[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 3 (Thursday, January 8, 2015)]
[House]
[Pages H142-H147]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     THE TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2015, the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Pocan) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. POCAN. Mr. Speaker, I am here on behalf of the Congressional 
Progressive Caucus in our Special Order hour where we want to share 
with the American public our concerns about a trade deal that we think 
will be coming through Congress in the first few months or first half 
of this session.
  The Trans-Pacific Partnership is the biggest and the baddest of the 
trade deals that we have seen come before this country. It represents a 
dozen countries. From Chile to Japan, almost 800 million people are 
represented by countries that would be included within the Trans-
Pacific Partnership, and it represents 40 percent of the world's 
economy.
  Yet the trade agreement has been drafted largely in secret. No one 
from the public has seen it. Quite honestly, Members of Congress 
haven't seen it. But about 600 people in this country are involved with 
the drafting of this trade deal. It has great ramifications that go 
beyond trade, the 29 chapters that make up the Trans-Pacific 
Partnership.
  We anticipate there also could be a move from leadership to introduce 
legislation to Fast Track the trade deal. What that means to Fast Track 
it is to really take away the public's ability, through their elected 
Members of Congress, to have a say, to be able to debate and to amend 
the trade deal.
  We anticipate that could be one of the first votes that would come to 
us this Congress about trade. We at the Progressive Caucus want to 
share with the public the various concerns that we may have about this 
very, very large, all-encompassing trade deal that could affect 
American jobs, could affect food safety, could affect environmental 
concerns, could affect things like buy American laws, currency policy, 
and many, many more issues.
  I am joined by a number of Members of Congress today who would like 
to take part in this, and I would like to, at this time, yield to my 
colleague from the great State of New York, who has put a number of 
efforts towards this in working very strongly to make sure the public 
knows what is in the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
  I would like to yield to Mr. Paul Tonko from New York.
  Mr. TONKO. Mr. Speaker, I thank Representative Pocan. It is great to 
join him in this hour of discussion about the Fast Track method that 
has been associated with trade negotiations and with fair trade/free 
trade concepts alike.
  I represent a district in upstate New York, the 20th Congressional 
District, which is primarily the confluence of the Hudson and Mohawk 
River Valleys, and it was there that we became the donor area to the 
Erie Canal that gave birth to westward movement for this Nation and 
sparked an industrial revolution. It was there that we saw the 
development of a necklace of communities, dubbed mill towns, that then 
rose as the epicenters of invention and innovation that saw 
manufacturing booming as we went forward as a nation.
  Many an immigrant called that their new home, that region their new 
home, and they tethered their American Dream to the prosperity that was 
continuing to grow in the region. I think back to the manufacturing 
sector and all that it meant to my ancestors, all it meant to me and 
the opportunities that came into my life, and it was that empowerment 
that came through the availability of work, the dignity of work, the 
opportunity to earn a paycheck that really made a difference.
  I think of those same towns today having really lost millions of jobs 
across America. We are reflective of all those towns that became those 
manufacturing centers, that enabled people again to engage in 
meaningful employment and to be able to have those dreams, those 
American Dreams fully, fully strengthened by the opportunity for work.
  When I see the reduction of standards, of environmental standards, 
where we are willing to have our children exploited by the ugly sins of 
the past with concerns for child labor laws that might erode, when we 
think about some of the inequities that are brought to bear with the 
denial of collective bargaining, all of these items have snuck into 
trade negotiations. There is an importance for Congress to be able to 
provide the oversight and the assessment of these various negotiations, 
where we can look at these trade deals and suggest amendments or have 
sound debate.
  We not only have a right as Members of Congress, I think the public 
that we represent has a need for Congress to review these documents and 
to suggest improvements. So I look forward to this hour of discussion 
where you and I and our several colleagues will join together in 
speaking to the wisdom, or lack thereof, of some of the processes that 
have followed this entire trade discussion.
  We are talking about a trade deficit now that has ballooned beyond 
belief, to record proportions, and where we are putting our economy and 
that American Dream at risk and where we are denying meaningful 
employment to those whom we represent here in Washington.
  I thank you for leading us in this hour of discussion, and I know 
that the information that we will exchange will be very critical and 
important to people who will be airing into this discussion and 
allowing them to trade those, exchange those ideas with their given 
elected representatives.
  With that, I thank you for leading us in this important discussion.
  Mr. POCAN. Thank you, Representative Tonko. As you mentioned, one of 
the concerns we have, not only in your region but in my district, is 
the loss of jobs that we have had because of some of these past trade 
deals that haven't quite gone as promised.
  It has been estimated we have lost 4 million U.S. jobs due to just 
three trade deals, and three-quarters of those jobs lost were in the 
manufacturing sector.
  I had mentioned earlier today at a press conference in Rock County, 
Wisconsin, a county that I share with Representative Paul Ryan, we used 
to have Parker Pen, made good American-made quality pens. A thousand 
jobs at one time were in that community working at Parker Pen. In early 
2010, the final jobs had moved to Mexico. That is just one example of 
the number of jobs that we lost just in south central Wisconsin, much 
less Flint, Michigan, and Los Angeles, California, and other parts of 
the country. So we appreciate your efforts and your comments.
  I would like to also yield to another colleague of mine from the 
great State of California, someone who has been a strong member of our 
Progressive Caucus. I would like to yield to Representative Janice Hahn 
of the great State of California.
  Ms. HAHN. Mr. Speaker, I am rising in solidarity today with millions 
of American working families who are deeply concerned about the impact 
that harmful trade deals have on our Nation. I am proud to join with my 
colleagues in the Progressive Caucus in explaining why we oppose this 
so-called Fast Track authority for international trade deals.

