Congressional Record, Volume 149 Issue 113 (Monday, July 28, 2003)

[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 113 (Monday, July 28, 2003)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10034-S10038]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

THE BILL SCHERLE POST OFFICE

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I am very pleased that the Senate and the
House of Representatives have passed S. 1399, legislation that names
the Glenwood, IA Post Office for former Iowa Congressman William J.
Scherle. I understand that the President will soon sign that measure--I
hope this week.
Congressman Bill Scherle--or Bill, as his friends call him--and his
wife Jane live on their family farm just outside of Henderson, IA, in
Mills County. Glenwood is the county seat of Mills County. Bill served
4 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, beginning with 3 terms in
1967 in what was then Iowa's 7th Congressional District, and a term in
the redistricted 5th Congressional District. I think it is appropriate
that Glenwood's Post Office will soon permanently bear Congressman
Scherle's name.
Bill long served this Nation. He started with military service in the
navy and Coast Guard during World War II, then afterward served in the
Naval Reserve. He chaired the Mills County Republican Party for almost
a decade starting in 1956. He served in the Iowa legislature from 1960
through 1966. He then was elected to the U.S. Congress and served
through 1974, including service on the Education and Labor Committee as
well as on the Appropriations Committee. His public service continued
in 1975 and 1976, when he was appointed to a senior position at the
Department of Agriculture.
In January 1968, North Korea seized the USS Pueblo, imprisoning and
torturing the crew. Congressman Scherle led the effort in Congress to
free the crew of the Pueblo. I have always admired Bill's tenacity in
never letting the Pueblo crew be forgotten. Bill was the only member of
Congress invited to attend Pueblo reunions, and, as their health has
allowed, Bill and Jane always have attended.
Bill and I are at different places on the political spectrum, and I
ran against him for Congress twice. He won the first time, and I won
the rematch. We disagreed on many issues, but I always understood that
he acted on the basis of strongly held views about what he considered
were the best interests of those he represented and of the Nation.
Long after we ran as opponents, I got to know Bill and visited on his
farm. He is a good person who cares deeply about his community and
rural America. Politics has always had a certain amount of rough and
tumble.
But while Bill was certainly a good Republican who wanted to see
consistent victories for the GOP, he also could see the good in all
people.
One area of our mutual interest was the Iowa School for the Deaf in
Council Bluffs. Bill always did what he could for the school my brother
attended years ago, and for deaf people in general.
Congressman Scherle always cared about children and their welfare. He
wrote a children's book, ``The Happy Barn.'' He gave away thousands of
copies to schools, hospitals and individual families in Southwest Iowa
and the Omaha area, reading to young children time after time. He had
lots of fun reading to children, and I believe that there are few more
valuable things we can do as adults than to read to children and get
them started on that most important activity.
Bill was a businessman and farmer, proud of both professions. He
received the Alegent Health Mercy Hospital Heritage Award for his
contributions to business in Southwest Iowa.
Bill Scherle remains a good father to his two sons, and a good
husband to his wife of 55 years, Jane. He is blessed with six
grandchildren--five girls and a boy. Bill has lived a dedicated life,
full of patriotism, family and public service. I am please that my
colleague, Senator Grassley, joins me in sponsoring this legislation.
Congressman King introduced the companion legislation in the House of
Representatives, which was cosponsored by the entire Iowa delegation.
I thank my colleagues for helping us all to honor Congressman Bill
Scherle, and I look forward to hearing that the President has signed
this bill--hopefully this week.
Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, the Senate will be asked to approve two
free-trade agreements with respect to Singapore and Chile. I expect the
Senate will approve both trade agreements by very wide margins. I
intend to oppose both and wanted to explain why. It is not the case
that I believe a free-trade agreement with Singapore is inappropriate.
It is not the case that I believe a free-trade agreement with Chile is
inappropriate. It is the case, however, that this country has a trade
regime that is in total chaos and it is a significant mess.
For 20 years, under Republican and Democratic administrations, we
have seen our trade deficit ratchet way up. We now have the largest
trade deficit in human history that has occurred anywhere on the globe.
It has been rising very rapidly. Instead of fixing the problems that
exist in international trade and demanding fair trade and demanding
from our allies fair trade treatment and doing something to prevent the
erosion of American jobs which, incidentally, are now moving overseas
at a rapid pace, we have trade negotiators rushing across the world
trying to do new agreements.
I say fix the old agreements before we start running around doing new
agreements. The reason we are going to consider new agreements today
under something called fast track is that Congress decided to handcuff
itself and agree to a procedure by which no amendments will be able to
be offered to either free-trade agreement.
Singapore is a tiny nation of 3 million people a half a world away.
We already have a very favorable trade relationship with Singapore. It
has little manufacturing and little agriculture. It is wide open to
imported goods. Singapore is not an example of a trade problem for us.
So it does not matter much to me whether we have a free-trade agreement
with Singapore.
The trade ambassador has brought us an 800-page free-trade agreement
with Singapore. But demonstrative of the problem we have created for
ourselves is a small provision in the free-trade agreement with
Singapore that provides an authorization for the opportunity for
Singapore to send to our

