[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 145 (Friday, October 24, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H9552-H9557]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       FAST TRACK TRADE AUTHORITY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Gilchrest). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 7, 1997, the gentleman from Massachusetts 
[Mr. Frank] is recognized for 60 minutes.)
  Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, I am going to talk today 
about why I am opposing the Presidential request for fast track 
legislation and, while I am not authorized to speak for anyone but 
myself, I think I reflect the views of many of my Democratic colleagues 
and some of my Republican colleagues, but particularly my Democratic 
colleagues who are opposing the request, even though for many of us the 
goal of more trade negotiated through fast track authority is 
ultimately something we want to support.
  I want to take this time because of the absolutely central imperative 
that Thomas Jefferson urged on all of us engaged in the making of 
public policy when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, the decent 
respect for the opinions of mankind. It is essential that we be 
explicit about our reasons, especially since, as I said, expanded trade 
negotiating authority and the agreements that would result therefrom 
ultimately, I believe, are in the public interest, but not in the 
current context.
  We are at a time in this country and in the world in which a 
combination of increased globalization of economies and the 
technological advances that

[[Page H9553]]

spur that on and are spurred and turned on by it are doing two things: 
First, they are increasing, I believe, the overall wealth of the world. 
Expanded economic activity among nations, the greater efficiency that 
comes from increased mobility of capital without artificial barriers, 
and certainly the technological changes that occur, those do allow us 
overall to produce more. Unfortunately, absent appropriate public 
policies, they result both in increased wealth and in increased 
inequality. That is especially true within the United States and other 
developed nations.
  Mr. Speaker, I wish more people had read, and I will be submitting 
for the Record once again, because I have done this before, some 
passages from the world economic review in 1993 of the Economist 
magazine, a magazine very much in favor of free trade, devoted to free 
trade in its inception.