[[Page H143]]

  Let me be clear. I am very much pro-trade. Trade is essential to the 
economy of my district, and I am proud to represent the Port of Los 
Angeles, the largest container port in the country. Trade is essential 
to our economy in my district, but it is essential to the economy of 
the whole State of California--and of course, dare I say, the whole 
Nation--the many wonderful and diverse exports we do promote in our 
State: films, creative content made in Hollywood, the fruits and 
vegetables grown in Central Valley, the wines from Sonoma and Napa, the 
innovative products developed in our Silicon Valley, or the goods that 
are manufactured in California factories.
  Trade is essential to our entire U.S. economy. Trade creates and 
sustains American jobs, not only at our ports in this country, but 
throughout the entire supply chain. Trade helps American businesses 
reach new markets, grow, prosper.
  Trade helps American consumers gain access to many products that we 
value, and trade is not an exclusive Democratic issue or Republican 
issue. Everyone who wants our Nation to prosper understands the 
importance and value of engaging in trade and being globally 
competitive and connected.
  That is why I am proud that as a progressive Democrat I was able to 
join with a conservative Republican, Ted Poe, and we have worked 
together to cochair our Congressional PORTS Caucus. We now have about 
90 Members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats, coming together over 
the issue of investing in and sustaining and making competitive our 
Nation's seaports. We might disagree on other policy issues, but we 
have a common understanding of the economic benefits of trade, 
especially trade passing through our ports. So I want to say it again, 
and I hope it is clear that I strongly support trade.
  However, I am opposed to trade deals with other countries that have 
harmful consequences on our American workers and deals that give unfair 
advantages to those who exploit workers and destroy the environment. 
That is why I oppose Fast Track.
  I believe with all my heart that Congress has a constitutional duty 
to oversee trade agreements, but Fast Track takes away our authority to 
regulate trade and to be involved in these negotiations. Under Fast 
Track, we would only be able to vote for or against a deal that has 
been negotiated without us, and we would not even have the opportunity 
to amend it. That sounds like a recipe for a raw deal, not a good deal.
  I am honored to hold public office and to have earned the support and 
the trust of those who depend on me to stand up for them and what is 
best for them. I take my responsibility very seriously to represent 
them and act in their interests, as I think every Member of Congress 
does, and I think our constituents are counting on us to make trade 
deals that are fair and beneficial.
  I think Fast Track undercuts our authority and our ability to provide 
this oversight. I hope that we can support trade and have good trade 
agreements, but I hope we can all oppose the idea of Fast Tracking 
these trade deals.
  Mr. POCAN. Thank you, Representative Hahn. I think you said it very 
eloquently. We are all for trade. I don't think there is a Member in 
this body who doesn't want to see trade happen, but we want fair trade. 
We don't want the so-called free trade that makes it harder for 
American workers, that depresses our wages and ultimately includes a 
whole lot of other things that affect everything from food safety to 
environmental concerns to our ability to have something as basic as buy 
American laws and buy local laws. So thank you for your comments.
  I would also like to yield to a gentleman, a colleague, and a friend 
from the State of Michigan, someone who represents the Flint and 
Saginaw area. I would like to yield to Representative Dan Kildee from 
the great State of Michigan.
  Mr. KILDEE. First of all, thank you to my colleague, Mr. Pocan, for 
his leadership on this and for yielding.
  Mr. Speaker, this is a really important subject for the American 
people. It is a really important subject for the people that I 
represent in Flint, Michigan, in Saginaw, Michigan, Bay City.
  You mentioned Flint. It is my hometown. I was born and raised there. 
September 16, 1908, General Motors was incorporated in Flint, Michigan, 
and it was a company that brought together carriage-makers and wheel-
makers, and they put the world on wheels.
  About 30 years later, the workers in that city at General Motors 
organized and got the first UAW contract. Between the auto industry 
itself and the organized workers who were able to then claim their fair 
share of the tremendous wealth generated by their productive capacity, 
we built the American middle class. We built an amazing society that 
gives opportunity, gave opportunity, I think, to just about anybody who 
felt they could work hard and would put in the time and get a fair wage 
and get decent benefits and be able to go to work with some dignity.

