Trade Policy
Floor Speech
TRADE POLICY -- (Senate - April 27, 2009)
Mr. BROWN. Madam President, I actually approve of the Senator's comments. In this case I want to express that.
In the last few weeks, there has been a good bit of discussion in the media
and in Washington, not much around the country, but in the media and in Washington, about continuing the Bush trade policy by promoting the trade pacts he negotiated before leaving office.
We know President Bush pushed the Central American Free Trade Agreement through the Congress after his father and President Clinton had pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement. And we know that continuing the Bush trade policy would be a mistake.
Look at what has happened in States such as Ohio and New Hampshire. Look all over this country. You can see not simply the incredible job loss middle-class families have suffered, not just their own job loss, what that means to a neighborhood, what that means to a community, what it means to police and fire protection and the layoffs of city workers and the general malaise that surrounds those in the community with major layoffs, but it has also meant years of stagnant wages. We have seen, since this huge loss of manufacturing jobs, since this exploding of our trade deficit, years of stagnant wages where most of America simply has not gotten a pay raise in real dollars.
A combination of the current recession and manufacturing jobs lost as a result of wrong-headed trade policies have taken their toll on community after community in Ohio. From the North American Free Trade Agreement to the Central American Free Trade Agreement, from Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China, to failing to enforce our trade laws, our Nation's trade policy in the last decade, pure and simple, has betrayed America's middle class.
Last year alone our trade deficit topped $700 billion. We have every day, yesterday--Saturday, Friday, tomorrow, the next day, all week, every day--a trade deficit of $2 billion, a $2 billion a day trade deficit. If you spent a dollar every second of every minute of every hour of every day, it would take you 63 years to spend $2 billion.
We have a $2 billion trade deficit every day. The first President Bush said a billion dollar trade surplus or a billion dollar trade deficit translates into some 13,000 jobs gained or lost. A $1 billion trade surplus means you are manufacturing and selling $1 billion more out of the country than you are importing. That is a 13,000 job gain. A $1 billion trade deficit is the reverse, is a 13,000 job loss. That is according to President Bush the first.
So you can do the math. A $700 billion trade deficit is a lot of lost jobs. This is a net trade deficit. This is imports minus exports or exports minus imports. Our trade deficit has resulted in our Nation not only importing goods and services and building that trade deficit and seeing the kinds of numbers of lost jobs, it is also importing the dangerous safety standards of our trading partners.
In Toledo, OH, several patients died after taking contaminated heparin for their heart conditions. The manufacturers of heparin had outsourced the making of the drug. As a result, they did not know where the contaminated ingredients came from. It has also happened in vitamins; it has also happened in other pharmaceuticals. It has happened in dog food, where the manufacturers of these dog foods or, in the case of the dog food, or the manufacturer of the pharmaceuticals, the companies have moved offshore, have bought ingredients--outsourced these ingredients--have bought them from all kinds of subcontractors, whom they generally cannot trace very well.
They have come back into the United States and caused significant damage, sometimes to the point of death for too many Americans.
The same with toys. Professor Jeffrey Weidenhamer, a professor at Ashland University, not far from where I grew up in Ohio, took his freshman chemistry class and went out and bought very inexpensive toys at Halloween and Christmas last year and then tested these toys for lead-based paint and found a significant number of them had far too high levels, dangerously high levels for children.
These were products made by an American company but outsourced. The production was outsourced to China. These companies then subcontracted with all kinds of small Chinese operations and at the same time pushed them every year to cut costs. So what happened? These companies used the cheapest, the easiest to apply paint, which happened to be lead-based paint, which is put on these products, which then make their way back into the United States and show up in the homes of children in Avon Lake and Bucyrus, OH.
Whether it is patients in Toledo, whether it is children who are using these toys in Zanesville, or whether it is workers who have lost their jobs because of trade agreements, it is clear our trade direction is not working. It is clear the trade agenda given us by the Bush administration, inherited by the Bush administration, should not be continued.