                              {time}  1530

  What they said in 1993, as we were in the midst of the NAFTA debate, 
was that some of their colleagues on behalf of free trade were not 
being fully intellectually honest. Because the argument was being made 
that free trade, specifically in this case NAFTA, was a good thing, and 
either implicitly or explicitly was being argued that it was, 
therefore, good for everybody; that it would benefit everybody and hurt 
nobody, or at least benefit a large number of people, benefit the 
totality and not have any negative consequences.
  As the economists acknowledged, trade does not work that way, and 
they pointed out that the whole theory of comparative advantage, 
developed in the 19th century, which continues to be a major argument 
in favor of trade, the theoretical underpinning for much of the 
argument, assumes that some people will not do as well. The theory says 
that countries will do better in trade and increase their production in 
areas where they have a comparative advantage, but they will lose to 
some extent in areas where they do not have a comparative advantage. 
The overall will be to people's benefit.
  In the United States that means that people who are technologically 
skillful, people who can take advantage in their work of globalization 
and technology will benefit greatly. Those people in our country who 
are in industries, where America does not have a comparative advantage, 
where the level of technology is not high, where trade factors will 
work to the benefit of others rather than ourselves will be worse off.
  Yes; it is probable that overall we will be better off, certainly in 
the long run. But in the real world that people live in, some people 
will be hurt.
  I see this in my own district, Mr. Speaker. I was given by the 
Massachusetts Legislature in 1992 a rather bizarre shaped district. 
They were not doing it particularly to help me or hurt me. The 
legislature had in mind helping one of my colleagues; the Governor 
wanted to hurt another. The result is a district, which I dearly love 
and am proud to represent, but it is rather oddly shaped on a map. It 
almost disappears at a few points.
  Indeed, Mr. Speaker, under the current jurisprudence of the U.S. 
Supreme Court, I think if I were African-American my district would 
probably be held unconstitutional. But white people are allowed to 
benefit from extreme gerrymandering in America, only black people are 
not, so I continue to be lucky enough to represent the district and it 
is divided.
  The northern part of my district has a number of economic activities 
that are beneficiaries of the new economic order. There are places 
where the world is now more of a market for them. There are places 
where technology is being used to great advantage, not just for the 
economic benefit of those who participate but for the benefit of the 
world. Software development; biotechnology, bringing great new 
products; medical care in general, because we get a lot of people 
coming to Massachusetts from other parts of the world and paying us for 
the first-rate medical care available there; financial services, where 
America has led the way and has been exporting our services, those are 
just some of the areas where we benefit. We have other industries, 
Raytheon and others, that benefit from exports.
  In the southern part of my district I have other industries where 
people work very, very hard, sometimes in difficult circumstance, but 
without, up until now, a lot of technological aid at their disposal; in 
areas where other parts of the world have been able to compete, in 
areas where labor not as highly skilled as other parts of our economy 
is a very intensive factor, and these are people who are being hurt.
  Garment and textiles are two industries that produced a great deal of 
the livelihood of many of the people in the southern part of my 
district. American trade policy has essentially presided over the 
substantial erosion of those industries.
  So here is the problem that I and many of my Democratic colleagues 
confront: We are being asked to promote greater trade and greater 
globalization knowing that along with that will come an increase in 
technological innovation, because I think the two spur each other, and 
we know that this will benefit a great many people, and may benefit the 
country as a whole, but it will exacerbate the tendency toward 
inequality in this country. Some people will do very, very well; others 
will not do well.
  And while there are debates about exactly how it has happened and why 
it has happened, the fact that income growth has at best stagnated for 
many, many people in the lower sectors of the economy is indisputable. 
Working people who do not have the advantage of great technological 
sophistication behind them have not participated nearly as much in the 
prosperity as other segments. We have increased inequality, and people 
in the lower half of the income sphere, in the lower three-quarters, 
have not done nearly as well as they should have.
  What I and many others believe is that if we simply project current 
policy trends forward, if we do nothing but increase trade, we will 
exacerbate that tendency. Yes; many people will get richer, some people 
not now rich will get rich. That is a good thing. But other people will 
be left further behind. And I and many others will oppose increased 
trade negotiation powers to the President until we have public policies 
in place that see that the wealth that we will gain thereby is more 
fairly shared.
  Now, let me acknowledge that people have said, well, trade is only a 
small part of the reason for some of the inequality. I have read the 
economists' analysis. Most of them agree that technology is even more 
important than trade. The point, of course, is that trade and 
technology reinforce each other.
  What we have is the physical capacity, thanks to technology, 
increasingly to make anything anywhere and sell it somewhere else. That 
includes not just the production processes, but the reduction in size 
of many products, increased transportation, and communications 
equipment which allows us to make geography much less important.
  But while technology has physically made it possible to make almost 
anything almost anywhere and sell it almost anywhere else, trade 
policies are essential because they make that legally possible. And the 
combination has left many working people worse off. Because what we are 
told is, to get the full benefit of modern trends we have to make 
capital as mobile as possible. We have to remove barriers to capital. 
Mobile capital, among other things, has the capacity to get the upper 
hand over labor. In virtually every part of the developed world, and 
increasingly in the developing world, working people are told they must 
moderate their demands; they must take less and they must not ask to 
participate in the increase, because if they take too large a share, 
the owners will move their capital elsewhere.
  The mobility of capital is increasing at a great rate, and it is, of 
course, trade and technology both that are involved, both the legal and 
physical aspects of that, and the result is that the bargaining 
position of labor has been undercut. We have added to that in this 
country because during the 1980's there were de facto and legal changes 
that reduced the ability of working people to defend themselves.

  And let me fill in one other thing that gets neglected. Substantial 
deregulation. This economy has been very substantially deregulated and 
it has been bipartisan. It has been a Republican interest, but it was a 
Democrat interest as well. Senator Kennedy,

[[Page H9554]]

