[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 19]
[House]
[Pages 27336-27337]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                            WTO/ENVIRONMENT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, next month, the world's power brokers 
are going to meet in Seattle so they can kick off a new round of trade 
talks for the World Trade Organization. Although one will not learn 
much about the WTO summit from television news casters or read about it 
on the front pages of newspapers, there are few events this year that 
will be more important to workers in Ohio and around the world.
  While the WTO corporate supporters and allies in Washington see the 
Seattle negotiations as a fresh opportunity to completely deregulate 
the international economy, the truth is that their agenda has 
systematically gutted our worker, consumer, and environmental 
protections that we have fought for in this body, and deliberately 
usurped the rights of individual nations to make their own laws, 
especially when those laws protect the environment and especially when 
those laws protect workers.
  Mr. Speaker, a report ``Whose Trade Organization,'' written by Public 
Citizen's Global Trade Watch dramatically demonstrates why the WTO 
requires fundamental change before the bureaucrats in Seattle take us 
down another road of trade negotiations.
  When Congress approved the World Trade Organization and other 
agreements, like NAFTA, we essentially ceded our authority to 
independently advance health and safety standards that protect 
America's families. Let me say that again. Thanks to the WTO and to 
NAFTA and other trade agreements, we are losing our ability to protect 
the health and the well-being of the men and women that voted us into 
office.
  That is because we have to ensure that we are not violating some 
bureaucrat's view of what constitutes a trade

[[Page 27337]]

barrier or what constitutes a legitimate health concern.
  None of the lawyers, Mr. Speaker, from the U.S. Trade 
Representative's office or the Commerce Department or their supporters 
on Wall Street has been elected to office. Yet these are the very 
people that will represent us in Seattle, the people that will weaken 
our ability to erect meaningful worker and environmental standards.
  Their fascination with a healthy bottom line is how we wind up with 
trade agreements that give more rights to corporations and their 
stockholders than they do to individual citizens and to our elected 
governments. That is how we wind up giving unelected bureaucrats the 
authority to determine whether or not our consumers have to eat foods 
that have been treated with carcinogenic pesticides or whether or not 
we have to drink water that tastes vaguely like paint thinner.
  That is what is happening right now in California. The governor has 
banned the gasoline additive MTBE because it is leaking into the 
drinking water. The Canadian corporation that makes it is using NAFTA 
to sue the United States for nearly $1 billion because they think this 
constitutes a trade barrier. Think about that. A foreign corporation is 
asking our taxpayers to give it $1 billion because the people in 
California do not like the taste of paint thinner in their drinking 
water and think it is good public health to ban this gasoline additive.
  This case is just one of the dozens that are included in this book I 
mentioned which meticulously documents how every single health safety 
or environmental law reviewed by the WTO has been declared an illegal 
trade barrier that must be eliminated under the threat of sanctions.
  In addition to these cases, Public Citizen documents that much of the 
WTO's damage is done merely by threatening the use of its powerful 
dispute system, a fact evidenced by the increasing number of countries 
that are preemptively eliminating their environmental or health laws 
just to avoid the steep political and fiscal costs involved in 
defending a law from a WTO challenge.
  Mr. Speaker, if we want to preserve American jobs, if we want to 
continue protecting our environment, we need to make sure that 
negotiators in Seattle, U.S. taxpayer financed negotiators in Seattle, 
respect the principles that let us stand here during this debate 
tonight.
  Rather than letting unelected officials from the Trade Rep's office 
or their friends on Wall Street tell us what is good for America, we 
need to make sure they hear what our constituents want.
  Every weekend that I go home to Ohio, they tell me they do not want 
to eat contaminated strawberries; they tell me they do not want to 
drink unsafe water. They do not want to lose their jobs because the WTO 
does not care whether some foreign workers, no older, sometimes, than 
the age of 13 or 14, or that work 18 hours a day for what amounts to 
less than a dollar an hour, that WTO does not care whether workers like 
that are taking American jobs and being exploited in developing 
countries.
  Mr. Speaker, it is vital that we in Congress, that the American 
people, realize what is at stake when the world's largest assembly of 
millionaires meets in Seattle this year. We have to keep fighting to 
make labor standards, environmental standards, and human rights as 
important to our trade bureaucrats as intellectual property rights.

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