[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 20 (Tuesday, February 24, 2004)]
[House]
[Pages H543-H550]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   MORE HEMORRHAGING OF AMERICAN JOBS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) is recognized for 
60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.


                             General Leave

  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all 
Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend 
their remarks and include extraneous material on the subject of my 
Special Order.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the 
gentleman from Ohio?
  There was no objection.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I begin this evening by offering the 
comments of my colleague, the gentlewoman from Cleveland, Ohio (Mrs. 
Jones), who could not stay with us this evening, but to announce her 
support of our efforts, or opposition, if you will, to the Central 
American Free Trade Agreement and her good work on opposing this 
agreement that will expand NAFTA to Central America and ultimately lead 
to the quadrupling of low-income workers, the doubling of the size of 
NAFTA and more hemorrhaging of American jobs.
  Mr. Speaker, President Bush last Friday officially notified Congress 
that he supports the Central American Free Trade Agreement, that he 
plans to send it to Congress, probably sometime in May, and this body 
sometime after that will make a decision on whether it wants to pass 
the Central American Free Trade Agreement.
  It just amazes me, Mr. Speaker, that President Bush continues the 
same very much failed economic policies that he has promoted in this 
country for the last 3 years.
  The Bush economic policies basically are twofold: continued tax cuts 
for people who need it least, for the most wealthy people in our 
society. Roughly half the tax cuts have gone to the wealthiest 1 
percent of people in this country as we continue to run up huge budget 
deficits. That is one part of the President's economic recovery program 
which has led us to a jobless recovery, or, more precisely, Mr. 
Speaker, a job-loss recovery. One aspect is tax cuts for the wealthiest 
of Americans as part of his policy for economic recovery.
  The other part is to continue to pass trade agreements which have, 
frankly, shipped jobs overseas. That is why he is asking Congress, 
because he believes these trade agreements for some reason seem to be 
helping; but it is pretty clear we have lost lots and lots of 
manufacturing jobs, to China, Mexico, south of the border, across the 
ocean, to countries all over the world.
  Mr. Speaker, in my State of Ohio, one out of six manufacturing jobs 
has simply disappeared since President Bush took office. That means 
that tens of thousands of Ohioans are out of work; literally hundreds 
of thousands of Americans in manufacturing have been thrown out of 
work. And it means something else: 30 or 40 years ago when we were in 
the midst of a recession, you figured most of those jobs, seven out of 
10, statistics say, would return, people would get their jobs back. 
They would have temporary layoffs at a Ford plant, temporary layoffs at 
a steel mill. Seven out of 10 of those jobs would come back. Three of 
them would be lost forever. Other jobs might be created during a 
recovery.
  During the Bush recession and recovery, they are predicting now only 
three of the 10 manufacturing jobs lost will return, and they have not 
even returned yet. So we have this jobless job-loss recovery, when the 
President says his tax cuts are working. They may be working for upper-
income people who both get the tax cuts and now are seeing the stock 
market doing a little better, only a little better; but they are not 
working for Ohioans who have lost jobs. They simply are not working. 
The promises the President made simply have not been fulfilled.
  The front page of The Washington Post today, a newspaper that has 
been pretty pro-Bush on Medicare, very pro-Bush on Iraq, pretty pro-
Bush on a whole host of issues, this newspaper wrote on the front page, 
talked about the Bush job forecast.
  With President Bush, every time he issues a statement, an economic 
report, every time he introduces legislation on the economy to 
Congress, he makes predictions. He predicted there would be 3.4 million 
more jobs in 2003 than there were in 2000.
  Now, this prediction was not made before September 11, upon which he 
blames much of the economic stumbling, economic recession in some 
places, depression in others in this country. This was a prediction 
made 2 years ago.
  The President said by 2003 there would be 3.4 million more jobs in 
this country than there were when he took office. You know what? We 
have actually seen a loss of 1.7 million jobs; 1.7 million fewer jobs 
today than when President Bush took office.
  That is some kind of a record. There has not been a President of the 
United States for 7 decades that has actually seen a net loss of jobs 
during his presidency. Herbert Hoover was the last one, and Herbert 
Hoover obviously paid a political price at the next election; and, more 
importantly, Herbert Hoover paid a historical price in that he became 
the President that perhaps managed the economy worse than any President 
in the last century, until this President, who is kind of competing for 
the same kinds of records.
  The President also predicted a couple of years ago the budget deficit 
would be down to $14 billion. Well, it turns out that the budget 
deficit is $521 billion. So he predicted, way after September 11, a 
couple of years ago, he predicted a 3.4 million jobs increase

[[Page H544]]

