[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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