Trans-Pacific Partnership

Floor Speech

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Mr. Speaker, the President came to Oregon last week, and he has taken to insults and misstatements of fact in order to get his trade promotion authority bill done, the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

He said, ``Number four, critics warn that parts of this deal would undermine American regulation, food safety, worker safety, even financial regulations. They are making this stuff up''--great applause from his audience. ``This is not true. No trade agreement is going to force us to change our laws.''

Well, the President has sort of a technical point there. He is a lawyer. They can't force us to change our laws. They can just make us pay to have them, and it has happened.

Mexican fishermen were paid by the U.S. Government to not kill dolphins because we had adopted a dolphin-safe label for tuna. We had to pay damages to Mexico because of their foregone profit because we wouldn't let them kill the dolphins.

Mexican trucks wanted to come into the U.S. Well, they don't meet our standards--kind of a problem, Mexican trucks rumbling around the U.S. with drivers that don't meet our standards, but they won a judgment under these same provisions.

Nope, he is right. They couldn't make us change the laws. They just imposed a whole range of punitive tariffs, politically targeted against people like me who had imposed the Mexican trucks, then-Speaker Pelosi, and others; and the U.S. relented.

Now, they didn't make us change our laws. We volunteered to do it after they imposed massive and unfair tariffs on Mexican goods.

But it works both ways. It has been great for America. There is a U.S. mining company that just won a judgment against Nova Scotia. They wanted to put a huge pit mine on the Bay of Fundy, destroy the fisheries' resource for their pit mine. They were denied. They won a judgment against the government of Nova Scotia and Canada.

Now, Nova Scotia and Canada don't have to change their laws. They can pay this country $300 million of damages because they can't destroy the fishery with their pit mine.

Now, the President is a smart guy, went to Harvard, but I consulted a little bit higher and smarter authority. Last night, I was at a dinner with Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winning economist. He was on the Obama economic team when NAFTA was adopted.

He said we made a huge mistake. We did not understand that this ISDS was creating a regulatory taking in a special court available only to corporations. We didn't know that, and it opened the door on chapter 11 in NAFTA. He says Obama is opening the door all the way and putting full force behind those provisions in this legislation.

Bottom line, what he said? People will die. People will die because of this provision in the TPP. It is a huge win for the pharmaceutical industry. They get to wipe out the formularies in those countries, both developing and developed countries who are part of the TPP, which lowers drug prices. They will not be allowed under this agreement, and they can go to a secret tribunal to get damages if those countries won't revoke them.

It will wipe out access to generics in developing countries who are part of this agreement. That means AIDS drugs and other things that they can't afford, no longer generic--people will die.

Now, these are people overseas. Maybe we shouldn't care so much. I do. But others might not; it is all about profits.

But ultimately, it is going to come home because a U.S.-based pharmaceutical company can open a subsidiary in any one of those countries, and it can go to a secret trade tribunal and it can challenge our reduced drug prices for veterans, which the pharmaceutical industry would really love to undo. That is billions of dollars of profits foregone every year because our veterans get the lowest price for drugs. Under this trade agreement, ultimately, that will be challenged, and in all probability, we will lose.

Now, the President is right: we won't have to repeal the law that gets the lowest-priced drugs for our veterans. We will just have to pay the pharmaceutical industry billions of dollars a year to continue to give our vets the drugs at a lower price so we can provide more care for more veterans.

This trade agreement, unfortunately, is what those of us who are critics say it is. It is built upon the faulty foundation of past trade agreements, including Korea.

The special trade representative to the President--also dissembling a little bit--comes to caucuses: ``It is unbelievable. We have got 20,000 more cars into Korea last year. This thing is a success.''

I said, ``Oh, Mr. Ambassador, how many more Korean cars came in last year as a result of the agreement?''

``Oh, I don't have that number.''

Well, of course he didn't have the number. Well, he knows the number. It is 461,000.

So we got 20,000 cars into Korea; they got 461,000 more into the U.S. That means a net loss of 441,000 cars. That is a heck of a lot of jobs lost in the auto industry.

This was a great day yesterday when the Senate slowed them down a little bit, and as the American people learn more, we will stop them.

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