and a budget deficit of $14 billion. He got a 1.7 million job loss and 
a budget deficit of $521 billion.
  Again, The Washington Post, not exactly a liberal newspaper, a paper 
that supported President Bush on most of his initiatives, the headline 
in The Post, ``Bush assertion on tax cuts is at odds with IRS data.'' 
President Bush runs the IRS; and still his statistics, even according 
to them, are inaccurate.
  Now, we talked earlier about the tax cuts being the mantra. Whenever 
there are economic problems or whenever there are jobs lost, the 
President decides to cut taxes. Well, he also talks about trade 
agreements. Let me talk for a moment, and then my friend, the gentleman 
from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio), is also here and will join us and talk about 
some of these issues also.
  The President has said that he is going to bring the Central American 
Free Trade Agreement to this Congress. If there is anything obvious to 
the American people, steelworkers in Ohio, lumber workers in Oregon 
where the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) is, paper mill workers, 
auto workers in my State, rubber workers in my State, tool and die 
makers in my State, if there is something obvious to all of them, it is 
they believe an awful lot of their jobs have been lost overseas, 
because we have seen this kind of hemorrhaging of jobs, shipping of 
jobs overseas.
  This week I was at a plant, Ohio Screw Products, in Elyria, Ohio, in 
my district, with Dan Imbrogno, who runs this company. They have about 
70 full-time and a handful of temporary workers who punch out bolts and 
make products to be components in other products of all kinds, 
including some defense work.
  But mostly he has seen a threat of jobs going to China, a threat of 
jobs going to Mexico, a threat of jobs going further south across the 
southern border in this country; and he just shakes his head, as do the 
workers who I met with at this company over lunch on one other visit a 
few months ago, just shake their heads over American trade policy. Why 
do we keep passing it? Why do we want to extend NAFTA, clearly a broken 
trade agreement, to the rest of Latin America? It is not working in 
Mexico. Why should we double it in size and population and quadruple it 
in terms of the number of low-income workers?
  When we passed NAFTA in this body, the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. 
DeFazio) and I both opposed it in 1993. When we passed that 
legislation, that agreement, we had a trade surplus with Mexico. Today 
our trade deficit with Mexico is $25 billion.
  Now, President Bush's father, who presided over a similar kind of 
economic decline, although this one is significantly worse than his 
father's, but President Bush, Sr., said for every $1 billion in trade, 
because trade entails usually manufacturing of goods, for every $1 
billion in trade, we lose or gain 18,000 jobs. So, in other words, if 
you have a $1 billion trade surplus, it means you are making a lot of 
things, selling them overseas, for every $1 billion in sales hiring 
about 18,000 American workers. If you have a trade deficit, as we have, 
you see it go the other way.
  So we now have a trade deficit with China of over $100 billion, a 
trade deficit overall around the world of some $400 billion. All you 
have to do is do the math to see the kind of job loss that brings to 
our country.
  So the answer from President Bush is more tax cuts for the richest 
people in our country and more trade agreements that hemorrhage jobs, 
that ship more jobs overseas? It simply does not add up.
  In a moment I will yield to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio). 
In a moment I will give some more details about what the Central 
American Free Trade Agreement actually does to our Nation, to our 
economy, and especially to manufacturing in my part of the country, 
where we are seeing these jobs shipped overseas every day, plant 
closings, layoffs, threats of more plant closings, threats by 
management to move overseas, so that workers see their wages stagnate 
or even go down with give-backs, all that happens with these trade 
policies; yet President Bush says we have got to do more of them 
because, frankly, I think that helps his investor friends, his major 
campaign contributors, the people who seem to have the most influence 
in this administration on economic policy.

                              {time}  2115

  Not working families, union or nonunion; not small businesses that 
are struggling, but the people that have the influence in this 
administration; not Ohio Screw Products in O'Leary, Ohio, but are the 
large companies that gain from the trade agreements, they gain profits 
as they shed workers in this country. Those are the only people that 
benefit. It is President Bush and his campaign kitty and those 
companies, those executives and those investors that shift jobs 
overseas and pad their pockets and make bigger profits and get bigger 
bonuses.
  I yield to my friend, the gentleman from Oregon, who is holding one 
of his favorite books there that can tell more than I know.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. This is 
a must read for every American who is concerned about the future of our 
country, whether we will continue to be the leading industrial power in 
the world, whether there will be a future for Social Security, what 
will the rules of trade be and what are the objectives. This is the 
economic report of the President.
  Now, we have to give the President's Chair of his Board of Economic 
Advisors, Council of Economic Advisors appointed by the President, full 
confidence of the President, we have to give him some credit, because 
he is distressingly honest. In this book on page 229, he talks about 
the fact that one of the great benefits of trade is that when a good or 
service is produced more cheaply abroad, it makes more sense to import 
it than to make or provide it domestically. Of course he does not deal 
with the fact that Chinese labor is oppressed and abused, that they 
have no protections in their workplace. Basically if someone gets their 
arm torn off operating a machine in China, they drag him away from the 
machine and put a new worker there, and then, after that, they might 
tend to some basic first aid before they send that person home or to 
the graveyard, but there are no benefits or significant health care 
provided. So they are recommending that the U.S. workers should somehow 
have to compete with this.
  Now, it would be one thing if this was sort of a self-generated thing 
on the part of China or Mexico or any one of these other countries that 
are stealing our jobs. But guess what? It is being done with U.S. 
capital which are being subsidized with our tax cuts. Not only are we 
borrowing money from the Social Security Trust Fund to give to the 
wealthiest of Americans in tax cuts, we are also borrowing money, given 
our deficit situation, to subsidize the largest corporations in the 
world through OPIC, the Overseas Private Investment Council, and 
others, to export American jobs.
  Now, I mean, I think that is one place where conservatives, who are 
against government subsidies, and progressives, who are against 
undermining the U.S. economy and the wage and labor standards of 
Americans and our standard of living as a whole and our industrial 
infrastructure, have some grounds for agreement. Let us at least repeal 
the taxpayer subsidies, the borrowed money that is subsidizing these 
corporations to export jobs overseas.
  But again, Mr. Mankiw, the President's chief economic adviser, in his 
official report to the American people this year, the economic report 
of the President, he says, shipping jobs to low-cost countries is the 
latest manifestation of the gains from trade that economists have 
talked about for centuries.
  Now, we have to wonder what that gain is, how illusory it is, when 
the American middle class is being devastated by these exports. A few 
years ago when the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) and I opposed NAFTA, 
they said, oh, you Congressmen, you are like dinosaurs. You want to 
protect those old, inefficient manufacturing jobs. Do not worry, it 
will just be the low-skilled jobs that go to Mexico. Well, of course, 
that was a lie, and what we found out was that most of the major U.S. 
auto manufacturers were willing to invest in state-of-the-art plants in 
Mexico to access that cheap labor, and then reimport those vehicles 
into the U.S. And guess what? The

[[Page H545]]

price did not go down for U.S. consumers, but many U.S. families, those 
who used to be able to buy the product because they worked in the 
factories, could not afford to buy that product anymore.
  But then as things evolved, and the trade deficit began to accelerate 
over this last decade; when I introduced legislation to establish the 
U.S. Trade Deficit Review Commission in 1997, the trade deficit was 
$111 billion. It is almost quaint today. We are talking about $500 
billion. We are going to borrow a half a trillion dollars to finance 
the purchase of goods overseas by Americans. We are going to borrow 
another $700 billion to run the Government of the United States and to 
give tax cuts to the wealthiest of Americans. And a substantial amount 
of this money, almost all of the $500 billion and 40 percent of the 
$700 billion, is going to come from overseas. We are giving 
unbelievable leverage to those bastions of democracy like China, who is 
now the largest holder of U.S. debt, and others who may not have the 
best interests of the American workers or our economy in mind. But in 
any case, Mr. Mankiw thinks this is just fine.