in the areas of transportation. President Carter. We have deregulated. 
We were told that deregulation would make us more efficient, better 
able to compete internationally.
  But deregulation, while it has produced enormous benefits in many 
ways, has also, of course, weakened the economic position of the 
workers in those industries. We know that as a fact.
  Now, there is another problem I am going to address in a later 
special order, Mr. Speaker, and it is this: Workers in America were 
told, let us deregulate, let us increase efficiency, let us fully 
implement new technology without any requirement that we maintain a 
certain work force, and while this will weaken workers' bargaining 
position, the result will be a more efficient overall economy and we 
will be able to grow more.
  And I think that is happening. I think that is why we have the 
situation where we have for 5 years now been growing at a faster rate 
than most economists thought possible without inflation, yet we have 
been doing it without inflation.
  I recently wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times that 
they declined to print. I sometimes think if your letters to the editor 
are too much on point they are disqualified. A New York Times business 
reporter noted that the economy had grown by 3 point something percent 
in the second quarter, and this reporter noted that this was above the 
2.2 percent that most economists think is the absolute outer limit of 
growth that will not produce inflation.
  He said everybody agrees, or almost everybody agrees that if we grow 
at more than 2.2 percent, we will get inflation. Three paragraphs later 
he noted that we have grown at an average of 2.8 percent over the past 
5 years, with, of course, very little inflation. In other words, we are 
being told simultaneously that 2.2 percent is the absolute limit of 
growth without inflation and that we have in fact grown at nearly 30 
percent more than that without any inflation over the last 5 years.
  I think the only response to that would be the one that Marx 
formulated when Chico said to Groucho, ``Who are you going to believe, 
me or your own eyes?'' Do we believe the 2.2 percent limit that the New 
York Times' financial pages state or the 2.8 percent that in fact 
happened over 5 years?
  The point of that, however, is that working people in America were 
told that we were going to implement some policies that were going to 
weaken their bargaining position so that in relative terms they might 
be worse off, but they would be compensated by being part of an economy 
growing more rapidly. The problem is that we are now being told by 
orthodox economists in the New York Times' financial pages and others 
that we cannot grow any faster than we used to grow without the 
possibility of inflation, even though no inflation yet looms, not even 
the hint of inflation yet looms. So we have people saying the Federal 
Reserve should cut growth.
  Essentially what they say, quite explicitly, is that unemployment is 
too low. Indeed, our own Congressional Budget Office, Mr. Speaker, 
recently told me that they think 5.8 percent is as low as unemployment 
can go without generating inflation. Of course, unemployment is now at 
about 4.9 percent. So if we follow that logic, what we need is about 1 
million more people unemployed.
  The problem is that we are in the position, if we take that view, of 
saying to working people, gotcha. First, we told them we would 
deregulate and we would weaken unions and we would implement technology 
and we would weaken their position in relative terms, but the 
compensation would be faster growth. And now that faster growth has 
been a reality, we have people saying, what, they were kidding; that 
they did not really mean it when they said if we deregulated we would 
be more efficient and grow faster; that implementing technology would 
improve technology?
  Because many of the people in the financial community and in the 
orthodox sector of the economics community are basically saying to 
workers, yeah, we did all the things that undercut them, and while that 
has produced more growth, we do not think more growth is really such a 
good thing after all because we are worried that an inflation, that has 
not yet even begun to stick up its head yet, might be lurking somewhere 
around the corner, so we will give workers the worst of both worlds. We 
will continue the implementation of those things which weaken their 
relative position vis-a-vis capital, but we will also deny them the 
benefits of the faster growth that was supposed to come.
  Now, with regard to trade, we have an exacerbation of that. Because 
all of these things together, increased globalization, deregulation, 
flexibility for the ownership that comes in part from the weakening of 
labor unions, and the implementation of technology without any 
restriction, all of those together can be seen to increase the overall 
pie, although I think the weakening of labor unions is, in fact, not 
necessary to that, and I reject the notion that we had to undercut the 
rights of working men and women to bargain collectively to get growth. 
I think, in fact, the opposite is the case.