[[Page S10035]]

country 5,400 people under a visa program to take jobs in this country.
Normally that would be a circumstance that would be dealt with by
other committees in Congress, in which we evaluate how many people do
we want to come in under a visa to work in this country, but instead
this has been negotiated in a foreign-trade agreement negotiation
somewhere, perhaps most of it overseas, certainly behind closed doors,
inevitably in secret, and they put an immigration provision in this
proposal. The immigration provision would allow 5,400 immigrants to
come from Singapore to the United States to take jobs in the United
States.
Think of this for a second. We have 8 to 10 million people out of
work, desperate for jobs, needing to go to work, who cannot find a job
in this country. We read a story every day in the major newspapers
about someone who has hundreds of resumes out, they spend all day
desperately trying to find a job because we have lost 2\1/2\ million
jobs in the last couple of years.
It is not as if our economy is growing by creating new jobs. To the
extent there is any growth at all, it is jobless growth in this
country. Some have made the point that, no, there are jobs attached to
this growth, it is just that jobs do not exist in the United States.
The growth occurs here in terms of profits and economic expansion of
sales and profits, but the jobs attached to that growth are in
Bangladesh, Indonesia, China, and elsewhere.
So if we have a jobless expansion, which we have, having lost 2\1/2\
million jobs in the last couple of years, and we have people
desperately searching for jobs, and then we get a free-trade agreement
brought to the Senate floor our trade ambassador negotiated with
Singapore, and deep in the bowels of that agreement is a provision that
says 5,400 people from Singapore will come to this country to take jobs
in this country and we ask the question: Why? Why would we do that?
So then the immediate instinct is, if there is a provision in this
free-trade agreement with Singapore that is that odious, then let's get
rid of it by offering an amendment. Dump it. The problem is, fast track
means trade agreements brought to the Senate floor prevent any Member
of the Senate from offering any amendment under any circumstance.
This Congress foolishly decided that it would straitjacket itself and
whatever is negotiated anywhere by our trade ambassador and brought
back in the form of a trade agreement, we will agree that we will be
prevented from offering an amendment.
So we will vote on this. The majority of the Senate will vote yes to
free trade with Singapore, and yes to 5,400 immigrants from Singapore
to come to this country to take American jobs. I am not going to vote
for that. Once again, the lesson is, those who believe fast-track trade
procedures make sense ought to think again.
Also, this trade agreement with Singapore provides for transshipment.
It provides for transshipment of high-tech products from anywhere,
China, Burma, Indonesia, if they are transshipped through Singapore to
the United States to get the full benefit of the Singapore free-trade
agreement.
Singapore is already one of the largest transshipping points in the
world. Should we be negotiating trade agreements that encourage
transshipment so we do not know the origin of shipments to this country
of high-tech products or others? I do not think so.
I understand, interestingly enough, that a bipartisan group of my
colleagues will offer a resolution on the immigration piece that is in
the free-trade agreement. The resolution is going to be a sense-of-the-
Senate amendment. I think I was asked if I put my name on it. I am
happy to put my name on it, but it does not mean anything. It is
beating someone over the head with a feather.

