do.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I would like to ask the Senator to yield for one more point. The Governor of Pennsylvania, Governor Rendell, tried very hard to keep a company in Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania House Furniture. They make fine furniture with Pennsylvania wood, a very special kind of Pennsylvania wood. They make top-of-the-line furniture and did for a long time--I think for over a century as well. They were purchased by La-Z-Boy, and La-Z-Boy decided that Pennsylvania House Furniture would be outsourced to China. At that point, Governor Rendell and folks in Pennsylvania got involved to try to save Pennsylvania House Furniture, but they couldn't do it. The jobs all went to China. Incidentally, they now ship the wood from Pennsylvania to China, put the furniture together, and then ship it back to be sold as Pennsylvania House Furniture.

There is somebody in this country who has a piece of furniture that they don't understand the value of. The last day at work at this plant where they had made furniture, these craftsmen, who made top-end, top-of-the-line furniture, these craftsmen, the last day of work, on the last piece of furniture that came off the assembly line in Pennsylvania, turned it over and they all signed it. Someone has a piece of furniture with the signatures of all the craftsmen at that plant who, on their last day at work, decided they wanted to sign as a note of pride in the work they had just completed.

Then the jobs were gone, all gone to China, because the Pennsylvania workers could not compete with those who would work for 25 cents, 30 cents, 35 cents an hour. But they shouldn't have to. That is the point of our discussion about fair trade.

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, in the next decade our Nation needs to--our Government needs to come up with a manufacturing policy. If our trade laws and our tax laws continue to encourage outsourcing, continue to contribute to this erosion of the middle class, we will be a country with less and less manufacturing, fewer and fewer manufacturing jobs, less and less of an ability to protect our national interests. It is a question of national security, to be able to have a strong manufacturing component to our economy, and it is a question of economic security for families in places such as Dayton, in places such as Steubenville and Painesville and Cleveland, OH, places where people have built middle-class lifestyles, bought their homes, sent their children to college, worked for a decent retirement because they have worked hard and played by the rules and manufactured goods that people in our country use.

I think it is important as we move forward with Senator Dorgan and people like Senator Whitehouse from Rhode Island, who is also very interested in this, that we move forward on developing this manufacturing policy on trade, on tax law, and on helping particularly our small manufacturers compete in this global economy.

I thank the President, and I yield the floor.

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