  Now, the President has tried to back away from this a little bit. He 
did that famous press event in front of a bunch of boxes which they had 
to repaint. Actually they said, oh, it was just an overzealous intern 
from the White House at one of his unbelievable staged press events 
that cost an average of $400,000 each paid for by the American 
taxpayers, of course; the boxes, when he went to this one particular 
plant, all said ``Made in China'' on them, but he wanted to talk about 
American jobs; a little embarrassing. So this, of course, intern, with 
no direction from the political staff at the White House or anybody 
else, somehow came up with all new labels to run through and label them 
all ``Made in the U.S.,'' of course another lie.
  So what they are doing, Mr. Mankiw is an unbelievably honest man, 
because he admits that they are exporting jobs, and they think that is 
good because it makes a few people rich and just impoverishes a 
majority of the people in this country, and deprives them of their 
livelihoods, and undermines the industrial and economic might of our 
country; but the President is trying to pretend that he does not really 
believe in this stuff, but I guess why is his signature on page 4 if he 
does not really believe in it? There it is, the President's signature 
on this report, basically endorsing these policies.
  We cannot continue this way. Do we know what that means? Let us break 
it down a little bit, and then I will yield back to the gentleman. Our 
current trade deficit, that is the amount of money we are borrowing 
from overseas to finance the purchase of goods, many of those goods 
manufactured by formerly U.S.-based corporations that have now seen fit 
to chase cheap labor and lack of environmental standards and other 
things overseas, is $1.5 billion a day. Mr. Speaker, $1.5 thousand 
million a day.
  Now, how is that sustainable? That is $1 million per minute of U.S. 
wealth that is flooding overseas, giving unbelievable leverage to 
foreign governments over the U.S. dollar.
  Just one last point on this, and then I am certain we will get on to 
other things. What do the economists say? Oh, do not worry, it has 
always been this way. What will happen is the U.S. dollar will decline, 
our goods will become cheaper, and then we will begin exporting again. 
But as I said to a number of these economists, none of whom can answer 
this question, I said, I understand how that used to work when we made 
things, but when we do not make things anymore, how does that work? If 
the dollar gets cheaper, then all of those imported goods we are buying 
become more expensive. We will see inflation in the United States. We 
will see the dollar continue to drop. We will see higher interest rates 
in the United States. We will see the dollar continue to drop.
  We are headed toward an incredible economic train wreck here. And the 
chief engineer, George Bush, who signed this report, thinks it is just 
fine. Because guess what? A few tens of thousands of people, CEOs, his 
buddies, his principal campaign contributors, they are all going to 
make out like bandits. The profits are up. Wall Street's profits are 
up. We are just having this little problem called a jobless recovery; 
jobless because those jobs have been exported. The means of the 
production has been exported. The industrial might of this country has 
been exported. And I would say to the hawks on that side of the aisle, 
in fact, you are exporting the capability of defending the United 
States in the future against adversaries around the world.
  With that, I am happy to yield back to the gentleman for a little 
further discourse on this.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. We think about 
this. He mentioned when he introduced his idea to better monitor and 
study and pay attention to, if you will, focus, on the trade deficit, 
how it has gone up since 1997. The trade deficit for the entire year of 
1992 was smaller than the trade deficit, or was about equivalent in 
1992 to the trade deficit for 1 month last month. We had a trade 
deficit of about $40 billion a dozen years ago. We have a trade deficit 
in excess of $40 billion a month now. I mean, that is what that means.
  But more importantly, as the gentleman from Oregon pointed out, what 
that really means is that we are continuing to get further and further 
in debt as a Nation to foreign investors, to investors in other 
countries. That means that the Chinese, with their $100 billion a year 
in U.S. currency, the trade surplus they have with our country, the 
fact that they sell us so much more than we buy from them, the Chinese 
take that $100 billion and are beginning to buy up a lot of scrap steel 
in the United States, driving up prices of steel, of scrap for U.S. 
manufacturers, making it harder for them to compete.

  They are also buying energy companies in the United States, again 
driving up the cost of natural gas for American manufacturers and 
putting them more and more behind the eightball.
  And, as the gentleman from Oregon said, when the worm turns, as 
economists like to say in their ivory and their traditional economic 
theory, when the worm turns, and our trade deficit gets so overwhelming 
that eventually the value of the dollar drops, we begin to produce more 
to sell to them, our factories are hollowed out. Our factories are not 
manufacturing things, because so many of them are closed. They are not 
going to be able to retool just because all of a sudden prices are a 
bit higher.
  But what is disturbing about the economic report that the gentleman 
mentioned, and then I want to yield to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. 
Strickland), who absolutely gets it on these job issues, partly because 
we live in a State where we have seen our economy devastated by these 
Bush economic policies, but what is disturbing about the economic 
report that Mr. Mankiw put out, the President's chief economic adviser, 
and that President Bush signed, is that they really see nothing wrong 
with the direction we are going. So what, we have a huge trade deficit. 
So what, we have a huge budget deficit. Let us keep doing tax cuts that 
overwhelmingly go to the most privileged; let us keep doing trade 
agreements that ship jobs overseas, in large part because profits right 
now are up for major corporations. So if the companies are making 
money, as the Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao said, if the stock market 
is going up, then there is really nothing wrong.
  What is wrong, as Mr. Mankiw said, outsourcing is a good thing when 
blue-collar jobs; white-collar jobs, phone operators, computer 
engineers, computer programmers, when those jobs go overseas, I think 
there is something wrong with that, and it is mostly because George 
Bush and Mr. Mankiw have never looked an Akron rubber worker in the 
eyes, or never looked a paper worker in Oregon in the eye, or never 
looked a Silicon Valley in California, a computer programmer in the eye 
and say, yes, outsourcing is a good thing. Sorry about your job. Maybe 
you can get a job at Wal-Mart, or maybe you can get a job at 
McDonald's.
  Speaking of McDonald's, and then I will yield to my friend, the 
gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland), in this economic report, 
something the media have not paid much attention to, and that is these 
economists, and these are not exactly people who know a lot of people 
who work in America's factories, but these economists are having a 
debate inside the Bush administration on how to classify manufacturing.