It is a sense-of-the-Senate resolution that says: You better watch
it; you should not have done this. But it cannot be more than a sense
of the Senate because we cannot take out this provision. This provision
is stuck in the trade bill and we cannot get it out. This Senate has
already agreed we will not allow amendments.
I didn't vote for that; I voted against it. But the majority of this
Senate says: Let us line up so we can be subservient to the trade
ambassador--whoever it is, Republican or Democrat--and agree whatever
they negotiate in secret overseas that affects American jobs, count us
out. We will not be able to offer amendments. That is just fine with
us.
Apparently, these are colleagues who have forgotten what is written
in the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution clearly says
that trade is the Senate's responsibility, not anyone else's; not the
President but the Senate.
Fast track trade agreements have been disastrous for this country.
This chart shows the runaway deficits we have experienced.
It does not matter which administration is in office. A person could
be blindfolded and listen and cannot tell if it is a Republican or
Democratic administration. They all say the same thing: all we care
about is getting another trade agreement. Meanwhile, we had $470
billion in the year 2002 in merchandise trade deficits. Is that
alarming to some? One cannot detect it in the Senate. No one seems to
care much about it. There are only two or three Members who talk about
this, and we are considered the xenophobic isolationist stooges that do
not get it.
What I get is this country fought for a century for a series of
things that make life better in our country. There are people who died
in the streets of America for the right to organize in labor unions. We
fought about child labor laws, saying you should not work 12-year-old
kids 12 hours a day in a coal mine or manufacturing plant. We fought
about prohibiting companies from dumping chemicals into the air and the
water. We fought about safe workplaces, believing the American workers
have a right to work in safe workplaces. We fought about all those
issues for a century.
Now some have decided you can pole-vault over all of that by
producing what you want to produce elsewhere, where you do not have to
worry about hiring children, where you do not have to worry about clean
air and clean water. You do not have to worry about safe workplaces.
You could prohibit all workers from organizing any bargaining unit. We
have decided that is OK, let companies do that. They pole-vault to
China or Indonesia or Bangladesh, produce there but sell here.
The problem is, in the long term, it does not work because the very
people who earned the income in the manufacturing plants in this
country are the people who were able to purchase the products off the
store shelves. Without the incomes from those jobs--and our
manufacturing sector is shrinking badly--from that manufacturing
sector, who will buy these products?
This morning in the Wall Street Journal an article reads, ``U.S.-
Chinese Trade Becomes a Delicate Issue of Turf.'' It is talking about
the debate within the National Association of Manufacturers between the
big manufacturers that are international in scope that want to move
their manufacturing to other countries where they can pay pennies on
the dollar for labor, and the other businesses, medium and small
businesses, that rely on the business from the larger companies to
spill over to them. It is a fascinating article. I commend the reading
to people who are interested in the subject.

Jim Schollaert, a lobbyist with the American Manufacturing Trade
Action Coalition, says simply: The big companies are following a new
business model--pay Chinese wages but charge U.S. prices.
That is the question these days for us. Is there a price of admission
to the American marketplace? We understand we have a globalization of
the international economy, and it will not stop. But have the rules for
this new global economy kept pace with globalization itself? The
answer, clearly, is no. If a large international company has a choice
to decide where it wants to produce, and it flies its jet around the
world and looks down at the landscape and sees different kinds of
governance, different philosophies, different local politics, and
different labor forces and decides to choose where to produce, does it
not all too often these days decide to produce where it can hire a 12-
year-old, work them 12 hours a day and pay them 12 cents an hour?
You think it does not happen? Of course it does. We can describe it
and use names in the Senate, names of workers and names of companies.
Not

[[Page S10036]]

