Columbia Free Trade Agreement

Floor Speech

COLOMBIAN FREE TRADE AGREEMENT -- (Senate - April 07, 2008)

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, today President Bush announced he was sending the Colombian Free Trade Agreement to the Congress. He expects and demands that we take it up and pass it. I regret he has taken that action because he proposes that we continue failed trade practices of the past. That makes precious little sense for this country's interests. I am in favor of trade and plenty of it. Trade advances our interests provided it is fair and mutually beneficial between our country and those with which we have agreements. But I want to cite the record of President Bush in the last 7 years because when I say our trade policy is a failure, let me describe it this way.

When President Bush took office in 2001, our trade deficit was $429 billion. That is way too high. But 7 years later, our trade deficit is $815 billion. When the President took office, our trade deficit was $429 billion. Now it is almost double, $815 billion. In 7 years, this President's trade policies have doubled the trade deficit. We are not only collecting a massive amount of debt around the necks of the American people, they are encouraging the shipping of U.S. jobs overseas.

Now the President says: I have a new policy. Let's do more of the same. If you have trade policies that double the trade debt in this country, and you say let's do more of the same, there is something wrong with that.

Last month we lost 80,000 jobs in this country. Just last week it was announced, last month we lost 80,000 jobs. And what do we get this week from the President? Another proposal of a free-trade agreement.

Let me describe. We have had plenty of practice with these trade agreements. Some long while ago, we had a proposal: We have to have a free-trade agreement with Mexico. At the time we had a $1.5 billion trade surplus with Mexico. The first President Bush began negotiating a free-trade agreement with Mexico. He had a bunch of economists tell us how wonderful this would be; if we can just have a free-trade agreement with Mexico, it would be nirvana. So we did. I didn't vote for it. I led the opposition. But we went from a $1.5 billion trade surplus with Mexico to now a $74 billion trade deficit with Mexico. Think of that. We went from a $1.5 billion surplus to a $74 billion deficit. We are borrowing money from the Mexicans in trade. It is unbelievable. Talk about failed agreements.

This agreement with Colombia is modeled after NAFTA. It is the same. You have a failure. Let's do more of it, the President says. I don't understand that at all. It is a curious strategy to decide: OK, let's hold up a failure and let's suggest we should double it. I don't understand it.

I was watching CNN this afternoon. Wolf Blitzer, who is a terrific broadcaster--kind of breathless from time to time--was describing the President coming out in his announcement and essentially demanding that the Congress pass this free-trade agreement. Wolf Blitzer put up on the screen the description the President offered, saying: Most of Colombian-made goods come into this country with no tariff on them. Many of American goods go to Colombia with a tariff as high as 35 percent.

They put up on the screen this zero and 35 with two arrows, Colombia, United States. I am thinking to myself, it is curious that the President uses this to say we have to have this trade agreement with Colombia, as if we have no leverage with Colombia. We are sending a lot of money to Colombia, and have for a long while, to help President Uribe fight the insurgents, the FARC, the insurgent organization. We are sending American tax dollars down there in substantial quantity. We don't need to do a bad trade agreement with a failed NAFTA strategy with Colombia to get them to reduce their tariffs, if they have tariffs on American goods going to Colombia. All we have to do is say: Look, we are sending a lot of money down here to help you. Get rid of your tariffs. If we don't have tariffs on your goods coming north, don't you put tariffs on American goods going south.

We don't have to pass a bad trade agreement to get that result. We just have to say to President Uribe: We have been bankrolling a fair amount of the effort that you are making, and we are doing it because we want to help you. But in the process of wanting to help you with American tax dollars, we expect you to remove the tariffs.

I have met with President Uribe. I have been in his office in Colombia. I have a lot of respect for him. It is a tough job down there. They have real problems. Some say: This discussion about labor issues and trade agreements is not so relevant. It is pretty relevant in a country where one labor leader is killed every week on average this year. It is pretty relevant when 97 percent of the killings of Colombia labor leaders going back to 2001 have been unpunished--97 percent. It is pretty relevant, it seems to me. I accept that President Uribe has a lot of issues, a lot of problems. We as a country have tried to help him. But it seems to me it doesn't help anybody for this country and for President Bush to try to push through a bad trade agreement.

