[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 17 (Wednesday, February 11, 2004)]
[House]
[Page H485]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         PRESCRIPTION DRUG BILL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I did not come to the floor to speak about 
prescription drugs, but I cannot let what the gentleman before me in 
the well said. He voted to prevent the Federal Government, unlike any 
other industrial nation on Earth, any other developed country, 
negotiating with the pharmaceutical industry for lower drug prices, 
unlike the private insurance industry, that can negotiate lower prices.
  He says market forces will do better. Well, that is funny. Maybe the 
pharmaceutical industry would have fought against market forces. They 
plain and simple want to continue to gouge American consumers. The Bush 
administration's working day and night on this.
  The Australian Free Trade Agreement prohibits the reimportation of 
U.S.-manufactured, FDA-approved drugs from Australia if they are 
cheaper than sold in the United States. They are working day and night 
to get Canada to agree to raise the price of FDA-approved, U.S.-
manufactured drugs exported and sold in Canada at a lower price. They 
want the price lifted for the reimportation to the United States, and 
he comes to give us this little joke here after he has voted to prevent 
the one most effective measure we could have taken to give seniors and 
everyone else in this country a better deal on prescription drugs than 
market forces would do better. Yeah, sure.


                        Job Creation in America

  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, here is another thing that the Republicans 
have been talking a lot about. The President is concerned about jobs. 
Despite the worst job-loss record of any President since Herbert 
Hoover, he is really concerned. He has been appearing around the 
country with people and actually I kind of doubted him, but I found out 
yesterday in reading the Los Angeles Times that he does really care 
about jobs. The President really does care about creating jobs. The 
only problem is, he does not put any priority on where those jobs are 
created.
  Here it is right here. Los Angeles Times, Bush supports shift of jobs 
overseas.
  Whoa. Where is that coming from? Well, we have a few quotes to back 
it up. The administration's top economic adviser, ``Outsourcing,'' 
i.e., moving American jobs overseas, ``is just a new way of doing 
international trade. More things are tradeable than were tradeable in 
the past. And that's a good thing,'' says the President's own 
personally chosen senior economic adviser, Mr. Mankiw, chairman of the 
Council of Economic Advisors.
  He goes on to say, ``The market is the best determinant of where the 
jobs should be,'' and that is according to Bush and Mankiw, overseas, 
not in the United States of America because there is cheaper labor over 
there.
  He says here, people are concerned, maybe we will outsource a few 
radiologists. What does that mean? That means the false promise that 
was heard for years, do not worry about the industrial jobs; they are 
obsolete. They say, I wonder how you are a great Nation if you do not 
make things. Let us accept their argument for a moment.
  Then they said they would retrain American workers for those high-
tech knowledge industry jobs. Radiology, that is a pretty educated job. 
We are going to export those. We are going to export a whole host of IT 
jobs. In fact, the prediction is we will export 3 million U.S. IT jobs 
over the next 10 years. This is the next huge hemorrhaging of U.S. jobs 
overseas, and what does the President think? He thinks it is a good 
thing because the labor is cheaper over there. It gives a better bottom 
line for the corporations.
  What about the American workers? What are they going to do? Here are 
a couple of other quotes from Mr. Mankiw: ``Shipping jobs to low-cost 
countries is the `latest manifestation of the gains from trade.' '' 
Shipping U.S. jobs overseas by the Bush administration is considered to 
be a gain from trade.
  This is unbelievable, but at least they are finally being honest with 
us what they really believe, and they are now engaged in negotiating an 
expansion of NAFTA through the entire Central America, and they tell us 
this will be good for America. Why? Well, because the jobs would not 
have to travel quite as far from the United States. They would not have 
to go all the way to India or China. Maybe we can just export the jobs 
1,000 miles down to South America so the owners of the corporations, 
the few managers that are left in the United States, can more easily 
get there to occasionally supervise their new workforce working down 
there in Chile or Argentina or someplace else.
  That is their bottom line agenda here. They do not give a darn about 
American workers, American jobs, the industrial might of this country, 
the economic base of this country, the huge and growing trade deficit.
  We are going to borrow more than $500 billion from overseas this year 
because of our trade deficit. That is not sustainable. The dollar is 
dropping like a rock, and the Bush administration says that is a good 
thing because our goods will become cheaper. Guess what. We do not make 
much in America anymore; and if Bush has his way, we will not make 
anything in America anymore.

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