[[Page H546]]

Now, we have lost one out of six jobs in manufacturing in Ohio. We have 
lost literally well over 2 million jobs nationally in manufacturing, 
and they are trying to figure out how to define manufacturing.
  Well, they are debating whether or not to define the fast food 
restaurant industry as a service job or a manufacturing job, because, 
you know, if you work in McDonald's, it is not just like somebody comes 
up and orders, and you take it off the shelf and give it to them. I am 
not making this up, it sounds like it, but it is in the Bush 
administration's book, you have to manufacture these hamburgers. You 
have to take the bun, you got to unwrap it, so you take the wrapping 
off, you take it out of the box, unwrap it, put the bun down; then you 
have to take the hamburger, and you have to chemically change the 
hamburger, it is a chemical process called cooking, put the hamburger 
on the grill, and put it on the bun after it is cooked. Then you have 
to get the cheese, and you might have to chemically alter the cheese 
because you have to melt the cheese. You put the cheese on the 
hamburger, and then you add a couple of things. You add a slice of 
tomato, so that is an extra element in the manufacturing. You put the 
tomato on, unwrap the lettuce, peel the lettuce off the head, so that 
may be another manufacturing part. This is pretty complex; almost like 
making a Ford in Ohio or manufacturing steel or making tires in Akron, 
Ohio, used to be.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, people are 
going to think we are making this up. I am not making this up. But let 
us go to the source. Economic Report of the President, signed on page 4 
by President George Bush and endorsed by all of his economic advisers, 
and it says right here: ``When a fast food restaurant,'' this is page 
73, chapter 2, halfway down the page, ``When a fast food restaurant 
sells a hamburger, for example, is it providing a service, or is it 
combining inputs to manufacture a product?'' Well, we can erase that 
very embarrassing manufacturing job loss that George Bush has provided, 
the largest manufacturing job loss in the history of the United States, 
worse than the Great Depression, we can erase that in one fell swoop. 
All we have to do is turn to page 73 and say, well, of course, as the 
President's chief economic adviser says, that is manufacturing a 
product. That is not a service.

                              {time}  2130

  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, that means if you 
live in O'Leary, Ohio, and you have worked in what we used to call in 
this country traditional manufacturing, not ``Mc manufacturing'' is, I 
guess, the fast-food restaurant category. I guess there will be two 
categories of manufacturing, traditional manufacturing and ``Mc'' 
manufacturing. It will be M-c, with the arches, manufacturing.
  This is not really funny. It is kind of depressing that they would 
think that this is what we are going to, in the new era, the new Bush 
era, the new 21st century, that this is what we are going to call 
manufacturing; that these workers in O'Leary, Ohio, who have been in 
traditional manufacturing making $12, $14, $16 an hour, with decent 
health benefits, with a decent retirement, that they will lose their 
jobs in manufacturing, they will get another job in manufacturing, 
working at McDonald's for $7 an hour with no benefits, with no health 
care and no retirement.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, do not forget 
the farmers and ranchers. I had some cattlemen come to my town hall 
last week who say, hey, we are next. Not only was Canada a huge threat 
to our industry and not only are they bringing in stuff that might kill 
the American people with mad cow disease, but the so-called free trade 
agreement with Australia, Argentina, other target countries in CAFTA, 
that is going to kill off the U.S. agriculture people. So we will 
import the beef that will be probably ground up overseas because that 
is value added, but then when the frozen patties get here, we will 
still manufacture them into a finished device which is, i.e., a Big Mac 
or a Whopper, we do not want to shortchange Burger King here and/or 
whatever you want to call it, and somehow we will prosper as a Nation 
by doing this.
  I thank the gentleman.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, the point is that the Bush 
administration, the Bush's chief economic adviser, Gregory Mankiw, with 
the President's signature on this economic policy, does not see 
anything wrong with the direction they want to take this country's 
manufacturing: huge numbers of loss of jobs, reclassifying, underpaid 
service jobs with no benefits as manufacturing for political purposes, 
making excuses, justifying this all in the name of this global economy 
that helps wealthy investors, i.e., helps Bush contributors but hurts 
workers in the U.S., hurts farmers in the U.S., hurts ranchers in the 
U.S., hurts workers in the developing world but helps the wealthy of 
both countries. It simply does not make sense.
  I yield to my friend, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland), who 
has been a real leader in trying to do the right things to restore 
Ohio's and America's industrial base.
  Mr. STRICKLAND. Mr. Speaker, I just want to say to my friends that 
what they are describing here is almost humorous, talking about the 
putting together of a hamburger as being a manufacturing activity, but 
it is serious because it represents deception. It represents an effort, 
quite frankly, to mislead the American people; and I hope they are 
listening tonight because this information is coming from the 
``Economic Report of the President''; and as my colleague said, it has 
got his name on it. So he is responsible for this charade.
  I would like to read just one sentence from page 25, and I hope 
unemployed steelworkers along the Ohio River, I hope those who work in 
the pottery and ceramic plants along the Ohio River, on the Ohio and 
West Virginia side of that great river, I hope they understand what 
this means: ``When a good or a service is produced at lower cost in 
another country, it makes sense to import it rather than to produce it 
domestically.''
  Let me say that nearly everything we make in this country can be 
produced in another country at a lower cost. I was in Mexico about 2 
months ago. I talked to a woman who works for an American company. She 
works 9\1/2\ hours a day, 5 days a week. She showed me her weekly 
check, $38. Nearly every job in this country can be produced for less 
cost somewhere else; and the President's report says, ``If a good or 
service is produced at lower cost in another country, it makes sense to 
import it rather than to produce it domestically.'' Apparently, they 
are willing to give up the entire employment base of this country, 
anything to get it a little cheaper. It is a race to the bottom. It 
absolutely is a race to the bottom.
  I would hope the President would publicly renounce this report, 
disassociate himself from it, take his name off it. This is a report 
that is based on the theory of comparative advantage. If you can do it 
for less cost somewhere else, that is where we ought to do it. Where 
does it stop?
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is making an excellent point; 
but of course, they are following exactly the same rules, are they not? 
Do we not have a level playing field? Are they not required to provide 
health and safety, environmental protections, child labor protections? 
Are we not competing on a level playing field here?
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. The answer to that is pretty obvious; but what is 
interesting, I remember standing on this floor 10 years ago with David 
Bonior, who was the real leader on these trade issues in Congress years 
ago, and they promised in those days with NAFTA that only the good-
paying jobs would stay and these low-end, low-wage jobs would go 
overseas; and over time in Mexico they would begin to have stronger 
environmental laws, over time they would make higher wages, over time 
they would have good labor law, worker safety, all of that.
  But as the gentleman from Oregon's (Mr. DeFazio) questions intimate, 
obviously these countries are not moving in that direction. In fact, we 
are seeing our country move in their direction. Our country move in 
their direction in terms of there are significantly fewer pension 
systems in this country, good pensions for workers than there were 10 
years ago, and particularly fewer than

