[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 63 (Wednesday, April 30, 2003)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5511-S5514]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                  Free Trade Agreement With Singapore

  Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, on Thursday of next week, U.S. officials 
will sign a trade agreement with Singapore. It will be the first free 
trade agreement that is negotiated under so-called fast track. Fast 
track, incidentally, is a procedure that the Senate adopted in a 
Byzantine way. They did it without my vote, but enough Senators did it 
so that we have a fast-track procedure, which is a guarantee that your 
trade negotiators can go overseas, go in a closed room, close the door, 
keep the public out, and then you reach a negotiation with another 
country.
  When you bring it back to the Senate, we will agree that none of us 
will be able to offer any amendment at any time. What we have said is, 
bring us a straitjacket so we can put it on and we can all grin.
  It makes no sense. That is what the Senate has done. So now we will 
have a free trade agreement coming back to the Senate, the first one 
under the so-called fast-track procedure, and it is done with the 
country of Singapore.
  Let me read what is in the trade agreement, just one piece. There are 
many, and I will talk about them in future days. All of this is cloaked 
in language that is hard to understand, but the implications are not 
hard to understand because it is related to American jobs. It all 
relates to waving goodbye to American manufacturing jobs. Article 32, 
treatment of certain products, under chapter 3: A party shall consider 
a good listed in annex 2 when imported into its territory from the 
territory of another port to be an originating good. Within 6 months 
after entry into force of the agreement, the parties shall meet to 
explore the expansion of the product coverage of annex 2.
  This sounds like six or eight people sitting around drinking, but 
these are pretty smart people who have reached a trade agreement. This 
is the way they write it: A party shall consider a good listed in annex 
2 when imported into its territory from the territory of another party 
to be an originating good.
  What does that mean? What that means is that, in the circumstances of 
a free trade agreement with Singapore, products such as electronics, 
semiconductors, computers, telecommunications equipment, cell phones, 
fiber cables, optical cables, photocopy equipment, medical instruments, 
appliances, a wide range of high-tech products can come in through the 
free trade agreement with Singapore, even if they are not produced 
there. If they are produced elsewhere, they come through Singapore and 
come into this country under a free trade agreement.
  It is fascinating to me that in the last 12 years we have lost 2 
million jobs. I am not talking about decreasing the rate of growth of 
jobs. This country has lost over 2 million jobs. We are off negotiating 
new trade agreements--and, incidentally, proposing new fiscal policies 
that will exacerbate the loss of jobs with huge Federal deficits--and 
we say to other countries, by the way, we will give you a special deal. 
We don't care much about providing basic protection of fair competition 
for America's domestic manufacturers. We will give you a special deal.
  The special deal is this, Singapore: You can move goods through 
Singapore, high-tech goods, the product of high-skilled labor, good 
jobs. You can move them through Singapore through a free trade 
agreement into the United States and displace American jobs. That is 
what this says.
  In every single circumstance we have negotiated trade agreements--
United States-Canada, NAFTA, the WTO--in agreement after agreement, we 
have said to American workers and companies producing goods, we want 
you to compete with others overseas that don't have to meet any basic 
standards. It doesn't matter if the country will not allow them to 
organize as workers, if they don't have worker rights, if they hire 
kids, work them 16 hours a day, pay them 16 cents an hour. That doesn't 
matter. They should be able to produce those products, these agreements 
say, and run them through Singapore, some other country, run them 
through Mexico, for that matter, and move them into Toledo and 
Pittsburgh and Bismarck and Los Angeles and Pierre, and then have 
American workers and businesses compete with that labor.
  What does it mean? It means we can't compete. Is there an American 
worker who decides they can compete against 16-cents-an-hour labor 
performed by a 14-year-old who works 16 hours a day in a plant where 
they don't have basic safety standards, where they can pump pollution 
into the air and water; is there anybody who can compete with that? The 
answer is no. And they should not be expected to.
  This Singapore free trade agreement is coming here under fast track. 
We cannot offer amendments. There isn't one single parliamentary step 
that will be missed as we move to try to consider this. When they sign 
this next Thursday--and they certainly should not sign it with this 
provision in it; this is a loophole big enough to drive a semi truck 
through--let them understand that there will be no unanimous consent 
agreement for anything under any circumstance at any step of the way to 
get this considered by the Senate.
  They will get it considered, no doubt, and no doubt those Senators 
who decided they would like to put themselves in the straitjacket and 
prevent themselves from offering an amendment--God forbid they should 
try to correct this--they will vote for it. And no doubt the Senate 
will ratify this free trade agreement. I am just serving notice that it 
is going to take some time. We will have some lengthy discussion about 
it.
  There is no justification, in my judgment, for this kind of nonsense. 
I will come to the floor in a day or so to also talk about China. We 
did a bilateral trade agreement with them 2 years ago that has not 
meant a thing. It is like spitting in a high wind. They agreed to 
everything so they could join the World Trade Organization. We have a 
$103 billion trade deficit with China. Our jobs have been exported.
  The fact is, China has not done what they said they would do in the 
bilateral agreement. And nobody seems to care. We have all these 
bureaucrats running around, most of them negotiating incompetent trade 
agreements. We have a few of them down at the Department of Commerce 
who are supposed to enforce the trade agreements.
  Take a look at what we have. We have this miserable skeleton of an 
enforcement unit. We have no more than a dozen people who are supposed 
to enforce the trade agreements in China. If you gave them a pop quiz, 
they would not have the foggiest idea of what is in the agreements, let 
alone enforce them. I think we have a growing scandal with the 
imbalance in Chinese trade, especially since we had a bilateral 
agreement 2 years ago with them and they have complied with none of it.

[[Page S5514]]

  Madam President, I want to serve notice on the Singapore free trade 
agreement that there is a lot to fix in this agreement. It doesn't mean 
a thing when people such as I talk about this because our trade 
negotiators don't care; they don't see; they are in their little 
cocoon, and they will negotiate, and the success of their life is 
reaching an agreement--even if it is bad. They did a bad agreement with 
Canada, with NAFTA, and with the WTO, and a bad agreement with 
Singapore. Apparently, they have not done a bad one with Chile yet 
because we didn't know where they stood on Iraq. The fact is, it is 
time for them to stop doing bad agreements and time for them, on behalf 
of American workers and companies, to say we demand and insist on fair 
trade. That certainly will not be the case with respect to the 
agreements we expect in future free trade deals, with respect to labor 
protections and a whole range of issues in the Singapore agreement.