                              {time}  1645

  We built something that was truly amazing.
  It was not that long ago, because of globalization and because of 
trade deals like the one that is being considered right now, that the 
Federal Government, rightfully, and this President, rightfully, stood 
up for the American auto industry and put it back on its feet. They 
gave the American autoworker--the American worker--the chance to 
reclaim that dignity that so many people fought for even decades ago.
  What I worry about is that everything that those people worked and 
fought for could go away. In fact, even the great work that this 
President did to rescue the American auto industry could all be for 
naught if we continue down this path of pursuing trade policy that puts 
corporate and stockholder and offshore interests, really, in front of 
the interests of the American people and the American worker.
  My hometown has seen this play itself out. I remember--I was in local 
government--when the North American Free Trade Agreement was adopted. 
We keep hearing that the agreement that is being contemplated right now 
is a vastly different sort of agreement, but we don't see that. What we 
do hear and see is the very same language and the very same rhetoric 
and the very same explanations or excuses about the need to grant Fast 
Track authority to negotiate this agreement and bring it back to 
Congress for a ``yes'' or ``no'' vote. The same arguments that are 
being made now were being made then, and the people whom I represent 
truly believed that they were sold a bill of goods.
  At one point in time, in my hometown of Flint, Michigan, we had 
79,000 autoworkers. This was a city that was never more than 200,000 in 
population, so this is a city that really grew up around American 
manufacturing. It was direct GM employees, but it was suppliers and a 
whole community built around this incredible productive capacity that 
started over a century ago; but in just a few short years, we have gone 
from that 79,000 number to about 10,000 autoworkers in my hometown.
  When I think about trade and these trade deals, it is not a question 
of sort of the big geopolitical tensions that we are trying to address. 
It is not even a matter of this kind of esoteric argument about the 
philosophy of trade policy. It is about Flint and Saginaw and Bay City, 
Michigan, families who have worked hard their whole lives and who stand 
to lose everything because we are continuing to pursue trade policy 
that thinks about the short-term profits of multinational corporations 
and not about strengthening the long-term integrity of the American 
middle class. This is a dangerous path that we are on.
  What is particularly concerning to me is that, when I go home, as I 
do--as you all do--we get questions about this.
  The questions are: ``We keep hearing that this trade agreement will 
have a high standard, a high set of standards, and that it will not be 
like past agreements.'' Even some here in Washington have said that we 
are fighting old battles and that this is a new day. Yet, when I have 
to answer to my constituents' questions like: ``Will these agreements 
have environmental protections and enforcement mechanisms for those 
environmental standards unlike some previous agreements?'' I have to 
say, ``I don't really know because we don't have access to the 
documents. We don't have access to the process. We haven't been asked 
to weigh in.''

[[Page H144]]

  ``Will the agreements have labor standards that guarantee that 
American workers won't have to compete with nations that outlaw labor 
unions?'' for example.
  ``I don't know because we have not seen that language.''
  We are being asked to accept on faith that, somehow, miraculously, 
this trade agreement is going to look dramatically different than 
others, even of those that have been fairly recently passed.
  Finally, I am asked, ``Will there be protections to keep other 
nations from manipulating their currency?'' No matter what else is in 
any of these trade agreements, if currency can be manipulated to a 
point so that the price of one nation's exports makes it impossible for 
us to compete with them, all is lost.
  From what we hear, there will be no currency provisions or at least, 
if there are any at all, they certainly won't be strong enough to have 
any influence whatsoever on the ability of these nations to undermine 
the American economy by dumping goods, by manipulating currency in a 
fashion that makes it impossible for us to compete.
  This is the wrong track for this country. It is something for which 
Congress needs to stand up and assert its constitutional role in 
defending. I stand with my colleagues, and I know many, many others who 
simply are not going to sit idly by no matter who the President is--a 
Democrat, a Republican, or otherwise--and allow the prerogatives of 
Congress, which means the prerogatives of the people who sent us here, 
to be overlooked. It would be a dangerous path for us to take, and I am 
very grateful to my friend Mr. Pocan for his leadership and for the 
leadership of many others here on this issue.
  I am glad to stand with you in fighting this battle.
  Mr. POCAN. Again, thank you so much, Representative Kildee.
  When you mentioned the auto industry, I have to admit that I grew up 
in Kenosha, Wisconsin. American Motors was the company that ran the 
town. Almost everyone had a family member or a neighbor who worked at 
American Motors. Now, granted, we made Pacers and Gremlins, so there 
were some mistakes along the way. American Motors eventually went away 
to Renault, and it went away to Chrysler. It went away to nothing as 
well as the people who had the strong family-supporting wages from that 
auto industry. Now the companies that have replaced the auto industry 
are, quite honestly, jelly bean manufacturers and companies like that. 
It does not pay the same wage. It doesn't support the family in the 
same way.
  Just as we were promised with the Korean free trade agreement, 
especially around autos, in that 70,000 jobs would be created, instead, 
60,000 jobs were lost. That is exactly why we have to be involved now 
while it matters, not after it has been negotiated. We don't have a 
debate, and we don't have a chance to amend it. So thank you for all of 
your work on this on behalf of the people of Michigan.
  I would also like to yield to another colleague of mine, someone who 
has been a stalwart in the Progressive Caucus, someone I respected long 
before I ever had the chance to come to Congress. I would like to yield 
to my great colleague, Representative Barbara Lee, from the great State 
of California.
  Ms. LEE. Thank you very much.
  Let me thank you, Congressman Pocan, for yielding but also for your 
tireless leadership on behalf of the American people and for leading 
not only this Progressive Caucus special hour but each and every one of 
them for so many years. You have been our voice. I think the American 
people are hearing from us through you, so I just want to thank you 
again for really beating the drum across America, allowing the American 
people to know what the real deal is here in Washington, D.C.
  Let me also thank all of my colleagues in the Congressional 
Progressive Caucus for rising tonight to talk about why we are strongly 
opposed to Fast Track for the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