only can they settle on a site in the world where they can put a
manufacturing plant, hire kids and adults and pay them pennies on the
dollar and pollute the air and water and decide they shall not be
allowed to organize as a bargaining unit and they do not have to have
safe workplaces in which the workers conduct their daily activities,
and then produce there, but they also ship it back to Toledo,
Anchorage, Fargo, or Los Angeles and sell it on the store shelves in
this country. That is the global marketplace.
Let me talk about a series of specific countries. First, I will talk
about China. China has the largest trade deficit with us. It is $103
billion a year. They ship us their trinkets, trousers, shirts, shoes.
We are a huge sponge for Chinese production.
One reason we have a very large trade deficit with China, which hurts
us and strengthens them, is because the Chinese do not want certain
things from us. They are not buying our grain in any significant way.
They do not want our wheat. They do not want to buy airplanes. They
need airplanes, but do not want to buy our airplanes off the shelf
where we manufacture them and send our airplanes to China. They say
they want some of our technology, but they want us to build our
airplane plant in China and hire Chinese workers. That is the way they
would like to buy American airplanes.
The problem is, it does not work that way. That is not what
international trade is about. We buy that which we can best use from
China, they ought to buy what they can best use from us. That is the
doctrine of comparative advantage. It is as old as the study of
economics itself.
Our negotiators, our U.S. official negotiators negotiate with other
countries and typically underserve American interests.
About 2\1/2\ years ago we had a bilateral trade agreement done with
China. It was a prelude to China joining the WTO. At the end of the
agreement, there was once again celebration by negotiators because
negotiators judge their success by whether or not they got a negotiated
agreement. It is a terrible agreement, I might say. They decided, for
example, that if there is automobile trade between the United States
and China in the future, after a long phase-in, the following will
exist: China will be allowed a 25-percent tariff on United States
automobiles sold in China, and we would have a 2.5-percent tariff on
any Chinese automobiles sold in the United States.
Our negotiators went to China and said: All right, we agree if there
is automobile trade, vehicle trade between the United States and China.
We will agree that you shall have a tariff that is 10 times higher than
what we will impose on your products. Who negotiated this on our
behalf? Did they forget who they were working for?

Do you know how many movies we get into China? Before the trade
agreement, only 10 imported movies could be shipped to China in a year.
Just 10. So after the agreement, we get to ship 20 movies. People say,
Look at that; what a great thing that is, to double it to 20. Our
expectations on fair trade are pathetic.
The Chinese, by and large, keep their market reasonably closed to us,
prevent us from accessing opportunities in their marketplace but expect
our marketplace to be wide open to Chinese goods.
We have become a cash cow for the hard currency needs for China, and
it is hurting our country. The imbalance in the trade relationship that
exists between the United States and China is almost unforgivable. Is
anybody doing anything about it? Not a thing. Nothing. Just nothing.
All you get, when you talk to the trade ambassador's office, again
under Democratic and Republican administrations--all you get from them
are a few grunts and groans about we would like to do better and then
they rush off and do a new agreement with some other country.
This is what we have with Korea. I mentioned the absurd situation
with automobile trade with China. Well, in 2001, 618,000 cars were
shipped from Korea to the United States. I believe last year it was
680,000 but use this as a working number; 618,000 cars were shipped
from Korea to the United States to U.S. consumers--Hyundais, Daewoos.
Probably they are wonderful automobiles. I have not driven one but I am
sure they are fine automobiles.
They sent us 618,000 into our marketplace. Can anyone guess how many
U.S. automobiles were sold in Korea? It was 2,800; 618,000 coming into
our marketplace; we got 2,800 into the Korean market. Korea ships us as
many cars as they can get into our marketplace and the Korean
Government will keep out as many U.S. cars as they can.
A recent example of that is the Dodge Dakota pickup, which showed
great promise in the Korean marketplace. The Dodge Dakota pickup, after
2 months, started penetrating the Korean marketplace. The Korean
Government cracked down on it, big headlines in the newspapers, and
immediately most of the orders were canceled.
My State produces potatoes in the Red River Valley, great potato
country. We produce potatoes and we ship potato flakes to Korea for use
in confection food--potato flakes. Do you know what the tariff on
potato flakes is to Korea? It is 300 percent. Why do we allow that? I
don't know. Our country doesn't seem to be interested in standing up
for its economic interests.
Perhaps we should say to the Koreans, these great cars you are
shipping into the marketplace, if you don't allow our cars into your
marketplace and fair access to your consumers, then you ought to take
your cars and sell them in Zaire. Try to sell them in Zaire. If you
don't like it, then open your marketplace. Until your marketplace is
open, we are not going to absorb more than a half a million of your
vehicles. That is simple enough.
But we will not do that because our country is unwilling to stand up
for its economic interests. In fact, that which I am presenting today
on the floor of the Senate, I can't even present in an op-ed piece in
the Washington Post. The Washington Post wouldn't run an op-ed piece in
a million years talking about this because they are for one thing: free
trade, free trade, free trade. It is as if they were wearing a robe,
standing on a street corner chanting, and they only want one view
expressed in their op-ed pages. Those of us who raise questions about
the requirement for fair trade to stand up for the interests of
American jobs are called protectionists.

