United States-Panama Trade Promotion Agreement Implementation Act

Floor Speech

Ms. KAPTUR. I want to thank my good friend from Ohio for yielding me the time and for his steadfast opposition to these free trade agreements, and I rise in strong opposition to this proposed Panama Free Trade Agreement. Who in their right mind could believe any free trade agreements modeled on NAFTA would create jobs in our country?

I remember during the 1990s fighting the first NAFTA accord here, and Newt Gingrich saying at that time NAFTA would help the United States ``by increasing American jobs through world sales.'' Sure.

Here's what NAFTA yielded: a trillion dollars in accumulated trade deficit, and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of lost American jobs that moved from Cleveland and moved from Avon Lake and moved from Sandusky and moved from Toledo and moved from Madeira to other places in this world south of the border. Why don't we go back and fix this?

Now, let's be honest. Panama's entire GDP equals about 6 percent of the economy of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. So what could this Panama agreement actually be about? Well, letters we've received give us some insight into what it might be about. With Panama, we know the country has a long-standing money laundering problem and that it is a tax haven for corporations. How convenient.

In 2008, the Government Accountability Office included Panama on its 50-country tax haven list. Get the picture? Starting to clear some of the fog? We all know about some of these Cayman Island accounts. Well, why don't we add Panama right to the stack. Panama was long on the OECD's gray list of countries that failed to implement internationally agreed upon tax standards. These guys have got something really good going. But you know what? In this country it would be illegal.

According to Public Citizen, approximately 400,000 firms and numerous wealthy individuals use Panama's offshore financial services industry to dodge paying their taxes. I thought we were supposed to be for returning those tax dollars to the United States, not giving them another escape hatch. AFSCME has said that Panama has a history of failing to protect workers and enforce labor rights. And the Sierra Club points out that the Panama free trade agreement has the same investment chapters proposed in other trade agreements that allow foreign investors and corporations to directly challenge public interest laws for compensation before international tribunals, bypassing domestic courts. In other words, the rule of law gets shredded piece by piece by piece.

Why does America keep shooting itself in the foot? As the building and construction trades at the AFL-CIO have noted, the Panama proposed agreement, like all others, ``undermine the Buy America policies that reinvested our taxes in our communities.''

You know, it's really sad when an institution and an administration keeps doing the same thing over and over and over again that is hollowing out the jobs in the United States of America. We want to make it in America. We don't want to outsource more jobs, provide more tax havens, provide more escape hatches.

When you campaign and you try to represent the people in places like Ohio, as Congressman Kucinich knows, we've tried so very hard, every time you create 100 jobs, they snatch away 300. And then they say to the workers: You know what, you're earning too much money; $14 an hour, you're going down to $9. You don't like that? Well, there's the door because there are 7,000 workers lined up for part-time jobs in places like northern Ohio.

This Congress had better wake up and renegotiate these trade deals that have cost the middle class across this country their ability to earn a living in America.

I thank the gentleman for yielding me the time and look forward to the continuing debate.

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