  Mr. Speaker, when it comes to trade deals and American jobs, Congress 
should never be a rubber stamp. As the Representative from California's 
13th Congressional District, I have the honor and the privilege of 
representing the Port of Oakland--one of our Nation's busiest 
seaports--and also the airport. I support trade because it is critical 
to the economy of my district and our Nation. Trade is good when it is 
fair, when it is open, when it is transparent, and when it creates 
good-paying jobs here in America. Trade is bad, however, when it ships 
American jobs overseas so that the 1 percent can reap even greater 
profits. For this reason, I join the vast majority of Americans--
Americans from both parties--in opposing Fast Track for the TPP. Bad 
trade hurts all American workers--American families, American 
businesses, and also, especially, those individuals and businesses in 
communities of color.
  Of the 2.7 million jobs lost because of the U.S.-China trade deal, a 
disproportionately high percentage--35 percent, mind you--came from 
communities of color. That is outrageous. Now, after these individuals 
lost their jobs, their situations got even worse. When they found a new 
job, it was, on average, for a 30 percent lower wage. The loss of these 
jobs and wages totals more than $10 billion in lost economic growth for 
these communities, not one time, but each and every year. Enacting 
another bad trade deal will continue to prevent communities of color 
from building wealth and moving into the middle class. In addition to 
the negative impact on communities of color, Fast Track for TPP will 
not provide an opportunity to add critical labor and environmental 
protections that are critical to respecting human rights and preserving 
our planet.
  That is why my colleagues and I are here, saying ``no'' to Fast Track 
for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Trade negotiations should not be 
conducted in back rooms. The American people and Members of Congress 
deserve to know what is in these deals. That is why, again, Congress is 
so important. Otherwise, people have no say. They have no voice on 
trade policies that really affect their economic livelihoods--their 
ability to put food on the table and their ability to aspire into the 
middle class. Fast Track for the Trans-Pacific Partnership does not 
help the American people. It only allows special interests and 
corporations to craft trade deals that are bad for the American people.
  Mr. Speaker, it is time to turn the lights on the TPP. If the United 
States is going to pursue a trade deal in the Pacific, Congress needs 
to fully debate it so we are certain that it creates jobs and all the 
protections that we all are standing for and know about and want right 
here in America.
  Over the last 20 years, the U.S. has lost nearly 3.5 million jobs due 
to NAFTA and the United States-China trade deal. Many of these jobs 
were lost in California and in communities of color. Let's not make the 
same mistake again. Let's stand together in opposing Fast Track because 
it will sacrifice American jobs and environmental protections in the 
name of international corporate profits. Let's take Fast Track off of 
the table, and let's start talking about creating good-paying American 
jobs for American families.
  Thank you, once again, for your tremendous leadership.
  Mr. POCAN. Thank you, Representative Lee.
  I look forward to working with you on our Progressive alternative 
also for the budget, when, I think, we will showcase many of those 
initiatives that we would much rather see the country do to help create 
good-paying jobs and get more people back to work. So thank you for all 
of your efforts.
  At this point, I would like to yield to a colleague of mine from the 
great State of Ohio, who has seen much of this firsthand and who, 
today, has very eloquently explained her experiences of being around 
when NAFTA had passed. Let me yield to Representative Marcy Kaptur from 
the great State of Ohio.
  Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I thank the very able gentleman from 
Wisconsin, Congressman Pocan, for organizing all of us this evening and 
for his indefatigable efforts to tell the truth about what is happening 
to the workers of our country and those around the world.
  I rise with you tonight because America--our wonderful country--has a 
huge ``good jobs'' deficit because we have a gigantic free trade 
deficit. Our trade policies export more U.S. jobs than U.S. products. 
More and more foreign imports come across our shores