My goal is not to put a wall around this country. I want to expand
trade. I think expanded trade will be good for everyone, provided the
rules are fair. When the rules are not fair, it is time for this
country to stand up for itself and stand up for its jobs and stand up
for its businesses.
I will give some other examples. I have mentioned Korea and I
mentioned China. Now let me discuss Europe. I am using some
agricultural examples simply because I come from a farm State. There
are so many other examples.
If you take a look at what is happening in beef with Europe, the
Europeans do not want U.S. beef in their marketplace because they say
it is produced with growth hormones and is therefore harmful to their
health. There is no scientific evidence of that. In fact, all the
evidence is on the other side. But Europe says, We are not going to
allow American beef into the European marketplace. In fact, they
portray our beef as two-headed cows, some sort of obscene animal that
would be terribly harmful to the marketplace, so they say, Keep it out.
So we go to the World Trade Organization and file a complaint against
Europe and we win. It doesn't matter to Europe that we win. They are
still not going to allow American beef into Europe. So what do we do?
We are going to get tough. This is symbolic of the lack of backbone we
have in this country when it comes to trade. How do we get tough? We
decide to slap some retaliation on Europe. We hit them with some
tariffs on truffles, goose liver, and Roquefort cheese.
God bless us, we are really getting tough with Europe. We are going
to sock them around with truffles, goose liver, and Roquefort cheese.
So what is Europe's idea to retaliate against us? Tariffs on U.S. steel
and textiles.
Can you just see the difference? We simply do not have the backbone,
the nerve, or the will to stand up for this country's economic
interests.
I am mentioning Europe. There are plenty of problems with Europe in
terms of our trade agreements. We continue to see country after
country--with respect to Europe, we see the entire continent--with
large, abiding,

[[Page S10037]]

yearly trade deficits that relate to jobs lost in this country.
If we were losing those jobs just because we couldn't compete, that
is one thing. That is fine. I wouldn't like it but I would understand
it and I would say we better figure out how to compete in the
international marketplace. But if we are losing those jobs because the
basis of competition is fundamentally unfair to America, then I say
there is something wrong with the trade agreements.
We connect to other countries in a way that says to other countries:
All right. We will trade and this is the circumstance. We will just tie
one or two hands behind our back and then we will start. You can hire
kids, you can put them in plants that are unsafe, dump your chemicals
into the streams and the air, and you can prohibit them from organizing
by law. You can do all those things and it is fine. Make your product
as cheap as you can make it and ship it to the marketplace in Bismarck,
ND, or Boise, ID, or Fairbanks, AK, or Los Angeles, and we would love
to purchase that.

How absurd is that? Is there not any basic standard at all? Are the
standards we fought for in this country for so long so old-fashioned?
Is it not a timeless truth that workers ought to be able to organize,
they ought to be able to expect a fair wage, and that you ought not be
able to work 12-year-olds 12 hours a day 7 days a week?
If you wonder about that, let me give an example of a story. This
story is entitled ``Worked Till They Drop.'' This happens to be about a
19-year-old girl but it is happening way too often in parts of the
world where they do not care about the conditions of production that we
have cared about for a long while and that we fought over for many
decades. This is a story about Li Chunmei, May 13 of last year. She had
been on her feet for 16 hours, her coworkers said:

. . . running back and forth inside the Bainan Toy Factory,
[in China] carrying toy parts from machine to machine.

Let me read a bit from the piece.

This was the busy season, before Christmas, when orders
peaked from Japan and the United States for the factory's
stuffed animals. Long hours were mandatory, and at least 2
months had passed since Li and the other workers had enjoyed
even a Sunday off.

Sixteen hours a day, 7 days a week.

Lying on her bed in the night, staring at the bunk above
her, the slight 19-year-old complained she felt worn out.

She was massaging her aching legs, coughing, and she told them she
was hungry.

The factory food was so bad, she said, she felt as if she
had not eaten at all. . . .
``I want to quit,'' one of her roommates . . . remembered
her saying. ``I want to go home.'' Her roommates had already
fallen asleep when Li started coughing up blood. They found
her in the bathroom a few hours later, curled up on the
floor. . . .