[[Page H547]]

there were in 1973 when this trade debacle really started in this 
country. That was really a key year in terms of turning the way we did 
trade.
  We have seen our pension system atrophy. We have seen wages stagnate 
in most of these 30 years. We have seen environmental laws and States 
played off against States, and the Federal Government played off 
against the Mexican Government to weaken all these standards. Food 
safety laws are not as enforced, and clearly our food supply is not as 
safe as it would be if these trade agreements would actually raise 
their standards.
  Instead of passing a trade agreement with Latin America to raise up 
their living standard, to raise their wages, to raise their workplace 
safety conditions, to raise their food safety standards, to raise 
environmental standards, we are seeing pressure on our government to 
bring those standards down so that we can compete with these countries. 
We should compete with them. They should compete with us, but let us 
raise living standards so ultimately they can buy our products, have a 
safer environment, have better food safety, have better worker safety 
and all that.
  I yield to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland).
  Mr. STRICKLAND. Mr. Speaker, tomorrow morning Ohio's Governor Taft is 
going to be here in the capital city meeting with those of us who are 
Representatives from the State of Ohio.
  The State of Ohio has been devastated, absolutely devastated and 
especially my district that stretches all along the Ohio River, some 
330 miles. I have perhaps the poorest, the oldest, and the sickest 
district in Ohio. I have got lots of veterans. I have got lots of 
unemployed steelworkers. And what does the President say to them? How 
can the President come to Ohio and own this statement, ``When a good or 
service is produced at lower cost in another country it makes sense to 
import it''? What does that mean?
  We all have constituents and we are all concerned about our 
constituents. I am a little parochial in my concern I guess because I 
have got a lot of constituents who do not have jobs, who have lost 
jobs. As a result, they have lost health care. They have lost nearly 
everything they have worked their entire lives for, and we have an 
administration that is encouraging the outsourcing of jobs to other 
countries. It buffaloes me. I do not understand what kind of thinking 
goes into a document like this that is called the ``Economic Report of 
the President.''
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, think about this: 
we have a President who is always at the beck and call of his corporate 
contributors. When it comes time to pass a Medicare bill, it is written 
by the insurance and the drug companies. When it comes time to pass 
Social Security privatization, it is written by Wall Street. When it 
comes to pass an environmental law, the President gives us a bill 
written by the chemical companies or the energy companies. Issue after 
issue after issue.
  What we have really seen happen from the gentleman from Ohio's (Mr. 
Strickland) suggestion, what we have seen is as we pass trade 
agreements like this, making it harder for us to compete with Chinese 
workers, with Mexico, with Costa Rica, with El Salvador, one of the 
things that happens is we have seen a stagnation of U.S. wages and a 
weakening of food safety, environmental standards, and worker safety 
standards.
  We also see in this body many of my Republican friends, particularly 
Republican leadership, are trying to pass legislation with the 
President to cut overtime in the U.S., to cut comp time opportunity in 
the U.S., to weaken environmental standards in the U.S., to weaken food 
safety standards in the U.S. So what they are doing internationally is 
in a lot of ways what they are doing domestically. It really does not 
cause George Bush or Gregory Mankiw, as chief economic adviser, to lose 
a lot of sleep that U.S. wages are stagnant, does not cause them to 
lose a lot of sleep if there is a downward pressure, a pulling down of 
environmental and worker safety standards, because that is what they 
are doing domestically.
  So when Mr. Mankiw says they can do it cheaper in other countries, 
that means they have got comparative advantage, so send them overseas. 
The only way that we are going to compete in this Bush new world is to 
weaken our environmental standards, which is what they are trying to do 
anyway; to cut overtime, which is what they are trying to do anyway; to 
end comp time, which is what they are trying to do anyway; to roll back 
food safety, environment worker safety, wages, all of that. That is 
exactly what they are doing domestically.
  It is what these trade agreements will do internationally. And who 
benefits? It is not the workers in Mexico. We have no axe to grind with 
them. It is not the slave laborers in China or the workers in awful 
conditions that are not slave labor in China, but the exploited 
generally, I was going to say young women, but really girls because 
they are not old enough to be women yet. We have no quarrel with them. 
They are hurt by these trade agreements just like American workers are 
hurt; but the investors who fund the Bush campaign and the chemical 
companies, the drug companies, the insurance companies, they get their 
legislation through. They love these trade agreements because it means 
more profits and it means more bonuses for these executives.
  I yield to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio).
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I come from a State that back when we were 
fighting NAFTA, I was pretty lonely up there in the Pacific Northwest, 
and we were told, what is wrong with you, you are going to be a major 
beneficiary. The State of Oregon on the Pacific Rim, strategically 
perched just north of Mexico and south of Canada, your State, your 
people are going to be a big winner, but it turns out that we are one 
of the top 10 losers under NAFTA.
  As the gentleman alluded earlier, lumber and wood products are 
suffering because of subsidized Canadian lumber and wood products. The 
paper industry is seeing paper flee overseas to countries that do not 
observe any environmental practices or controls, and then a number of 
other more high-tech industries have gone elsewhere.
  I sat next to a fellow who worked for Hewlett-Packard on the plane 
flying home a week ago, Hewlett-Packard in Corvallis. I said, what do 
you do? He said, I work in the ink jet division. I do engineering, 
design, and development. I said, God, that is really great. I am glad 
to see you are still working there. I was worried about those jobs. He 
said, well, no, actually, he said, my entire division was exported to 
Bangalore, India, last year. I am just working on a special project 
here in the United States, but my division is gone. The next design 
development, the next ink jet technology is going to come from 
Bangalore, India. He said they can get an engineer there for 8 to 
$10,000 bucks a year.