[[Page H145]]

than we send goods out, and the gap grows wider every decade at 
extraordinary proportion. Never before in American history have so many 
good jobs been outsourced off our shores. America's workers have had 
income shortages--every family knows it--because America has had this 
jobs hemorrhage due to the flawed, Fast Tracked free trade agreements 
that have been ramrodded through this Congress.
  Since 1975, when Wall Street's free trade regimen began to lock down, 
America has amassed a $9.5 trillion trade deficit with the world. If 
you count up every year, numbers don't lie, and this has translated 
into a gigantic, unprecedented jobs loss of over 47.5 million lost 
American jobs--good jobs from coast to coast, living-wage jobs, jobs 
that have evaporated from our communities, jobs that have been shipped 
out. We know the places as we just look at the tags on any products--
Mexico, China, Vietnam, Korea, Bangladesh, Honduras, Guatemala, Turkey, 
El Salvador--to dozens of Third World nations--frankly, most very 
undemocratic--where workers are treated like a bonded class. Workers 
everywhere--here, too--are being treated like expendable parts. Yes, 
American jobs are being shipped out to penny-wage sweatshops behind the 
Iron Curtain of anonymous towns in distant countries most Americans 
will never visit.

                              {time}  1700

  Anonymity, worker exploitation, and hidden squalor are fundamental to 
free trade. And so are the stories of Americans who struggle to earn a 
living, who lose their jobs and are forgotten, are forgotten in their 
plight.
  In our country, the impact on the average American family has been a 
loss of real income of $7,000 a year. Imagine that. The public knows 
it.
  The people who elected me to Congress--and I thank them--have allowed 
me to be a voice, to put the ugly puzzle of outsourcing together. And I 
have made it my mission to travel the world to find the companies that 
fled our shores. And I have traveled to find them.
  I have lots of photos, and I have lots of interviews. And I have had 
time to talk to unemployed Americans too--far too many--and the 
exploited workers of developing nations and to visit the plants that 
have been displaced from this country and built elsewhere.
  The titans who run these global transnational corporations, their 
operatives, and the Wall Street giants that finance them couldn't care 
less about workers anywhere or the communities in which they live. And, 
frankly, these new bosses of global production don't care about 
democracy or the rule of law either. They pay whatever they want, and 
they can pay off as they see fit.
  I have seen workers making Maytag washing machines in Monterrey, 
Mexico. Those used to be made in Newton, Iowa. These Mexican workers 
don't earn enough to buy the very washing machines they make. And with 
the jobs lost from Newton, the poverty rate in Newton has dramatically 
increased in the town that Fred Maytag proudly helped build. However--I 
don't know if you have noticed--the quality of those machines has gone 
down too. Who can be proud of what is happening?
  I have visited the homes where those workers from Monterrey live and 
other maquiladora factory zones and have see firsthand their 
impoverished living standards.
  I have stood at a surreal location in Mexico following NAFTA's 
passage called Michigan-Ohio Avenues and witnessed the jobs outsourced 
from our country from a windshield wiper factory that used to be 
located in New York.
  I have met women in the garment industry from Honduras and El 
Salvador who earn 10 cents for every T-shirt they produce in those 
sweat shops down there, barricaded off behind barbed wire and 
outsourced from places like the Carolinas. The women are being paid 10 
cents an hour for every T-shirt that then comes in here and is sold for 
$20 each at stores and shopping centers around the country. Meanwhile, 
the booming garment and textile industry of the Carolinas, like the 
furniture industry too, has all but disappeared, and the tens of 
thousands of jobs that went with them. I visited those massive 
shuttered factories, and they reminded me of the auto plants that 
existed in my industrial region.
  I have tracked furniture jobs to Vietnam and have seen child laborers 
perched with their bare feet on the edge of large wooden bowls that 
they sand and spray with lacquer paint, wearing no face masks, with no 
air filters, breathing in the fumes and chemicals certain to damage 
their fragile lungs and bodies.
  Let me just say in closing, as an Ohio Representative, we have lost 
over 5 million manufacturing jobs alone in northern Ohio since the 
passage of NAFTA, which I fought with every ounce of being that I had 
here in 1993. We lost that fight. A 12-votes switch here would have 
made the difference. And as I speak here today, another global company, 
Hugo Boss, a German-owned company, is shutting down a factory in 
Brooklyn, Ohio, where workers had their pay cut 17 percent 2 years ago 
to save that company. You can walk into any Hugo Boss outlet, and you 
can see men's suits selling for $1,200 apiece. What a tragedy. What a 
tragedy for our country. What a tragedy for workers globally.
  I will say to my wonderful colleague from Wisconsin (Mr. Pocan), 
thank you so much for doing this.
  In terms of China--and others will cover this more completely--just 
in the past year, 2013, the latest complete year of data, our country 
assumed $319 billion of trade deficit with the nation of China just in 
that year, just in that year with that one country. Because of that 
deficit, we have lost an additional 1,595,000 more American jobs, just 
with this one country in 1 year.
  The answer to balanced global growth is to pay workers a living wage 
and to respect their work, not exploit it. The answer to balanced 
growth is to stop the outsourcing of U.S. jobs and to pry open the 
closed markets of the world, starting with Japan, China, and Korea. And 
the answer to balanced growth and fair trade is to stop the hemorrhage 
of more jobs from this country by defeating any more deals like NAFTA 
and all of its offspring, and the Fast Tracking of more jobs that they 
are trying to do in the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
  It is time for America to stand up and for this Congress to stand up 
with the American workers and communities.
  Again, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me this evening.
  Mr. POCAN. Thank you, Representative Kaptur, for all that you have 
done. You have been an articulate spokesperson on behalf of jobs and 
the effects of these bad trade deals on jobs. And I have to say, I am 
really glad you brought up the textile industry, because when we talk 
about the need to work together in this Congress, this is an issue 
where Democrats and Republicans can absolutely unite.
  About 12 years ago, I was on a delegation of the American Council of 
Young Political Leaders. And one of the people on the delegation was a 
very conservative judge from the State of Mississippi. She and I and 
the group had met with some sweatshop workers in Indonesia to talk 
about all the mills that have left, especially in the southern part of 
the United States, and those jobs are pretty much gone forever.
  I have been in business for 27 years, since I had hair. I have had a 
small business. And in that role, we screen-print on T-shirts. And I 
have watched over the years all of the mills that made T-shirts in the 
United States pretty much leave. It is pretty hard to find clothes 
still made in the USA. It is even harder to find them union-made in the 
USA. And this is something that unites people of different political 
ideologies because we see those jobs leaving. It doesn't matter. It is 
not a Democratic job or a Republican job. These bad trade deals too 
often just cost us jobs.
  I appreciate you bringing that up, and thank you again for all that 
you do.
  Next I would like to yield to someone who has been an extraordinary 
leader in this area. She has helped to coordinate Members of Congress 
like no one else, not just on this issue but on many other issues. She 
is an absolutely tireless advocate for the American public and for 
making sure that Congress has the proper role when it comes to trade 
agreements. She is someone whom I am extremely honored to have as a 
colleague and a friend. I would like to