She was dead.
The exact cause of Li's death remains unknown. But what happened to
her last November in this industrial town in southeastern Guangdong
province is described by family friends and coworkers as an example of
what China's more daring newspapers call guolaosi.
The phrase means ``over-work death,'' and usually applies to young
workers who suddenly collapse and die after working exceedingly long
hours, day after day.

This is the sort of thing that is happening in some factories around
the world, producing, in this case, stuffed toys. They could have been
producing baseball caps. A prominent Ivy League college buys baseball
caps from similar factories. They pay \1/5\ cent labor for each cap
produced and each cap is sold at $17 on the campus of the Ivy League
university. Fair trade?
The question is, What did we fight about all these years? It seems to
me we fought about having an economy that gave American businesses a
chance to compete fairly and provide good-paying jobs to American
workers. On issue after issue in international trade, we have trade
agreements being brought to the floor of the Senate that have been
negotiated with other countries in a way that is fundamentally
incompetent.
One other example I have spent 10 years working on is the aftermatch
of a free-trade agreement with Canada. The free-trade agreement with
Canada is one I voted against. Incidentally, it was a vote when I was
serving in the United States House Ways and Means Committee. It was 34-
1. I was the one who voted against it. I was told by my colleagues we
really need to make this a unanimous consent vote, that Canada was our
good neighbor to the north and we share a common border. I said no.
What you are proposing here is wrong. It is going to dramatically
injure family farmers in this country.
But the deal was passed under fast track and no one could offer
amendments. Oh, we had an assurance in writing from Trade Ambassador
Yeutter that it would not represent a change or a significant change in
the quantity of grain going back and forth across the border. The
minute it was passed, we began to see a flood--a virtual avalanche--of
Canadian wheat coming into this country sold by the Canadian Wheat
Board, a state-sanctioned monopoly that would be illegal in this
country. Our farmers were badly undercut by this unfair competition. We
haven't been able to do a thing about it--nothing.
I had the GAO go to the Canadian Wheat Board because we think they
are dumping in our marketplace. The Canadian Wheat Board simply thumbed
its nose at the General Accounting Office, saying we don't intend to
open our records to you at all. We intend to show you no information.
Year after year, we face this unfair grain trade from Canada. In
fact, one day I went to the Canadian border--I have mentioned this many
times--with a man named Earl Jensen in a 12-year-old orange truck with
a couple hundred bushels of durum wheat. We drove to the Canadian
border. All the way to the Canadian border we saw 18-wheelers coming
south full of Canadian grain being dumped on our marketplace injuring
our farmers. We saw semi load after semi load. I bet we met 20 semi
loads of Canadian grain. When we got to the border in the 12-year-old
little orange truck, guess what. We were stopped dead in place and we
could not get that truck across the border because you couldn't take
200 bushels of durum wheat into Canada. The Canadian market was closed
to us, but our market was wide open to unfair Canadian trade in this
country. This has gone on for 10 years and we have not been able to do
a thing about it.

Today we have a trade ambassador who has been scurrying around the
world doing new trade agreements. So we have two new agreements to vote
on, one of which has a 5,400 immigrant quota of people coming into our
country from Singapore to take American jobs. Everyone knows that is
wrong. Everybody in this Chamber knows that is foolish. That is not the
way you do immigration policy--behind closed doors in secret on a trade
bill. And yet no one in this Chamber will be able to get rid of that
provision. That provision will be ratified by this Congress either this
afternoon or tomorrow. Not with my vote.
At some point, somehow, somebody will have to wake up on trade. It is
not the case that I believe we ought to shut down trade or that we
ought to build walls and prevent trade. It is the case that this
country needs to have a backbone and some nerve and some will--yes,
dealing with China, Japan, Europe, Korea, Canada, and Mexico. And until
we get that will and are willing to protect American jobs with the
requirement for fair trade, this country is going to continue to lose
economic strength.
After the Second World War, for a quarter of a century our trade
policy was almost exclusively foreign policy. It wasn't trade. It
wasn't economics. It was all foreign policy coming out of the State
Department. It didn't matter because we were the biggest, the best, and
the strongest country in the world by far and we could tie one hand
behind our backs and out-compete anybody under any circumstance. So it
was just fine. We could have mushy-headed foreign policy masquerading
as trade policy. It didn't matter. We just would win.
But in the second 25 years after the Second World War, we saw the
development of some pretty tough and canny competitors--Japan, Europe,
now China, and others. Still much of our trade policy is fuzzy-headed
foreign policy. Now you tie one hand behind your back with moves that
are fairer and this country loses. Again, what do we lose? We lose
jobs, economic expansion, opportunity for businesses, opportunity for
workers, and some say it doesn't matter; it is just irrelevant.