Make no mistake about it: I want trade, I want more of it. I want it under a different set of rules. That is why I will be asking the Government Accountability Office to conduct a comprehensive study on our current trade agreements. A GAO report on trade would provide a nonideological, nonpartisan analysis of what is working, and what is not working in our trade policy. It is an important step toward redirecting U.S. trade policy that will provide critical solutions for our Nation's recovery strategy.
The basic premise of redirecting U.S. trade policy is that we must see evidence that our trade model is working before we pass new trade agreements. Why should we pass a trade agreement negotiated by the Bush administration with Panama or with Colombia or with South Korea, when those trade agreements are based on the NAFTA, CAFTA trade model, the same kind of trade agreement that surely has cost us jobs? If you do not believe it has cost us jobs, first, you are not looking at the statistics, but even if you do not believe it, let's go back and have that dispassionate analysis, nonideological, nonpartisan principled analysis of NAFTA, of CAFTA, of our trade policy with China before we move on and pass further trade agreements.
At the same time, during the last 8 years, the Bush administration never accepted a 301 petition to help us with trade enforcement, including a petition for an investigation of Chinese currency practices, and a petition of Chinese workers' rights. Are the Chinese using slave labor, child labor? The Bush administration would not even examine it. They dismissed those 301 petitions in a matter of, in one case, less than a day. The Bush administration also never acted on 421 cases even when the International Trade Commission found injury.
The nonenforcement has left struggling companies in my State, small manufacturing companies in New Hampshire, the Presiding Officer's State, unable to compete against unfair trade practices.
I am encouraged by the Obama administration's emphasis on trade enforcement. I want to see Congress work with the President to ensure the trade enforcement is a governmentwide practice.
Finally, I believe Congress should give President Obama the authority to negotiate better trade deals. But I do not believe we can give President Obama or any President a blank check on these trade agreements. Congress needs a stronger role in the process. That means Congress must review, must renegotiate, must revitalize trade. That is why Congress should enact the Trade Reform Accountability Development and Employment Act I introduced in the last Congress and plan to introduce soon in this Congress.
The trade act is forward looking. It is a pro-trade piece of legislation that requires a review of existing trade agreements and then provides a process to renegotiate existing trade agreements, when necessary. It outlines principles on labor standards, on the environment, on investment, on food safety, on consumer product safety, such as children's toys, to be included in future trade agreements, something that has never been included. Any consequential provisions, none of them have ever been included in any of these trade agreements on labor, on investment, on environment, on food safety, on consumer product safety.
With any delegation of its authority to negotiate better trade deals, Congress must ensure negotiating objectives are binding and that there is a
congressional vote on a trade agreement before it is signed by the President.
From on high, the President cuts all the special interest deals. We saw that in the Bush years and, frankly, we saw it too often in the Clinton years, the first Bush and the Reagan years also. The trade negotiators would cut their special interest deals, send the agreement to Congress, and Congress had to vote, after the President had signed on, either up or down. Reasserting congressional authority must also ensure Congress's public policy prerogatives are respected by international trade organizations such as the World Trade Organization. We must not find our public policy subject to corporate rights of action at the WTO or NAFTA that outweighs the Government's responsibility to preserve the public welfare.
What has happened is the corporate rights have been respected but not rights of workers, not rules to protect the environment or consumer safety and food safety.
A global system such as the WTO that doesn't give countries policy space risks the very legitimacy of global institutions. Countries should have sovereignty. If Canada wants to pass a strong environmental rule, if Mexico wants to pass a strong food safety law, who are we, in a world trade body or as another government, or who is someone in a corporation to tell those countries they can't pass a strong environmental law or a strong food safety law.
I recognize the framework I have outlined is only one strategy, but we can all agree our current trade model has not been working. When we change the process for writing trade deals, we can make trade deals work for more people in our country and for people living in the countries who are our trading partners. We have seen demonstrations in Central America against trade agreements, understanding that these trade agreements have so often overridden consumer protection rules in their countries. We see people in our country complain of trade agreements because workers lose jobs, because safe drinking water is not protected under these agreements. It is time these trade agreements are written for communities, for workers, and for small businesses. They have not been in the past. This is our chance to set out a new direction on trade.
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