                              {time}  1545

  But all of these things have been implemented. The result has been 
faster growth than almost any economist thought possible without 
inflation, and at the same time increased inequality. What we are being 
asked now, those of us who believe that growth and fairness are both 
important goals, we are being asked now to continue with the 
implementation of policies that will result in faster capacity to grow 
at the cost of ignoring inequality, and our response is, no, we will 
not support the request for fast track labor negotiations unless they 
are accompanied with some equity elements. In effect, what we are 
saying is we are prepared to support efforts that will provide faster 
growth but only if they can be somewhat more equitably shared.
  That has two aspects. First of all, it means that in the trade 
agreements themselves, we should be acting to encourage fairer working 
conditions and environmental standards in our trading partners. It ill 
behooves those who tell us that we should support increased trade to 
elevate the status of the poor people overseas to object when we try to 
take that seriously. When the President asked us to support the loan to 
Mexico 2\1/2\ years ago, and I think ultimately we benefited from 
making that loan, it was a good thing to do, but what many of us said 
was we do not want to do it unless at the same time we put a condition 
on it, we put conditions on that there has to be fair collective-
bargaining agreements in Mexico, so that the Mexican workers benefit 
some from this, which has two advantages. In the first place it raises 
their standard of living. In the second place, it diminishes the extent 
to which other countries have a comparative advantage over this solely 
because of depressed wages.
  They will have advantages, no one is denying that, in some cases. 
They will get to be able to sell us things. But we do not believe that 
that advantage should be artificially increased by their being able to 
employ child labor or not have fair representation for their workers or 
to engage in practices that degrade the environment. So, first, we want 
within the trade agreements efforts to require those who would benefit 
from trading with our economy to show some concern for the workers in 
their own country and for environmental standards.
  But that is not all. After all, trade in and of itself, I agree, is 
not the only cause of the worker insecurity here. It may not even be 
the major cause. Technology may, according to analyses I have read, be 
more important. But it clearly exacerbates it and the business 
community, the financial community that is so eager to see 
international trade because there will be benefits both for the country 
as a whole and for themselves. Because the owners of capital will 
benefit more than any other sector of this economy from the increased 
trade, they should not expect us to support what will be so much in 
their interest if they are unprepared to support measures for fairness.
  Mr. Speaker, I believe there are moral arguments why we ought to be 
concerned about fairness. I do not think it is right for 45-year-old 
people in my district or anybody else's district to be thrown out of 
work because of a combination of technology and international trade and 
then to lose their health care and maybe lose their

[[Page H9555]]

homes, on which they have been making mortgage payments, and accept a 
very, very substantially reduced standard of living not because of 
anything they did wrong, not because of a failure on their part to work 
hard but because that is what technology and trade led to.
  We know there are millions of Americans who have lost jobs over the 
past few years because of this. Many of them have gotten new jobs, some 
of those new jobs have been lower in pay, some have not gotten new 
jobs. We do know also that there has been an erosion of the bargaining 
power of those who have stayed on the job, and the threat that capital 
will become mobile and leave behind, as I said, is one of the major 
advantages that the owners have used to the disadvantage of workers.
  I think morally we should do more. I do not think that 7 and 8-year-
olds in one part of my district ought on the whole to face a future 
that is fairly bleak because they do not have access every day to 
computers and people to teach them how to use it or people in other 
parts of my district do. I am glad the people in other parts of my 
district do. I will work to help that. But I also feel the moral 
obligation to help people in the other part of my district.
  Let me address my friends in the financial community, the academic 
economists who are so distressed that those of us on the liberal side 
will not join in right away on the free-trade expansion movement. 
People in the business community, if you are not moved morally, and I 
should say my liberal economist friends, they share our moral view and 
many of them told me they regret the fact that we have public policies 
that leave behind so many working people but, they say, we should still 
go ahead with trade and then they will be for the other. They have got 
to learn a little more game theory, a little more bargaining in 
particular.
  There is not any reason in the world for those of us who believe 
equity is getting the short end of the stick ought to forget about that 
and join in policies that help one sector more than another without 
asking for something in return. And to the business community and to 
the financial services community, I want to quote John Kennedy. When 
John Kennedy initiated his Alliance for Progress 35 years ago or so, he 
harkened back to the good neighbor policy of Franklin Roosevelt, the 
first time America even pretended to be treating our Latin American 
neighbors on an equal basis, although regrettably we were a long way 
from reaching that ideal then.
  Of course, Franklin Roosevelt called his policy the good neighbor 
policy for Latin America. John Kennedy, launching the Alliance for 
Progress said, ``Franklin Roosevelt could be a good neighbor abroad 
because he was a good neighbor at home.'' Those who want, Mr. Speaker, 
a more active engagement by the United States with the international 
economy, those who want America to be a better neighbor abroad must 
understand that they will not get the support to do that unless they 
are prepared to start being better neighbors at home.
  It is one thing to tell a worker in the garment and textile industry 
that she will lose her job because of international trade and other 
factors over which she has no control. It is another to tell her that, 
oh, and by the way in addition to losing your job, you are going to 
lose your health care and you are not going to get much in the way of 
help in finding a new job.
  Health care is a big example. We still have a situation in this 
country in which the penalty for losing your job is to lose your health 
care in many, many cases. We have made it a little better with Kennedy-
Kassebaum and a few other things, but the fundamental gap is still 
there. Until we have a system in which health care is not determined by 
your employment, do not be surprised, I say to my friends in the 
business community, when the average worker reacts so strenuously to 
the suggestion that he or she may lose their job. Because they do not 
just lose their job, they suffer by loss of their job in many cases a 
drastic reduction in their standard of living. And so if you want to 
implement internationalism, if you want to take full advantage of 
technology and globalization, I have to say to people in the business 
community, join us in concern about equity.