[[Page S10038]]

I do not for the life of me understand that. It makes no sense that
this country does not any longer understand that international trade is
a significant foundation for this country's economic future. That
foundation is either a foundation of cement with strength or quicksand
that washes away quickly.
I have a chart which I believe shows a graph of where we have been
with all these trade agreements. One after another of these trade
agreements has traded away this country's economic interests. You can
see the line. It describes when the Tokyo round of GATT was approved.
It describes the Uruguay round of GATT. It describes where we are with
WTO, and with NAFTA.
It seems to me when something isn't working, you ought to change it.
Yet we see no proposal here for change at all. It is just let's have a
couple more helpings from the same menu, and the menu isn't working for
our country.
There are so many issues related to this. I talked about jobs
because, in my judgment, that is central to this. First, you have
currency issues and the fact that China, for example, dramatically
undervalues its currency against the U.S. dollar. They have a terrific
advantage in our marketplace in trade.
There are so many different facets of trade that it is almost hard to
describe. You have the political issues. Some countries as a matter of
governance decide here is the way we will compete. For example, I have
mentioned on a couple of occasions today that some countries will
prohibit workers from organizing. We are proud that our country
protects those rights. We understand it has strengthened this country
and it is good for our country. In fact, the way we have developed a
strong middle class in our country is with the development of a
manufacturing sector in which workers are organized and have been able
through their strength to collect a reasonable share of the national
income from manufacturing. But some countries say we will prohibit as a
matter of political choice workers from organizing.
Then there are some others who say it doesn't matter that our
manufacturing base is eroding; if that is what happens as a result of
some natural function of trade, that is all right for our country.
Well, it is not all right. There is no country that will long remain a
world power--none--without a strong manufacturing base. You cannot be a
world economic power without a strong manufacturing base. Those who
think this country will remain a strong, vibrant, growing, economic
superpower are dead wrong if they allow this manufacturing base to be
dissipated. Too many of my colleagues seem to think it is just fine;
whatever happens, happens.
It is not fine with me. All you have to do is look at where this
country is headed in international trade. Look at what has happened to
our manufacturing base. Look at how good jobs have shrunk in this
country. I am talking about those people who worked in the coal mines,
those who worked in the steel mills, those who worked in our
manufacturing plants who used to earn a good wage with good benefits
and good job security, and who now discover we are racing toward the
bottom to figure out how we can compete with other countries that pay a
dime an hour or 20 cents an hour.
How can we compete with other countries that have no laws that
prevent them from abusing the environment with chemicals going into the
airshed and into the water? If you wonder about that, just travel a
bit. Go to those countries--I have--and take a look at what happens.
Then ask yourself, Is that the level of competition? Is there an
admission price to the American marketplace that says it is almost
free? That you don't have to reach any threshold? And any trade--using
circumstances I have previously described--is fair trade to which we
ought to subject our workers and our employers?
I have explained at great length why I intend to vote no on these two
trades agreements. It is not about Chile. It is not about Singapore. It
is about a process that is fundamentally bankrupt. It is about trade
negotiators who ought to be ashamed of themselves. It is about past
trade agreements that are incompetent, whose repercussions we are
dealing with today.
I have, from time to time, threatened to offer legislation that would
require all U.S. trade negotiators to wear a jersey. When you are
representing the United States of America in the Olympics, you wear a
jersey that says ``USA.'' It seems to me that perhaps our trade
negotiators--more than almost anyone--need to have a jersey to be able
to look down at and understand who they represent.
Will Rogers used to say: The United States of America has never lost
a war and never won a conference. He surely must have been thinking
about trade negotiators. This country had better develop a backbone and
some will and some nerve to stand up for its economy and stand up for
its workers and stand up for its employers--no, not in a way that is
unfair to any other country but in a way that says to any other
country: We are open for business, we are ready for competition, and we
will compete anywhere and with anyone in the world, but we, by God,
demand that the rules be fair. And if the rules are not fair, then we
intend to change them to create rules that are fair to our country.
I yield the floor.

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