[[Page H146]]

yield to the great Representative Rosa DeLauro from the State of 
Connecticut.
  Ms. DeLAURO. Thank you so much to the gentleman from Wisconsin. 
Again, it is reciprocal. It is just such an honor to serve with you. We 
are simpatico in the views that we hold with regard to this and so many 
others. I am honored to be able to serve with you and to be tied 
together on this critically important issue.
  Earlier today, my colleagues who are on the floor here tonight and 
others who have spoken, we were all at a press conference. And I think 
we can say with one voice that it was one of the broadest advocacy 
coalitions that we have seen come together. It certainly is true for me 
in my 24 years in the House. The advocacy groups and Members of 
Congress came together to oppose Fast Track. It included faith groups, 
human rights groups, labor unions, environmental groups, and consumer 
protection groups. And the purpose, as I said, was to oppose the policy 
known as Fast Track for trade deals.
  Under this Fast Track umbrella, if you will, what happens? Members of 
Congress are denied the opportunity to debate and vote in detail on the 
text of these deals. We cannot have a serious debate, nor can we amend 
the process.
  Negotiations are going on right now between the United States and 11 
other countries. If these negotiations are successful, it will create 
the largest trade deal in history, something called the Trans-Pacific 
Partnership. Yet the details of this trade agreement remain a secret 
from the American people, from the Representatives of the American 
people in this body. The contours of the deal are being sketched out in 
secret, as I have said, by a Who's Who of Wall Street firms, big 
pharmaceutical companies, energy companies, and other corporate 
interests.
  They want to ram the agreement through the Congress, again, without 
amendment and with little opportunity for debate. To me, that is the 
very opposite of what we have been sent here to do.
  I have always opposed Fast Track, no matter who was in the Oval 
Office. I will oppose it again. We cannot, and we must not, really just 
sign away our constitutional duties. We need to retain the ability to 
scrutinize trade deals page by page, line by line, word by word. We 
should do that for all legislation, let alone legislation with such 
far-reaching implications for American workers.
  Some of us remember the debate on this floor or going back home 
during the debate on health care when our constituents and our 
colleagues on the other side of the aisle would say to us, have you 
read the bill? Have you read the bill? How can you vote on a bill that 
you have not read?
  The TPP is 1,000 pages, 1,000 pages. We want to read the bill. That 
is what we are asking for.
  Make no mistake: bad trade deals can have grave consequences for our 
people.
  And it used to be that the working-class families became middle class 
by finding work that paid enough to save a little, buy a home in a safe 
neighborhood, send their kids to college, and leave the next generation 
better off. But today, the good jobs that used to lift people into the 
middle class have been shipped overseas to places where labor is cheap. 
Many of them have gone to countries that get ahead by abusing labor 
rights, polluting the environment, risking public health, or 
manipulating their currency.
  A recent GAO report tells us of unpunished violence against trade 
unionists in Colombia, of union suppression in Guatemala, of abuses 
against foreign workers in Oman. These are all countries that we have 
trade deals with, agreements under which they promised--they promised--
to improve their records. We haven't held them accountable on these 
promises.
  I am not against free trade. I am in favor of fair trade on a level 
playing field. Hardworking Americans will win 9 times out of 10, but 
the competition must be fair.
  A recent Gallup Poll showed that in 2014, the issues Americans most 
often identified as the biggest problem facing our country was ``poor 
government leadership.'' Today, 80 percent of Americans disapprove of 
the job that this institution is doing. Why? Because far too often, we 
are seen as working not for all Americans but for a privileged few: tax 
breaks for millionaires, benefit cuts for the poorest; unprecedented 
paydays for those at the top, dwindling paychecks for everyone else. 
The big economic problem today is that jobs that people have do not pay 
enough to them so that they can live on it. Fast Tracking this trade 
agreement will exacerbate that problem.
  NAFTA-style trade deals are in the same category. For a narrow band 
of wealthy individuals and big corporations with the means to invest 
their money beyond our the borders, they do wonders. For the rest of 
us, they spell disaster. They send our jobs overseas. They erode our 
ability to protect our workers, consumers, and the environment. Worst 
of all, they threaten to saw the legs off the ladder of opportunity 
that leads to the middle class.
  Fast Tracking these deals would be yet another insult to American 
workers, yet another sign of how little their political leaders really 
care about them.