While I have respect for President Uribe of Colombia, I don't have great happiness about President Uribe being involved in America's political system. He decides apparently that he believes he should comment on our Presidential race. He says, of one of our Presidential candidates, ``I think it is for political calculations that he is making a statement,'' referring to a statement that one of the political candidates for President said that he didn't support this trade agreement with Colombia. So the President of Colombia says:

I think it is for political calculations that he is making a statement.

I don't think we need the President of Colombia describing motives of our Presidential candidates. There is a perfectly reasonable approach to support or perhaps oppose the Colombian Free Trade Agreement. The reasonable approach is to say we like failure. We want to do more of the same. So give us what you gave us in NAFTA and run a small trade surplus up to a huge deficit.

But there is also a perfectly logical reason for a Presidential candidate or a Member of Congress who may wish to say at some point: We ought to do a U-turn and say this country is for trade. We are for trade and plenty of it. We believe in trade and plenty of trade. But we demand and insist at long last that it be fair to our country. I don't think the Colombia agreement by itself is some sort of pivotal moment. I don't allege that. But I do say I don't think we ought to sit here with a President who has doubled the trade deficit in 7 years and take advice about what we do in the next 90 days.

These trade agreements have not worked in our country's interest. Trade agreements should be mutually beneficial when we negotiate them, whether it is with China, Mexico, Canada, Europe, or Japan. They ought to be mutually beneficial. I am flatout tired of seeing the results of bad trade agreements.

I guess some may say if you have an $815 billion trade deficit, it doesn't matter. That means over $2 billion a day we are putting in the hands of foreigners because that is what we are buying every day that exceeds our ability to export. We are importing $2 billion a day more than we are exporting in goods. That debt someday will have to be repaid with a lower standard of living in the United States. You would think at long last someone would say this strategy isn't working.

It is true that whether it is the Colombian Free Trade Agreement, the free-trade agreement with Mexico or Canada or the agreements we have with China, it is true that no one in this Chamber is going to lose their job to a bad trade agreement. It is other people who will lose their jobs--people working in manufacturing plants making bicycles or wagons or producing textiles or in high tech.

I wrote a piece once about Natasha Humphries who lost her job. She wasn't a textile worker. She went to Stanford and did everything right, a young African-American woman who did everything right and then went to work for Palm Pilot. Regrettably, her last job was to train the engineer from India who was hired at one-fifth the salary they were paying Natasha Humphries.

So should American youngsters who come out of our colleges, should American workers coming out of our colleges, aspiring to work in engineering, be willing to work for 20 percent of the salary that is paid in this country in order to compete with an engineer from India? Those are questions we ought to start asking in this country.

Everybody says we need to train more engineers and scientists. That is true but not if their first job and their last job is to train their successor who is an engineer in India making one-fifth the salary.

So I went further than talking about Colombia, except to say this: This is not new. We in this Congress have been for so long a catcher's mitt of bad trade agreements from Presidents--for years and years and years--and this trade agreement is the model of NAFTA. It is the same old thing. There are a couple labor provisions and environmental provisions in it, but it is largely the same old strategy.

I just remind my colleagues what happened with Mexico. Nobody writes much about it. Nobody speaks much about it. But we did a trade agreement with Mexico. We had all of these claims, all of these boosts, all of these suggestions of what was going to happen. We had a $1.5 billion surplus with Mexico in our trade relationship; in other words, it was about balanced. Now it is a $74 billion United States trade deficit with Mexico. We end up, some years later, borrowing money from the Mexicans, even as we ship our jobs across the line. That is a trade strategy that I think is bankrupt for our country.

My hope is the U.S. House, which likely will deal with this first, will make short work of it and simply send a message. The message to the President is simple: This country stands for trade. Yankee ingenuity and shrewd Yankee business stand for trade. It is in our blood. But we also stand for fairness, and at last--at long last--this country will begin to write fair trade agreements with other countries that stand up for our country's economic interests as well. Yes, we want to pull up others, but we will not any longer allow trade agreements that push down this country's standards. That has been the case for too long.

Madam President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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