  Are we telling Americans they should go to college for 4 years, incur 
$50,000 of debt to get a degree in engineering technology or whatever 
it is going to cost them to do it, and then they are going to work for 
$8,000 a year, raise a family, buy a home and all the other things that 
are a part of the American Dream? These people are killing the American 
Dream. That is what they are doing.
  There are a few people who are going to profit from it, and those are 
the people that support them; and they are so insulated from it some of 
them do not even realize what they are doing to destroy our country.
  One other point. Sometimes that is not even enough to say to an 
American, 4-year, 6-year degree, you are going to compete with some guy 
or woman from Indian who worked for $8,000. Sometimes it is not 
enought. You know what we also do? We are subsidizing, the American 
taxpayers, through our taxes, are subsidizing the export of these jobs. 
Here is a short list:
  Motorola laid off 42,900 workers while investing $3.4 billion in 
China with a $190 million taxpayers subsidy.

                              {time}  2145

  In General Electric, 260,000 U.S. workers, while investing $1.5 
billion in China, $2.5 billion in corporate subsidies paid for by U.S. 
taxpayers. Insult to injury. Steal their jobs, destroy the economic 
future of our country, our kids and our grandkids, and charge us to do 
it. That is what they are doing to

[[Page H548]]

average wage-earning Americans, because most of this is coming out of 
Social Security wages, out of payroll taxes.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I would now yield to the gentleman 
from Ohio (Mr. Strickland).
  Mr. STRICKLAND. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Ohio for 
yielding once again to me.
  I said a little earlier that I feel kind of parochial in these 
concerns because each of us represents, I do not know, 630,000 or so 
men, women and children. I represent people who are desperate for jobs. 
Now, in a little town that my colleague represents that I think he is 
familiar with, Salem, Ohio, there is a company, the Elger Company. They 
make bathroom sinks and wash basins and so on. They decided a few 
months ago that they would go to China. That means that there are going 
to be lots of families without a job.
  A short time ago, although the company has not really closed the 
operation in Salem yet, that is going to happen this spring, I got a 
call from one of the employees there, and they had just gotten a 
shipment of goods back from China, and they opened up the crates, and 
guess what they had stamped on the sides of those sinks and so on? 
``Made in the USA.'' The mold had not been changed, so they were forced 
to grind off the ``Made in the USA'' label. That is just an example.
  I guess in China they can make a bathtub or a wash basin or a toilet 
for less cost than we can do it in Salem, Ohio, where these workers got 
living-wage jobs, paid taxes, supported their schools, gave to their 
churches, and cared for their children. They were good, solid, living-
wage American jobs. But they can do it for less cost in China, so this 
administration says, oh, that is where it should be done then. So every 
worker at the Elger plant in Salem, Ohio, should know, and the 
community that depends upon those jobs should know, that this 
administration believes that is the right thing to do. As the 
President's report says, if it can be done more cheaply somewhere else, 
that is where it should be done.
  If a cheap product is a cheap product or a reduced cost to the 
consumer is the ultimate good, then maybe what we are doing is the 
right thing. But if we believe that in this country people and the 
communities in which they live should have living-wage jobs which 
enable the workers to pay taxes, to support their schools, to 
contribute their taxes to the State and to local government, to be a 
fully functioning taxpayer.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. To buy the products.
  Mr. STRICKLAND. And to buy the product, absolutely. If what we want 
is a cheaper pair of blue jeans from Wal-Mart, then maybe we are headed 
down the right road. But if we want a secure country, with stable 
families and secure communities, we had better change our way, because 
we are going to lose the American way of life. We are going to lose the 
middle class, and we are going to lose the ability to continue to 
support the infrastructure that makes us uniquely American.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend for those comments.
  What is disturbing to me is that in this economic report, as the 
gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) said, on page 4, signed by 
President Bush, this economic report put out by the President just this 
month says that there is nothing wrong with the way the global economy 
is operating. He said outsourcing is a good thing.
  Mr. Mankiw actually said, as we are seeing some of the most highly-
skilled American workers, radiologists, for example, seeing their jobs 
threatened, Mr. Mankiw says an MRI or an X-ray will be taken that will 
be e-mailed to perhaps Bangalore, perhaps somewhere else, and read by a 
physician there who makes some minute percent of whatever the physician 
makes here, and then it comes back, because those radiologists are not 
in as much demand today as they once were. He said, well, it is a 
question of comparative advantage. Perhaps we just need to quit 
training so many radiologists. They cannot compete. We need to maybe 
train more general surgeons or more family practice doctors.
  Let me do a little tour around the world to show what the gentleman 
from Oregon said about how there simply are not going to be enough 
people to buy these goods. If a Nike worker in Oregon loses his job to 
a Nike worker in China, there is one less consumer to buy cars; one 
less consumer to buy clothes, because the Nike worker in China is not 
making much to buy anything.
  Let me tell a quick story. About 5 years ago, when Congress was 
considering the fast track legislation to in those days lay the 
groundwork to extend NAFTA to Latin America, which President Bush is 
trying to foist on us, I, at my own expense, flew to McAllen, Texas, 
rented a car with a couple of friends, drove across the border and went 
to Reynoso, Mexico. I went to a worker's home who worked at General 
Electric Mexico, one of the largest employers in Mexico. The home of 
these workers were about 20 feet by 30 feet. They lived in a one-room 
shack: dirt floor, no running water, no electricity. When it rained 
hard, the dirt floor turned to mud. When you walked behind the shack, 
you saw a ditch of human and industrial waste. Who knows what it was. 
Children were playing nearby, as children will. The American Medical 
Association said that area along the border is perhaps the most toxic 
area in the Western Hemisphere.
  Now, as you walked through this neighborhood of these shacks, you 
could tell where the workers worked because their homes were 
constructed out of packing material, boxes, wood platforms, crates, 
whatever, of the company for which they worked or the supplier for the 
company for which they worked.
  We then visited nearby an auto plant. These workers at this GE plant 
in this home were making about $45 a week and working about 60 hours a 
week. But we went to this auto plant, and this auto plant in Reynoso, 
Mexico, 3 miles from the United States of America, looked just like an 
auto plant in the United States, just like a GM plant in Lordstown, 
near my colleague's district, or a Ford plant in Avon Lake or Lorain. 
It was modern. In fact, it was newer than the auto plants in our State 
mostly. It was modern, it was clean, it was the latest technology, and 
the workers were productive and hard-working.
  There was one difference between the Mexican auto plant and an 
American auto plant. That difference was there was no parking lot in 
the Mexican auto plant because the workers do not make enough to buy 
the cars that they make.
  You can go halfway around the world to Malaysia to a Motorola plant, 
and you will see the workers do not make enough to buy the cell phones 
they make. You can come back to this hemisphere and go to Haiti and see 
that the workers do not make it, to a Disney plant, and the workers do 
not make enough to buy the toys for their children they make. You can 
go back around the world to China and go to a Nike plant and see the 
workers do not make enough to buy the shoes which they make.
  Now, the lesson is this continued downhill slide with globalization. 
If we pass a Central America Free Trade Agreement, if Congress passes 
the Free Trade Area of the Americas, if Congress continues the tax cuts 
for the wealthy and continues to allow the drug companies and the 
insurance companies to sit in the Oval Office, with a Vice President 
who is still on the Halliburton payroll, I might add, at $3,000 a week, 
allows them to continue to write this legislation, we are going to have 
a country like Brazil, with a very wealthy group at the top and a bunch 
of people at the bottom that are not making enough money to buy the 
shoes and to buy the toys for their kids, and to buy the cars, and to 
buy the cell phones.
  If that is the society we want, then I guess maybe this report says 
let us keep doing it. But if it is not the society we want, then we 
need to say no to the Central American Free Trade Agreement, and we 
need to say no to this economic policy that has caused some of the 
highest unemployment rates in the country, in Oregon, and has 
devastated eastern Ohio and northeast Ohio where I live and damn near 
the rest of the State. We need to say no to that.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, when I lay 
this out to my constituents, they say, well, certainly the CEOs and 
others could not support that; they would not want to live in those 
communities or under those conditions or see those things happen. Well, 
the fact is today's CEOs,

