[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 59 (Tuesday, April 15, 2008)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3019-S3020]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     COLOMBIA FREE TRADE AGREEMENT

  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, earlier this month, President Bush sent up 
another trade agreement to the House of Representatives. This agreement 
is a bilateral trade agreement with Colombia. He calls it a ``free 
trade agreement,'' a term we use around here--I am not sure why, except 
that it sounds good, because these trade agreements generally are--I 
don't have it in front of me, but it was too thick to bind in its 
original printing. It is about seven or eight hundred pages.
  NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement--which the Presiding 
Officer opposed 15 years ago, as I did--was even longer than that. The 
way they sell these agreements is they say we are eliminating the 
tariffs on the trade relationship between--in this case it is Colombia, 
and Colombia still

[[Page S3020]]

has tariffs on American goods. We have eliminated tariffs on Colombian 
goods. If we were to pass a real free trade agreement, it would be 
three, four, five, six pages long and eliminate the tariff schedule, 
making a real free trade agreement.
  These are not free trade agreements the President sends us, nor are 
they free trade agreements that Presidents in the past sent. They are 
hundreds and hundreds of pages of protectionism, pages outlining 
protections for the drug companies, protections for the energy 
companies, for financial services companies, banks and others, and 
protections for the pharmaceutical industry. That is what these 
supposed free trade agreements are.
  It is interesting that those of us who oppose these ``free trade 
agreements'' because they don't protect our communities, frankly, are 
called ``protectionists.'' If we are going to write these agreements 
and build in protections for the drug companies, the oil industry, and 
the other energy companies, the financial services companies, the 
banks, and the insurance companies, we also should build in protections 
for our workers in New Jersey and in Ohio, protections for our 
communities in Lima, and Mansfield, and Tiffin, OH, protections for 
food safety, and build in protections for consumer product safety.
  But that is not what they do. What is most curious about these 
agreements that the President has sent up--in this case the most recent 
is Colombia--it reminds me of the old Einstein saying that the 
definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over 
again and expecting a different outcome.
  We have seen, in almost 15-plus years in the House of 
Representatives, and now in the Senate--and it is roughly the same 
period of the Presiding Officer--we have seen our trade deficit go from 
$38 billion in 1992, to in excess of $800 billion last year. It is hard 
to know exactly what that means. A $38 billion deficit--that means we 
buy $38 billion more in this country than we sell to other countries. 
It is $800 billion more that we buy in this country than we sell to 
other countries. That is a huge amount of dollars, obviously.
  That $800 billion--it was boiled down by the first President Bush, 
who said that a billion dollar trade surplus, or deficit, translated 
into 13,000 jobs. So if you have a trade surplus--in other words, if 
you are selling more than you are buying as a nation, a billion 
dollars, according to President Bush the first, would add up to about 
13,000 new jobs--net gain of jobs in your country. But if you have $1 
billion deficit, it means it is a 13,000 net job loss in your country. 
We have not a billion dollar trade deficit but an $800 billion one. Do 
the math. What does that mean in lost jobs? It means an awful lot of 
lost manufacturing jobs in my State, from Cleveland, to Dayton, to 
Lima, to Canton, to Kent, to Ravenna, to all over our State. It means a 
lot of other lost jobs, not just manufacturing jobs. When American 
Standard shuts down in Tiffin, and when a company shuts down in 
Bucyrus, or in Ashland, it means fewer firefighters, fewer 
schoolteachers, fewer restaurant workers, fewer realtors, and fewer 
people who serve those jobs--those people who had the manufacturing 
jobs.
  So it is pretty clear that the trade agreements, in addition to other 
damage they have done, clearly--when you have a trade deficit that goes 
from $38 billion to $800 billion in a decade and a half, they have done 
significant damage to our country and, most importantly, to our 
communities and our families.
  I will close on something specifically unique to the Colombia trade 
agreement. We know that in Colombia they have had a significant number 
of murders committed against union activists. I heard a Member of the 
House say today there were more union activists--organizing union 
leaders--murdered in Colombia than anywhere in the rest of the world 
combined.
  Although President Uribe of Colombia says union violence has come 
down and his spokespeople in this body say the same, the fact is that 
union murders, deaths of union activists in the first 3 months of 2008 
are almost twice what they were in 2007. Adding insult to injury, we 
have seen fewer and fewer convictions. Only about 3 percent of these 
murders have resulted in convictions of the people who have been guilty 
of the murders. To add even further insult to this whole issue, the 
American Government, the State Department has said the paramilitary 
vigilantes who are allied often with the Uribe Government who have 
killed the union activists are classified by our State Department as 
terrorists. We, in essence, are supporting the Uribe Government that is 
allied with paramilitary vigilantes who are called terrorists by our 
own Government.
  I don't quite see why we would want to reward that Government. I want 
President Uribe to succeed. I think he has done decent works. But I 
don't think we should reward him with a trade agreement and lose the 
leverage we have to try to get the activist murder rate down and also 
so that the people have the opportunity to join unions in Colombia. 
Fewer than 5 percent of the Colombian workforce is unionized. That is 
the lowest or second lowest in the Western Hemisphere.
  They are not doing what they need to do to bring working families 
into the middle class, as we have seen in our country. The reason we 
have a prosperous Zanesville and a prosperous Springfield, OH, in part 
is because of people's ability to join a union and bargain collectively 
for better wages, health care, and pensions.
  In the country of Colombia, they do not have those opportunities. For 
us to put the imprimatur of the U.S. on a free-trade agreement for that 
social structure and government to me makes little sense.
  The House of Representatives delayed the bill for several months. If 
it gets to this body, I am hopeful Members will do the right thing and 
say to President Bush: It is not time to do a trade agreement. This 
trade policy in our country has failed. It is not working for our 
country, it is not working for our national security, it is not working 
for our communities, it is not working for our families, and it is not 
working to build the middle class in this society the way we should.
  I yield the floor.

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