                              {time}  1715

  Instead of our abdicating our constitutional responsibility, let's 
send a clear message: enough is enough. No more offshoring. No more 
NAFTA-style trade deals, no more Fast Track. Let us focus on helping 
American workers, not throwing their jobs away.
  I thank the gentleman from Wisconsin for all of his efforts, and it 
is a privilege to work with you on this issue.
  Mr. POCAN. Again, thank you so much, Representative DeLauro, for all 
your leadership. You are helping to coordinate all of our voices in 
this battle, and we really appreciate that and all your efforts. Thank 
you so much.
  When you brought up the public opinion of Congress, there is no 
question. If you were actually to explain this process to anyone, 
regardless of their political ideology, that for the last 2 years, 
about 600 people in this country from America's biggest corporations 
and Wall Street's biggest banks have been involved in trying to craft 
this legislation that we haven't seen and the American public hasn't 
seen and we are going to be asked to vote on something that would take 
away our ability, sight unseen, to vote to limit our ability to debate 
and to amend any kind of a trade agreement--that is exactly what is 
wrong with Washington. That is why people, I think, get so disgusted 
with Washington.
  We need to stand up, Democrats and Republicans together, to make sure 
that we have our ability to have our voices heard, which is the 
public's voices through Members of Congress. So your efforts on Fast 
Track, on TPP, food safety, and so many areas, thank you so much. 
Again, I appreciate it.
  Another one of our leaders of our caucus is here who has been an 
articulate fighter on so many progressive issues.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from the State of Maryland, 
Representative Donna Edwards, my great colleague.
  Ms. EDWARDS. I want to thank Mr. Pocan for yielding and for his 
leadership for calling us together this evening to talk about what 
trade means to American paychecks.
  Thank you again because I was sitting in my office, and I was 
listening to my colleagues speak so eloquently about the need for 
Congress, for individual Members of Congress representing--those of us 
representing 725,000 Americans, to have a voice in a process that is so 
important to American paychecks.
  As I sat there, I thought I owed it to my constituents in the Fourth 
Congressional District of Maryland to come to this floor to stand on 
their side for their paychecks, so I thank you for that.
  As I listened to some of my colleagues, one of the things that I 
heard Ms. Kaptur say was to talk about the job loss in the 
manufacturing sector, in the clothing textile sector in the Carolinas. 
I represent a district in Maryland, but my family is from North 
Carolina.
  A lot of my family members had those good-paying jobs in the mills. 
They were making the sheets, pillowcases, T-shirts, and hats, and they 
all lost their jobs. All of those jobs went someplace else, but they 
didn't stay in North Carolina. That was a tragedy. It

[[Page H147]]

