America's Failed Trade Policy

Ms. KAPTUR. Madam Speaker, how many millions more jobs have to be outsourced before Washington wakes up? The U.S. Chamber of Commerce this week released a report claiming that U.S. trade agreements have support 5.4 million jobs. More than 90 percent of the jobs, according to the Chamber, can be attributed to NAFTA and our NAFTA trading partners, Mexico and Canada. Are we talking about the same country in the same continent?

In the United States I know and the district I return to every weekend, the battering effects of NAFTA and NAFTA-like trade agreements are still being felt: lost jobs, shuttered factories, and beleaguered communities. I can't help but wonder if the Chamber of Commerce is some sort of cruel joke: 5.4 million jobs? No way. Try 1 million jobs lost due to NAFTA. Try 2 million manufacturing jobs lost because of all of the off-shoring that has gone on in this country in the last quarter century. Or how about 12,000 to 20,000 service-sector jobs lost every month, many of which have simply been outsourced overseas.

In Ohio, employment just in the manufacturing sector has declined by a third. Companies like Silgan Holdings, Delphi, Georgia Pacific, General Motors, Dixon Ticonderoga, Champion Spark Plug, all have moved to Mexico. Things are not much better in Mexico. By the 10th anniversary of NAFTA, The Washington Post reported that 19 million more Mexicans were living in poverty than 20 years ago; 2 million peasant farmers alone were dispossessed from their land with no adjustment inside that country. So guess what they are doing. They are seeking to live anywhere, including crossing our border because they simply have no other choice. NAFTA didn't take care of them in their home country.

Now over half of the Mexican population is considered poor, while one in four is considered extremely poor and unable to even afford adequate food. The illegal drug trade has swept across that country and locked in fully at our border and across our country. Remember when NAFTA was held out as the ticket to the promised land with millions of new jobs and a rising standard of living? Right here in this very Chamber, Members voted to outsource America's job to a low-wage country with a state-managed economy.

Ross Perot was right: NAFTA has been a giant sucking sound of jobs leaving our country, leaving us behind with a NAFTA trade deficit of over $1.3 trillion since 1994. The deficits from NAFTA and NAFTA-like trade agreements have caused the great manufacturing that our Nation knew to wither as we saw our companies compete against state-managed capitalism in places like Mexico, China, Japan and so many others. Trade deficits are at the heart of our economic challenge. They destroyed jobs, millions and millions and millions of good jobs. We will never get our economy out of the ditch without fundamental changes in our trade policy.

When trade accounts began their downward spiral, America's economy started to deteriorate. Do you remember the last time we had a balanced trade account? It was 1974 when we had a thriving middle class.

Is it any wonder that our Nation is paying the price of economic policies that led to the current deep recession that Brad DeLong estimates has put a third of our Nation in depression. This was no accident. It is the direct result of over a quarter century of outsourcing U.S. jobs to penny-wage environments and of allowing other nations to keep their markets closed through managed trade practices, substandard environmental systems, and many undemocratic political systems able to exploit their workforces for the benefit of a few owners.

In essence, our market capitalism is forced to compete with state-managed
capitalism. From Mexico to China to Japan, it is just not a fair fight. These unfair trade agreements have been draining the economic lifeblood of our Nation, and every single American knows it to be true. Free trade among free people should be a bedrock principle on which any trade policy is based. And without it, our workers and companies stand no chance.

It is time to wake up, stand up for this country, and renegotiate those trade agreements that keep moving jobs offshore and take more and more and more of our jobs every single year. The same countries block access of our goods into those countries. It hurts our workers, it hurts our communities, and it has hurt this country deeply.

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