  Stop doing everything you can to frustrate the right of men and women 
who work to bargain collectively in an effective manner. Drop your 
opposition to a health care system in this country that will separate 
out employment from health care so people will not face the loss of 
their health care when they lose their jobs. Do not insist that when we 
come to the Federal budget, we cut back on the retirement benefits for 
poorer elderly people. People tell us, the CPI is too high, the 
Consumer Price Index. Old ladies living on 9, $10,000 a year are 
getting too much when they get a 2 percent increase. Let us cut it to 1 
percent. You cannot impose that kind of what I believe is cruelty on 
people at the low end and then be surprised when we say, we are not 
going to help you get richer until and unless you are prepared to do a 
little more sharing.
  No one is advocating that we avoid any job loss. Of course it is 
going to come. International trade will bring more job loss. I believe, 
properly done, it will bring overall more benefit. But we ought 
precisely for that reason to be able to share that benefit more fairly 
than we have. Of course, that has been the case in America, where we 
have weakened the workers' positions. We look at Western Europe and in 
Western Europe they have not yet progressed as far as we have, in 
deregulation and in other ways. We are told that the Western Europeans, 
therefore, have more unemployment but they also have, of course, 
greater job protections for the workers there. What the workers of 
Europe are being told is you must give up much of what you now have so 
your economy can be more flexible, so you can grow more.
  But that gets us back to the point I raised about interest rates. It 
does not present the very encouraging example to the workers of Western 
Europe if they look here and they see American workers having been told 
we are going to deregulate and we are going to implement technological 
change, we are going to do a lot of things that increase the 
flexibility of capital so we can grow more. The consequence will be, as 
I said, a weakened position for you in some ways but overall you will 
have a work force that is better off because we will generate more 
jobs. You cannot then turn around and say as orthodox economists and 
the financial community and others are now saying, ``Oh, but we didn't 
really mean that and we're not going to give you the benefit of the 
increase in jobs.'' I cannot stress enough, Mr. Speaker, how much I 
think these are interrelated. On the one hand, people say give us fast 
track, knowing that that is going to throw some people out of work 
because overall we will be better off and then at the same time have a 
Congressional Budget Office, and I just heard from Ms. O'Neill, our new 
Congressional Budget Office Director, that she believes if unemployment 
gets below 5.8 percent it will be inflationary and therefore 
unemployment is too low.
  The economics profession, in general there are some very welcome 
exceptions, tells us, many of them, that unemployment has to be half a 
million people more than it is today, 6 or 700,000 more than it is 
today. These are not going to work together. The point is this. Those 
who want fast track cannot see it as an isolated element, because it is 
not. It is one element in an overall economy. It is a part of an 
overall economy in which growth and inequality have been going 
together.
  Until we get a national consensus that we are going to put concerns 
for equality back in the mix, you are not going to get the growth. I 
have had some tell me, well, OK, we agree in general, that would be 
nice, we would like to have some more growth but we cannot really do 
anything about it.
  We have had two arguments why public policies at the Federal level to 
try to share the wealth a little better, not make it equal. No one 
rationally thinks we should even try to do away with inequality. 
Inequality is the engine of the market system. The fact that people 
will be unequally rewarded is a very important incentive. But we can 
reduce the extent of inequality, I believe clearly, without in any way 
hindering the efficiency of the market.
  Now, as I said, there have been two arguments. One is precisely what 
I have just been talking about. One is people say to us, no, you cannot 
do that. If you try to minimize or even

