[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 160 (Thursday, November 13, 1997)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2363-E2364]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




            FAST TRACK FELL VICTIM TO POLITICAL DEMAGOGUERY

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. PHILIP M. CRANE

                              of illinois

                    in the house of representatives

                      Thursday, November 13, 1997

  Mr. CRANE. Mr. Speaker, I was deeply disappointed in the fact that 
this body was unable to consider and pass the fast-track trade 
legislation authored by Chairman Bill Archer and myself.
  In particular, I was disappointed in the petty politics engaged in by 
fast-track opponents. I fear that, thanks to the campaign waged by big 
labor and their politician lackeys, the United States will lose its 
leadership position in world markets. Until now, trade agreements have 
been negotiated on our terms. My greatest fear is that the defeat of 
fast track in this session of the 105th Congress will effectively 
prohibit the consideration of this trade authority until the next 
millennium. I want to make the point to my colleagues that this will 
result in future trade agreements being negotiated on the terms of our 
trading partners. Given the increasingly global nature of markets, this 
Congress has put U.S. businesses and jobs at a significant economic 
disadvantage in the world economy.
  To further illustrate the political demagoguery on this issue, I 
commend to the attention of my colleagues an article in today's 
Washington Times by Donald Lambro entitled ``Low Bridge for the Fast 
Track Flap.'' I will not add to Mr. Lambro's observations, instead I 
simply say--Amen.

               [From the Washington Times, Nov. 13, 1997]

                   Low Bridge for the Fast Track Flap

                           (By Donald Lambro)

       If we learned anything from the fast-track trade fight, it 
     is that demagoguery is alive and well in Washington, economic 
     ignorance runs deeper than ever in Congress and the news 
     media, and the business community still doesn't know how to 
     sell the benefits of the global economy.
       Even by past legislative battle standards, this one reached 
     a new low in fear-mongering and deceit. The tools of big 
     labor, Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt and Reps. David Bonior 
     and Bernie Sanders, a socialist, came up with every 
     hyperbolic attack line they could muster. Mr. Gephardt even 
     blamed increased drug trafficking in the United States on the 
     North American Free Trade Agreement--not on its true cause, 
     President Clinton's abandonment of the war on drugs.
       In the final weeks of debate, the AFL-CIO's paid 
     congressional army of trade protectionists waged one of the 
     most dishonest lobbying campaigns that this reporter has seen 
     in 30 years of covering Washington. In one of the battle's 
     most skillful bits of anti-trade demagoguery, aired on the 
     CBS Evening News, Bonior and Sanders went down to Juarez, 
     Mexico, with a CBS film crew in tow. Visiting one of its 
     worst slums, which predates NAFTA, Mr. Bonior pointed to the 
     shacks and said, ``This is the global economy.'' It was a 
     totally one-sided editorial against trade by two veterans, 
     big government leftists that could have been produced at the 
     AFL-CIO, and probably was.
       Similarly one-sided stories filled the news programs of the 
     past several weeks, bashing NAFTA and repeating big labor's 
     protectionist line. Nowhere was it reported that U.S. exports 
     to NAFTA partners Mexico and Canada had reached nearly $200 
     billion last year--an all-time record; that both have become 
     America's biggest export markets,

[[Page E2364]]

     with Mexico's market bigger than Japan's; that the North 
     American economy is forecast to grow by 3.5 percent this 
     year, higher than the other industrialized countries of 
     the world; or that all those predictions of a ``giant 
     sucking sound'' of jobs leaving the United States have not 
     come true.
       Despite all the doom and gloom fears that trade expansion 
     will destroy jobs, the obvious fact is that trade has helped 
     to create millions of new, higher-paying jobs, driving the 
     U.S. unemployment rate to the lowest level in nearly a 
     quarter of a century.
       Last week's Labor Department unemployment report showed the 
     jobless rate falling to 4.7 percent, flattened by the 
     creation of an astonishing 284,000 jobs in October alone. 
     Since 1993 the U.S. economy has created more than 13.5 
     million new jobs. ``Clearly, NAFTA has not hurt the U.S. 
     economy,'' trade analyst Rebecca Reynolds Bannister writes in 
     a study for the Progressive Policy Institute.
       And contrary to the Gephardt-Bonior-Sanders disinformation 
     campaign that the United States is losing higher-paying 
     manufacturing jobs, the most robust job gains last month were 
     in manufacturing. Half the 54,000 jobs in this sector alone 
     were in machinery, transportation and construction. Big U.S. 
     companies like Boeing have hired 32,000 workers in the last 
     18 months and will add another 11,000 jobs to its factory 
     lines. Other companies like Caterpillar were expanding their 
     payrolls to keep up with mounting exports to Latin America.
       Rather than worry about losing jobs, the biggest complaint 
     among U.S. business leaders in the country today is the lack 
     of labor, qualified or otherwise.
       But too little or none of this is getting reported to the 
     American people. One reason is an abysmal level of ignorance 
     in much of the news media and in Congress about trade and the 
     global economy. An otherwise intelligent editor of a major 
     newspaper recently told me that ``America doesn't make much 
     of anything anymore.''
       This common perception, wholly untrue, reflects what many 
     Americans think of the U.S. economy. Combined with the belief 
     that imports destroy jobs and a misunderstanding about the 
     global economy's benefits, this is what is now driving so 
     much of the public mistrust about NAFTA and other trade 
     deals.
       The truth is we will begin losing jobs if we don't 
     negotiate lower trade barriers abroad because U.S. companies 
     will move plants to these countries to avoid paying import 
     tariffs.
       But the myth of U.S. deindustrialization goes on despite 
     all the evidence against it. Our gross domestic product, the 
     measure of all the goods and services we produce, stands at 
     nearly $8 trillion, bigger than any nation on Earth. If you 
     want to see what America makes, look at the New York Stock 
     Exchange listings or the NASDAQ in your local newspaper. 
     Millions of privately owned businesses add to the nation's 
     growth rate, which was expanding at a 3.5 percent annualized 
     rate in the third quarter--faster than any other 
     industrialized nation.
       We are the biggest producer of food on the planet. We are 
     the biggest producer of farm and industrial machinery, of 
     airplanes, of computers and of software. At our present rate 
     of growth, it is quite possible that our GDP will reach $10 
     trillion by the beginning of the next decade.
       Americans have produced this level of GDP. But because we 
     produce more products and services than we can possibly buy 
     ourselves, we sell the rest in global markets. And those 
     sales have been a major factor in our robust job-creation 
     rate that is higher than any industrialized nation on Earth.
       Mr. Clinton complained this week that ``this is no-
     brainer.'' Trade has not destroyed jobs, it has created them. 
     U.S. leadership in the global economy is one of the great 
     success stories of the 20th century. Sadly, the U.S. business 
     community had done a very poor job of promoting this story to 
     its workers, to Congress and to the media.
       Mr. Clinton deserves a lot of the blame for not beginning 
     early enough to get the votes needed to pass fast-track. But 
     I think American business is also much to blame for this 
     week's setback. Until corporate America gets into the 
     trenches and begins doing a better job of combating the 
     demagogues and educating the country about the benefits of 
     global trade, we're going to have even more trouble getting 
     trade bills through Congress in the future.

     

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