[[Page H549]]

where there is still a manufacturing job, earns 500 times what a worker 
earns. It is only a couple of decades since the ratio was only 20. They 
do not live in the same communities. They do not live in the same 
world. They live on a different planet.
  They live behind gates in their mansions with their servants. Now 
there will be a lot more servants out there for them, and probably the 
cost of servants will go down, so this will be a great benefit to them. 
Of course, under Bush we can import those, too, or maybe Americans can 
work for those low wages. Their kids go to private schools, so they are 
not worried about what the gentleman from Ohio was talking about, the 
support for our societal infrastructure, schools and those sorts of 
things.
  They do not really need the police. I guess we have not gone back to 
private for-profit fire departments yet, that is probably not far away, 
but they have private security so that we do not find a lot of support 
from them for police infrastructure or first responders, particularly 
not with the administration cutting their budgets under the homeland 
security proposal.
  And then when they want to go somewhere, they go to the private 
country club in their chauffeur-driven limousines. Or if they go 
further away, they go in private executive jets so they do not even 
have to deal with the deregulation of the airline industry, the 
overcrowding and all those sorts of things. But these are true 
international folks. They are talking about globalization and 
international trade and all the benefits. There are benefits for them, 
just not for the masses of America.

  Whatever happened to Henry Ford? ``My workers are going to be able to 
afford the product they make.'' We all did better under that system. We 
created the envy of the world here in the United States. We created the 
largest middle class. Everybody did better together. But a few people 
got greedy, and now they have got their hands on the levers of power, 
and they simply do not care about the majority. But they might find 
ways to distract them with wedge issues, social issues, or something 
else to distract them from the loss of their jobs, the opportunity for 
their kids, the lack of educational opportunities, or the future of 
this country.
  I do not think the American people are going to be fooled for very 
long. They are going to demand changes, and we have to bring about 
changes. This trade policy is one of the most devastating levers of 
power that they have to wield against the American system, against 
American workers, and against the wealth of this country, and they are 
using it ruthlessly.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, my colleague put his finger right on 
it when we talk about these workers and the way that they are paid.
  The key to our Nation's success, and the gentleman mentioned Henry 
Ford before, the key to our Nation's success is that workers share in 
the wealth they create. They are able to do that because we have a 
democracy. They are able to do that because we have a relatively strong 
labor union movement. They are able to do that because of mobility of 
labor, and a whole bunch of reasons in a free society here.
  When workers are more productive, as they are in the United States, 
as they increasingly get more productive, that means their wages should 
go up. They have not in large part because of the downward pull of 
these trade agreements. In Mexico, for instance, and I remember David 
Bonior, the former Democratic whip, talking about this a dozen years 
ago, as productivity went up in Mexico, wages did not go up with them 
because they had a government that was authoritarian by and large, 
because they did not have free trade unions. They had government-
controlled, business-controlled trade unions.
  So do we want a country like that? Do we want a country where the 
workers share in the wealth they produce, or do we want a country like 
a bunch of Wal-Marts, where the workers barely get minimum wage in many 
cases, rarely have health benefits, and often have to work off the 
clock while the Wal-Mart family, several members of the Wal-Mart 
family, rank as some of the richest people in the country? Billions of 
dollars have accrued to many members of the family, billions and 
billions, tens of billions to many members of the family, but the 
workers do not really share in the wealth they produce.
  That is a society that I do not think we want. We have seen that this 
country worked best, as the gentleman from Oregon mentioned, when 
workers at Ford got paid a wage where they could buy the cars, and 
workers all across the board were paid a decent livable wage that made 
an absolute difference in their lives.
  I go back, Mr. Speaker, to some of the promises we have seen in this 
administration's economic policy. Understand again that the foundation 
of their economic policy is more tax cuts for the wealthiest people in 
our society and more trade agreements that end up shipping jobs 
overseas. That is the foundation of their society. It makes the 
wealthy, the Bush contributors, wealthier; it weakens and dilutes the 
middle class; and it is particularly hard on families barely making it.
  We are going to see more promises in the next 8 months, as we have 
seen all along. This administration promised 3.4 million jobs. After 
September 11 they made a promise there would be 3.4 million more jobs 
in 2003 than there were when he took office. In fact, what we have seen 
is 1.7 million jobs lost. Again, more tax cuts for the rich and more 
trade agreements that ship jobs overseas. That is what the economic job 
loss is all about.