[[Page H9556]]

mitigate the harshest aspects of inequality, you will so interfere with 
the market system that it will not work. We have had a couple of tests 
of that, Mr. Speaker, in the last couple of years.
  In 1993, this Congress passed at the request of President Clinton a 
budget which, by the way, according to CBO did about 3\1/2\ times as 
much to reduce the budget deficit as the package we just passed. The 
current CBO in which the head was appointed by the Republican majority 
certifies that the budget deal of 1993 contributed more than $400 
billion in deficit reduction while the current budget package, they 
say, contributed somewhere over $100 billion, about 3\1/2\ to 4 times 
as much in 1993. But the package we passed in 1993 not only contributed 
to deficit reduction, it contributed a little bit to equity, because 
its major deficit reduction engine was an increased set of taxes on 
upper income people, and we were told and told and told again by the 
Republicans that raising taxes on wealthy people would devastate the 
economy. The predictions were explicit. The Wall Street Journal 
editorial page, the Republicans, you are going to cause a recession. 
You are going to increase unemployment.
  We had a test. The Republican Party overwhelmingly argued that the 
tax increase on upper income people in the 1993 budget deal, which CBO 
says contributed 3\1/2\ times as much in deficit reduction as this 
year's package, the Republican argument was that in our effort to be 
equitable, in our effort to raise taxes on upper income people as a way 
to cut the deficit rather than cut out programs that help the poor or 
make taxes more regressive, in our effort to combine deficit reduction 
with equity we were going to destroy the economy.
  Mr. Speaker, I cannot remember a time when more people were more 
wrong about a more important issue. Exactly the opposite happened.

                              {time}  1600

  In the year after the budget of 1993, when the Republicans predicted 
we would begin to see these terrible problems, the Federal Reserve 
slowed down the economy, because it was growing too fast, by raising 
interest rates. Since that time we have continued to have growth, which 
has been not as vigorous as I would like, but more vigorous than the 
economists tell us is possible. The Republican prediction that you 
could not combine equity with deficit reduction was absolutely, totally 
wrong and disproven as conclusively as you can prove an economic 
argument.
  Then we had another case. We were able, this time in Republican 
control of the House and with the support of a minority of tough-minded 
Republicans in this regard and the overwhelming support of the 
Democrats and the President, we raised the minimum wage; not nearly 
enough, not enough to live on, but we raised the minimum wage.
  Once again the Republican mainstream predictions were ``Your concerns 
for equity may make you feel good, but it will be backfire. You will 
have more unemployment. The working people you are trying to help will 
be worse off.''
  Mr. Speaker, if it is possible to be more wrong than they were in 
1993, that is how wrong they were in 1995. The increase in the minimum 
wage having gone into effect, it had none of the negative impacts on 
employment that the conservatives predicted. Unemployment has continued 
to drop, and it has continued to drop in that sector of the economy 
where the minimum wage increase has an effect.
  So for those who tell us I am wrong and we cannot as an economic fact 
take public policy steps to reduce inequality without somehow 
destroying the economy, I will point to the two most recent examples of 
that, 1993 and 1995, the budget deal of 1993 and the minimum wage bill 
of 1995, and the fact is we were right and they were wrong in both of 
those cases.
  Well, the other argument is we cannot afford it. There are people who 
said yes, we would like to do more, but we cannot afford it; to do 
health care, to keep the CPI as it is. What is the argument for 
reducing the Consumer Price Index? It is to cut the deficit down. 
People argue we cannot do that.
  Well, here we get to an item we will talk about again next week, the 
military budget. If the United States were not now subsidizing our 
Western European and Asian allies, we could get our budget down.
  I want to talk here about one of the great intellectual and moral 
failings of the people who preach to the rest of us about fiscal 
responsibility, the willful ignoring of military overspending.
  Why are we constantly told that we must look to the elderly poor to 
cut the budget deficit? Why is it 82-year-old women getting a 2-percent 
increase in their Social Security are singled out as the cause of our 
fiscal problems? Why is it not a military budget that continues to 
exceed any rational need? And not just in America, but in much of the 
world.
  The area in the world where governments most overspend is in the 
military. We are recently now going to sell more arms to Latin America, 
to countries where no gun has been fired in anger at anybody other than 
one of their own citizens for anybody's memory.
  The business community, shockingly to me, preaches fiscal discipline 
when it comes to social welfare and preaches the virtues of cutbacks 
when it comes to trying to alleviate poverty and hunger and distress. 
But when it comes to worldwide overspending on the military, the only 
time you hear from elements of the business community is when they are 
the people who can make some money off the overzealous.
  So they are sometimes there as advocates of selling more, but they 
are collectively shockingly silent on the waste of resources that 
occurs internationally in the military.
  So, Mr. Speaker, let me summarize. I know, Mr. Speaker, you would be 
delighted to have me summarize. You would have liked for me to 
summarize 20 minutes ago, I understand that. I appreciate your 
indulgence.
  But I want to summarize and say I and many other Democrats, liberals, 
supporters of working people, think trade properly done is a very good 
idea. We want to help lift up people in other parts of the world.
  We want the greater growth that comes. We welcome 
internationalization as a way to reduce tension and, potentially, war 
in the world. But we are not prepared to support the regime that we are 
now in internationally and nationally, in which everyone is asked to 
exalt the complete and total mobility of capital, both physically and 
legally, in which everyone is asked to be completely supportive of 
technological change and free trade and currency exchanges, without 
regard to the negative consequences that can have for equity. And we 
can have both.
  We can have growth through the market. We can encourage the mobility 
and the most efficient use of capital, if we will, at the same time, 
put into place public policies that shelter working people from some of 
its negative different consequences. We can do that in ways which we 
have seen recently in this country which do not interfere with the 
advantages we get from the market.
  But to tell us what we should get is more trade so that capital can 
be more mobile, so that working Americans can be more frequently 
threatened with the loss of their jobs if they do not acquiesce in a 
reduction in their wages or a cutback in their benefits, if we do not 
accept untrammeled trade without any offset, then we will say no.
  I am pleased to see that we appear now to be in a situation where 
there are enough of us ready to say no. We are not saying never, Mr. 
Speaker. We are saying to free trade, not under these conditions. We 
will not agree to a continuation of public policies in this country and 
elsewhere which exalt the mobility of capital and do nothing to provide 
some offset for the inequality that is exacerbated thereby.
  In the next few weeks, Mr. Speaker, I hope we will decide not to 
proceed with fast track, and instead to work together with a package of 
proposals that will see that trade is accompanied, in addition to 
greater efficiency, better use of technology, greater mobility of 
capital, with some concern for working people, with some minimum 
standards below which people do not go, with some concern that the 
competition that takes place within the world is not a competition for 
who can show the least concern for the environment.