was a tragedy for my family, as it has been a tragedy for families all 
across this country.
  I remember the NAFTA debate, and so many Members of Congress--I 
wasn't in Congress at the time, Mr. Pocan wasn't in Congress at the 
time--but we remember the debate. We remember that they told us: 
``Well, there would be other jobs that would be created, so don't worry 
about any jobs that would be lost.'' They said the jobs in the service 
sector would grow and they would stay.
  Almost one of the first things to happen after NAFTA went into effect 
was all those call centers closed. Those were service-sector jobs, and 
they left, along with millions of manufacturing jobs.
  In my home State of Maryland, we lost 70,000 jobs--and we are a small 
State--but we lost those just to NAFTA, so when people tell me now as a 
Member of Congress: ``We want you to just Fast Track this trade deal, 
this Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, and just trust us that the process 
is going to work, just trust us that all you have to do is rubberstamp 
the trade deal''--I remember--and Mr. Pocan, you remember--and that is 
what requires us for our constituents to say no way, that we cannot 
just give Fast Track authority over, hand it over and, in effect, just 
say that whatever the deal is that has been negotiated, we will just 
take that deal for the American people.
  Well, you and I know better. One of the things that has long 
concerned me is getting wind that our Trade Representative, on behalf 
of my constituents and your constituents, were negotiating away Buy 
American provisions, negotiating them away without our even having a 
voice in that conversation.
  Let's look at those Buy American provisions. In 2012, 68 of our 
colleagues joined us in saying to President Obama, ``Don't negotiate 
away the Buy American provision.'' Then just last year, 120 Members of 
Congress said, ``Mr. President, don't negotiate away the Buy American 
provisions.''
  So I see that the wind is really beneath our sails because the 
American people understand that when you negotiate away Buy American, 
what you do is negotiate away the buying power and the jobs of American 
workers. You trade what is, in effect, billions of dollars of American 
taxpayer buying power for very little buying power coming from the 
other direction.
  I am troubled that we have a Trade Representative that just wants to 
say, ``Take the deal and run,'' and those of us who stand in the steps 
of American workers, we are in their place. We are representing them. 
We have their voice. We need to have their voice, and we have to have 
their back and say ``no'' to Fast Track and say ``no'' to the TPP and 
``no'' to provisions that would trade away what we know the statistics 
are.
  The U.S. procurement market is more than 10 times larger than all the 
TPP procurement markets combined, and so that means that we would trade 
away preferential access for U.S. firms to $556 billion in Federal 
Government procurement. For what? $53 billion in return? We have to say 
``no'' to this deal.
  I want to thank Mr. Pocan for bringing us together. It is good that 
we are doing this from day one in the United States House of 
Representatives because what we are saying to American workers is: 
``Not only will we stand with you on the first day of the Congress and 
the next day of the Congress, but all the way to the end, to keep from 
trading away millions of your jobs.''
  Mr. POCAN. Thank you again so much, Representative Edwards. When you 
talked about the job loss in Maryland, we lost nearly 75,000 
manufacturing job through the NAFTA-WTO period in the last 20 years.
  When I was a legislator in the State of Wisconsin, it was a Buy 
American law that I got passed with a bipartisan vote in the Wisconsin 
Legislature. The fact that we are going to give up our sovereignty to 
have that law and some multinational corporation can sue any local unit 
of government so that they can contest those laws and we can lose that 
ability, I think the average person, if they knew that was something 
even being discussed, would be opposed to that, much less the other 28 
chapters in addition to procurement that are included in this Trans-
Pacific Partnership.
  Thank you so much for all the work you have done on this and for 
making people aware of all the little hidden gems that if we don't have 
an ability to have a full and fair debate in this House, things that 
could happen in the biggest and the baddest of the trade deals yet we 
have seen in this country, so thank you so much.
  Mr. Speaker, the Progressive Caucus is going to be doing everything 
we can in the coming months to fight this, to make sure that Congress 
has a say. We aren't against trade, we want fair trade, but the so-
called free trade that is out there right now that is being drafted by 
corporate CEOs and Wall Street banks doesn't include the public and 
doesn't include Congress, and it needs to have every single person 
represented.
  We are the voices of the American people. We need to be able to have 
a full debate in this body, and we need to be able to amend any deal 
that we don't like, the particular deals that have been decided by 
others, by corporate leaders in this country. The American public has 
to be included.
  Before I ever came to this Congress, the last 27 years, I have run a 
small business, a small specialty printing business. One of the things 
we do is we source American-made and union-made products for people.
  I watched, over that 27 years, companies leave this country over and 
over and over, whether it be the mills that I mentioned from the South 
that made T-shirts to things as simple as pens. Companies like Parker 
Pen used to have up to 1,000 jobs in Rock County, Wisconsin, that now 
have all gone out of this country. Those are the types of jobs that we 
have seen leave over and over.
  When you go back into these communities, they have not replaced the 
same quality paying jobs. That is part of why we have got a problem. 
While the economy has been coming back, unfortunately, many people are 
being left behind, and they are not having the same family-supporting 
wages that they need out there.
  The Trans-Pacific Partnership is 29 chapters, but only five of those 
chapters actually relate to trade. So much of what we have talked about 
has been about the job impacts and your income impacts of a trade deal, 
but this also covers environmental law, currency law, intellectual 
property law, food safety, and the ability for procurement, as we just 
talked about on Buy American laws, and on and on and on.
  This Congress, I think, can work together, Democrats and Republicans, 
who have a concern about giving carte blanche authority to simply the 
U.S. Trade Representative and the White House and leaving the people 
out, leaving the Congress out of that conversation.
  We are going to continue to fight this, to talk about this and to 
make sure that people understand what Fast Track is and what it isn't 
and to make sure that those myths that may be out there about how to 
help create jobs may not be true, and there is a lot more ramifications 
that are out there.
  Mr. Speaker, we thank you so much for this time this evening. We 
appreciate the ability to talk about this on the floor of Congress.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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