                              {time}  2200

  President Bush at the same time said we will have a budget deficit of 
only $14 billion. In fact, the budget deficit is $521 billion. We see 
these kinds of promises, and we will see them again. We see it in the 
new economic report. They promise 2.6 million jobs this year alone. Now 
they are backing off that. That is 200,000 jobs a month, and we are 
creating no jobs per month and we are still losing manufacturing jobs. 
They simply have not lived up to any of their promises. The only 
promise they live up to is a promise to their corporate contributors 
that they will continue to do them favors, they will continue to enrich 
them with their tax policy, and with the new laws they make on the 
Medicare bill and the Social Security bill and the environmental bills 
and the energy bills.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland).
  Mr. STRICKLAND. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. 
Brown). The gentleman made reference to our former colleague, David 
Bonior. I remember when NAFTA was passed some 10 years ago; and David 
Bonior stood on this floor, as did others, and told us the truth. The 
other side told us what we now know are falsehoods. They told us if we 
pass NAFTA we are going to create more jobs in America and raise the 
standard of living of the folks who live in Mexico. They said it is a 
win/win. We know that manufacturing wage rates have actually declined 
in Mexico since NAFTA, and we have lost jobs here in this country.
  This trade deal is only a part of the overall picture. The gentleman 
from Ohio (Mr. Brown) pointed out we have an exploding budget deficit. 
A Medicare bill was passed at 6 a.m. after arm twisting and deals were 
made, and perhaps even illegal activities, we do not know for sure, but 
that is certainly worthy of investigation; and it is being 
investigated. The fact is we now find out that it is not a $400 billion 
bill; it is a $534 billion bill, in part because there are no cost 
savings. There is no way to control the costs of prescription drugs in 
that bill because of our sellout to the pharmaceutical industry, 
basically.
  But I believe this trade issue is the overarching issue because we 
cannot deal with our health care problems; we cannot deal with all of 
the other problems that face us, funding education, prescription drugs 
for our seniors, caring for our veterans; we just cannot do that unless 
we solve this trade deal that is bleeding jobs out of this country.
  I get discouraged sometimes, and I would like to ask the gentleman 
from Ohio (Mr. Brown), what does the gentleman think can be done to 
reverse this? What is it going to take to reverse this?
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, it is clear that either the President 
needs to change his mind, or we need to change the President. President 
Bush

[[Page H550]]

came to Richfield, Ohio, on Labor Day, and to his credit, he created a 
job that day. He said he was going to start a new office called the job 
of the manufacturing czar. He promised the job, but he has not filled 
the manufacturing czar's job yet. It is pretty clear when the 
President's answer to everything is the same tired, trickle-down 
economics, tax breaks for the wealthiest people and more trade 
agreements that hemorrhage jobs. If he is not going to change his mind, 
then this country is pretty clearly going on a different course.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, there is one exception to free trade. 
People have to realize who runs this administration. There is one 
exception to free trade, and it is for the first time in a trade 
agreement with Australia. It is a prohibition on the importation or the 
reimportation of FDA-approved, U.S.-manufactured pharmaceuticals from 
Australia, not because they are unsafe like the phony baloney they are 
giving us about Canada, but because they are cheaper there. That is in 
the trade agreement. What is that doing in the trade agreement if this 
is not all about big business and multinational corporations? It is not 
about making things cheaper for American consumers. If it was, why did 
President Bush insist on prohibiting the reimportation of FDA-approved, 
U.S.-manufactured drugs from Australia at half the price? It is not 
about making things less expensive and benefiting our consumers and our 
society. It is all about benefiting a very privileged few.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. 
Strickland) and the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) for their 10 to 
15 years of working on these issues.
  Mrs. JONES of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I rise today as a member of the Ways 
and Means Committee to express my concerns about the Central American 
Free Trade Agreement. My concerns regarding this agreement cover many 
issues such as access to U.S. markets for agricultural goods, textiles 
and apparel, rules giving foreign investors the right to circumvent 
domestic courts and sue countries in binding arbitration, and the 
failure of the CAFTA to include enforceable, internationally-
recognized, core labor standards.
  CAFTA will lead to the expansion of export-oriented factories that 
are notorious for poor working conditions and exploitive working 
environments. Central America's textile industry is one of the most 
developed in the region. Companies that hire mostly women aged 15-25 at 
low wages and under poor working conditions produce most of the 
clothing.
  One of the poorest groups in the region are women that reside in 
rural areas. In fact, women are the heads of greater than 8 million 
rural households. Support for the rural sector in Central America is 
reflected by the lack of investment in rural infrastructure, financial 
services and human capital in the region. CAFTA only exacerbates the 
problems of the financially vulnerable small and medium sized farms 
forcing increased impoverishment of rural women.
  Additionally, I want to discuss the effect these agreements will have 
on our trade deficit and how they will harm American workers.
  The City of Cleveland in my congressional district currently has an 
unemployment rate of 13.1 percent. Much of that is due to lost jobs in 
the manufacturing sector. In fact, Cleveland has lost nearly 72,000 
manufacturing jobs in the last four years. Additionally, in the State 
of Ohio, 18.8 percent of manufacturing job loss can be directly 
attributed to international trade. I anticipate that the most likely 
traded item this agreement facilitates will only be more U.S. jobs.
  Like NAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement will cause 
shifts in production from the US that will further engorge the already 
bloated trade deficit and lead to the loss of more US jobs. Both of 
these agreements facilitate the shift of U.S. investments while doing 
little to increase U.S. exports. Even U.S. investors do not escape 
unscathed, because the agreements contain large loopholes that allow 
foreign investors to claim rights above and beyond those our domestic 
investors enjoy. The agreement before us today is taking us down the 
path of further job losses and I urge my colleagues to oppose this 
measure.
  Thank you Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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