[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 129 (Thursday, September 24, 1998)]
[House]
[Page H8603]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        A PICTURE OF FREE TRADE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, tomorrow Speaker Gingrich has 
promised that he would bring the fast track legislation to the floor of 
the House of Representatives.
  Some years ago, this Congress passed the North American Free Trade 
Agreement, a disastrous trade agreement that has led to more problems 
on the Mexican border, more unemployment in this country, more problems 
with food safety, more problems with truck safety, more problems with 
drug trafficking, and, ultimately, a bill that swelled, that took a 
trade surplus with Mexico of $2 billion and turned it into a trade 
deficit of $20 billion.
  The so-called fast track legislation which Speaker Gingrich is 
presenting to the House tomorrow is basically a procedural issue that 
will allow the extension of the North American Free Trade Agreement to 
the other countries of Latin America.
  For those of us who voted against the passage of NAFTA in 1993, we 
are particularly disturbed at the idea of expanding this failed trade 
agreement, the North American Free Trade Agreement, to another couple 
of dozen Latin, Central and South American countries.
  About 12 months ago at my own expense I traveled to the Mexican 
border. I flew to McAllen, Texas, rented a car with a couple of friends 
and drove across to Reynosa, Mexico. I went to the home of two auto 
workers, two people that worked at a large American auto plant in 
Mexico. Each of these workers, husband and wife, made 95 cents an hour. 
They brought home about $40 a week, each of these two workers. They 
lived in a home with no electricity, no running water and lived in a 
home with dirt floors. Right behind their shack was a ditch which had 
some kind of effluent running in it, certainly not clear, clean water, 
some kind of waste from some industrial plant or some sewage treatment 
or whatever, and there were children playing nearby in this ditch and 
nearby this ditch.
  On the other side of this ditch was another shack where a young woman 
worked who was expecting her first child. She was in her early 
twenties. She and her husband lived in this tiny shack. She was working 
at another large American company. She was making about 90 cents an 
hour. She had no electricity, no running water. She had a plywood 
floor, a little bit better conditions. She had over in the corner of 
her little shack a stove that you might buy at an American department 
store for $250 to $300 that was run by a generator. This lady was 
paying for this stove through her company, through her employer. They 
were taking $10 a week from her $40 a week paycheck, and she was paying 
for this stove for 52 weeks which you could have bought in this country 
for $250 to $300.
  Her brother-in-law, who lived in the other half of her shack 
separated by a cardboard, couple of pieces of cardboard stuck together, 
worked in another American factory; and he was suffering, his doctor 
said, at the age of about 25 or 26, from some kind of neurological 
damage, some kind of brain damage because he every day worked in a 
solution where he dipped his hands into a lead-based solution, and over 
time that lead solution caused him damage to his central nervous 
system. That same company in the United States makes the same product 
but does not use lead in its process. Why? Because the U.S. Government 
will not let that company have workers work in that lead-based solution 
like that.
  When you look at NAFTA, you look at fast track, that is the picture 
of the future, that is the picture of free trade according to Speaker 
Gingrich and according to the leaders of the other body. That kind of 
picture of the future: very low wages, weak environmental laws, 
nonenforced worker safety laws, problems with truck safety, problems 
with food safety, problems with more drugs coming across the Mexican 
border into the United States.
  Later that day, we traveled to Laredo, Texas, and stood at the border 
between Nuevo Laredo and Laredo. That is the port of entry where the 
most trucks enter the United States, about 2,500 a day.

                              {time}  1830

  Governor Bush, the Governor of Texas, has done virtually nothing to 
guarantee truck safety at that checkpoint. There was one scale there, a 
set of scales provided by the State of Texas, which had been broken for 
three months.
  There was one Federal truck inspector there who was in charge of 
inspecting these 2,500 trucks a day. I asked him how many trucks he 
inspected per day, and he said 10 to 12. I asked him how many of those 
trucks he took out of service because they were unsafe; he said 9 to 
11.
  Clearly the problems of truck safety, the problems of food safety at 
the border, the problems of drug smuggling coming into the United 
States, with more and more congestion and as more and more traffic is 
coming into the United States, clearly all those problems have been 
exacerbated by the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. 
Drug smugglers in Mexico, drug kingpins, have bought up legitimate 
trucking and shipping and freight operations and warehouse operations 
along the border, and are using those legitimate operations to bring 
more and more drugs into the country.
  Mr. Speaker, NAFTA has failed miserably; Fast Track will bring more 
problems. We should tomorrow defeat Fast Track.

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