[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 13]
[House]
[Pages 17651-17652]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        CAFTA IS BAD FOR AMERICA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, if one was to look at this chart, and the 
black bars represent the extraordinary growth in the United States 
trade deficit over the last 14 years, and you see you are digging 
yourself a hole for the American people, for the future of the American 
economy, of over $600 billion in 1 year. This year we are going to 
eclipse that. We are headed toward $2 billion a day of foreign 
borrowing.
  Now, most people say, well, Alan Greenspan says that is great. They 
are willing to lend us money. Shows how strong our economy is. But what 
Alan Greenspan and the other pointy-headed hack economists around here 
forget is that those are real dollars which can come back to bite us, 
and they are coming back to bite us when you have a Chinese Communist-
controlled oil company trying to buy a major American oil company with 
substantial reserves around the world. For a country that is importing 
20 million barrels a day of energy, we want to be selling off our oil 
assets, our reserves around the world to the Chinese Communist 
Government? I do not think so. But they think this is just working 
great.
  The point is we have a failed and failing trade policy here in the 
United States of America. We lost 3 million manufacturing jobs, good 
high-wage,

[[Page 17652]]

high-benefit jobs, through NAFTA, and the WTO and permanent most 
favored nation status for China. Those have cost the American people 
dearly. Millions of Americans have lost good jobs.
  And the trend is accelerating. We are losing our manufacturing base. 
And the question becomes with CAFTA before the United States House of 
Representatives, do we think that these big black lines, these huge 
deficits, this borrowing, this putting America up for sale and in hock 
is a good trend? Yeah, it is a good trend for a few people, a lot of 
friends of the President. They are making a bunch of money. They own 
the stock. They run the multinational corporations. They are getting 
tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars sometimes, 
in stock options because of selling off our country.
  Yeah, it is good for a few people, but it is bad for the majority of 
the American people. It is bad for the workers. It is bad for our 
future. It is bad for our economic security, our military security, if 
you look at some of the recent trends dealing with China.
  So the question becomes should the United States House of 
Representatives, should those who are undecided now, particularly on 
the other side of the aisle, get pressured by the President to do 
something that they know is wrong and is against the interests of the 
people they represent?
  This is not a partisan issue. You know, Bill Clinton was a disaster 
on trade policy. The problem is you cannot find much difference between 
Ronald Reagan, Bush the first, Bill Clinton and Bush the second on 
trade policy. They are a bipartisan disaster, selling out the American 
people, selling out our industrial infrastructure.
  And people say, well, CAFTA is really not that big, so why are you so 
concerned about it? Well, you are right. It is not very big. If you 
combine the buying power of all of the people of the CAFTA nations and 
say somehow this is going to create jobs in America, well, whew, you 
need to have your head examined, because if all of those people living 
in those countries applied every cent they earned, whatever currency it 
is, to purchasing American goods, it would not be a tiny blip on the 
radar screen of the American economy.
  This is the same people who sold us NAFTA, and they said it was going 
to produce 400,000 jobs. Instead it lost 800,000 jobs. They were only 
off by 1.2 million jobs in their estimates.
  Now the President goes on television this week and says, oh, this 
will be good for the American people. This is going to create exports. 
What he forgot to tell them was his own experts say it will create more 
imports from Central America than exports. It is going to be yet 
another loser for the American people. They will see their jobs go 
south.
  American workers should not be asked to compete with people earning 
80 cents an hour, and guess what, people who earn 80 cents an hour are 
not going to be buying a lot of manufactured American goods.

                              {time}  2230

  So now CAFTA is the same disaster that was NAFTA, that is the WTO, 
and MFN for China. It is just saying, we have dug ourselves a deep 
hole. Here is a shovel; keep digging. Pretty soon you may come out in 
the other end in China, but by then they will own us.
  So it is time for this Congress to stand up to this President, the 
same way they should have stood up to Bill Clinton or to Bush the First 
or to Reagan. We want a trade policy that benefits the American people, 
our national security, our economic security and brings and keeps jobs 
that pay decent wages and benefits home here.
  Vote ``no'' on CAFTA.

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