  And I hope we will also look at what the economists said in 1993, 
that some

[[Page H9557]]

American workers will be hurt by free trade. That is inevitable, and 
they will be those who have the lease. Under theory of comparative 
advantage as it will work out, Americans at the lower end of the skill 
chain, at the lower end of our economic reward system, will on the 
whole benefit lessor, actually be hurt, than people at the other end.
  Let us accompany increased free trade with measures that alleviate 
the distress that free trade will cause some, even while it is 
benefiting many others, and let us try to insist to the extent that we 
can that other countries do well. By the way, I did want to address one 
other point. We are told we cannot interfere. We shouldn't interfere in 
their labor relations or their environmental policies.
  That is, Mr. Speaker, hypocritical nonsense, because many of the 
people who tell us that we should not accompany our trade policies with 
concern about human rights or concern about worker rights or concern 
about the environment, are perfectly prepared to dictate to these other 
countries about how much they must respect capital.
  We are told that it is perfectly legitimate for the American 
Government to insist that our trading partners have a complete respect 
for property rights. I agree. But to insist that we get total respect 
for property rights, for the rights of contracts, for the rights of 
ownership, and, on the other hand, claim that we cannot tell them about 
the rights of workers or environmental protections, is hypocritical 
nonsense.
  What it means is we will do those things which benefit capital and 
enhance its mobility and the return on it, while doing nothing to cope 
with the consequences of that.
  Mr. Speaker, I look forward to being able to vote for increased trade 
negotiations. I wanted to do that as part of a package which provides 
for the health care of Americans that lose their jobs, which makes sure 
to the extent that we can that Americans are not further disadvantaged 
if they are at the low end of the spectrum, to make sure that Americans 
who lose their jobs are not left bereft of an ability to support 
themselves and their family, to make sure that working people in our 
trading partner countries are given some reasonable hope that they will 
be beneficiaries in the increased benefits of trade, and in the hope 
that we can clean up some of the environmental abuses that would 
otherwise occur.
  Free trade can be a wonderful thing if its benefits are fairly 
shared. But we are being asked now to provide a free trade expansion 
which will benefit disproportionately those who are already wealthy, 
will do either nothing or harm to many of those who are most 
vulnerable, and that is a proposition, Mr. Speaker, which I very much 
look forward to joining in defeating.

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