[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 179 (Monday, November 13, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H12164-H12165]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        NAFTA ACCOUNTABILITY ACT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from Ohio [Ms. Kaptur] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman and wish to state that 
I think this is a sad night for America, for our country and this 
Congress, as we are held hostage by a few extremists who want to take 
actions like raising premiums on Medicare part B for our senior 
citizens and rolling back environmental standards across this country, 
under the guise of a bill that is supposed to be about running our 
country and conducting the people's business.
  One of the reasons that the Government is short on funds and our 
families are working harder and showing less for it in their 
pocketbooks and their wallets is because of the dry rot inside the 
economy of the United States. It is that that I want to focus on, and 
it is that subject I wish that we as a Congress would be focusing on.
  This week represents the second anniversary of NAFTA's passage on 
November 17, 1993. Each day this week, several of my colleagues and I 
will be here on this floor discussing various aspects of 
that agreement. We will be calling attention to its performance to date 
which can be properly characterized as truly dismal and devastating for 
thousands of Americans as well as Mexican workers and their families. 
But it has been truly rewarding for speculators on Wall Street and 
Mexico's Wall Street at the Bolsa in Mexico City.

  Promises, promises, we were given lots of promises. During the NAFTA 
debate we were promised it would create 200,000 jobs just this year; 
good jobs, they told us, jobs that could help people pay taxes, jobs 
that could help people increase their incomes. However, as the Wall 
Street Journal recently reported, the reality is, and I quote: ``There 
has been no evidence of any overall gain in jobs as a result of this 
agreement with Mexico.''
  In fact, by the end of this year, 800,000 people in our country and 
several million in Mexico will have had their jobs put on the chopping 
block because of this agreement.
  Think about the toll of human lives in our country just in the last 2 
weeks. Fruit of the Loom announced 3,200 jobs being shut down in this 
country in Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, the Carolinas, moving to 
Mexico. And 479 workers out of work in St. Joseph, Missouri. They made 
Lee jeans. They earned $8.35 an hour. And chocolate workers in Hershey, 
Pennsylvania who were told that they are going to be laid off, get 
their pink slips because Hershey has decided to move its production of 
Giant Kisses to Guadalajara, Mexico. So I guess we could say NAFTA has 
become a giant kiss of death for many workers in our country.
  I want to pause here for a moment and say that NAFTA did not really 
grow out of a vacuum. It is merely one agreement within the larger 
context of our Nation's extremely flawed and ill-advised trade 
agreements which purposely ignore consequences on large segments of our 
people. These policies and trade agreements have spawned and destroyed 
both jobs and wealth in our country by providing incentives to export 
our jobs someplace else, exporting income from our people, increasing 
frustration in our electorate and causing a kind of doubt about the 
ability of this Government to deliver.
  There is economic dry rot out there in our country. Think about the 
last 20 years. The average American family has not had an increase in 
their purchasing power. In fact, the high school graduate today makes 
27 percent less in real wages on what they can actually buy with their 
check than their counterparts did 20 years ago, but the chief executive 
officers of our country are earning just in the last year 12 percent 
more real wages than they did in the prior year.
  Now, what exactly are those CEO's being rewarded for? Fortune 500 
companies have not created a single job in this country for a decade. 
Virtually all their investment in production has been abroad. American 
workers are being asked to compete against capital that can move 
anywhere in the world, foreign cartels that block our access into their 
markets and millions of low-wage workers in the world who live under 
undemocratic regimes.
  The resultant pulldown in wages in our country has been verified by 
economists like the University of California's Professor George Borjas, 
who maintains at least 25 percent of the loss in wages in this country 
is due to the type of trade agreement that we 

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got ourselves locked into including the NAFTA agreement.
  Mr. Speaker, I would just like to say that this week we will be 
introducing the NAFTA Accountability Act. My colleagues and I will be 
on the floor talking about its various provisions. We are going to 
listen to what the public is telling us. Once we restore the economic 
health of the country it will be easier to restore the governance of 
the Nation.

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