[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 11]
[House]
[Pages 15912-15916]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         THE PROGRESSIVE CAUCUS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2015, the gentlewoman from New Jersey (Mrs. Watson Coleman) 
is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.


                             General Leave

  Mrs. WATSON COLEMAN. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all 
Members have 5 legislative days 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 
gentlewoman from New Jersey?
  There was no objection.
  Mrs. WATSON COLEMAN. Mr. Speaker, this past spring Congress passed 
legislation that authorized the President to negotiate and sign 
sweeping trade agreements with limited input from Congress.
  When I say ``the President,'' I am not just talking about Mr. Obama, 
Mr. Speaker. I am talking about anyone who sits in the Oval Office from 
now on.
  This body then went on to pass a trade adjustment assistance package 
that falls far short of what is necessary and, in and of itself, 
acknowledges the loss of employment that comes from the trade 
agreement. Those steps set the stage for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, 
the final language of which was announced earlier this week. That deal 
was built from years of secret negotiations between corporations and 
trade representatives, with little to no input from the working 
families who will have to bear the loss of jobs here at home.
  Mr. Speaker, back in New Jersey, we know what happens when trade 
deals don't consider American workers. Factories close, employees are 
laid off, and whole cities that used to pump out

[[Page 15913]]

products for consumers around the world are suddenly faced with stunted 
economies and incomprehensible unemployment.
  While I am not opposed to free trade, our priority can't simply be 
corporate gains under the guise of economic growth; it must be the 
welfare of working families. But working families are going to find 
themselves out of luck if they are forced to compete with salaries of 
just cents an hour overseas.
  TPP is a very bad deal. It lacks prohibitions to address currency 
manipulation; it lacks environmental standards that will keep 
manufacturers accountable and ensure we are preventing some of the 
human causes of climate change; and it lacks labor standards that 
protect the human rights of workers in places like Mexico, Vietnam, and 
Malaysia, running against even the most basic human American values. It 
does all this based on the flawed philosophy that supporting 
multinational corporations somehow helps the middle class.
  Mr. Speaker, let me state for the record that no trade deal is ever 
crafted to support the American middle class, and any suggestion 
otherwise is a flat-out, bold-faced lie.
  International trade is always marketed as the key to economic growth, 
but we are told that opening new markets means more opportunities for 
U.S. businesses. That is true in part. But the businesses that profit 
most are multinational corporations, and part of that profit comes from 
sending American jobs overseas. We will allow those same companies to 
continue to enjoy tax loopholes that maximize their bottom line and 
allow them to keep much of their profits stashed away elsewhere. If 
NAFTA and CAFTA are any example, these profits will never make it down 
the line to Americans striving to get to the middle class.
  If we are serious about growing our economy in a way that supports 
every American, there are plenty of policy changes that we could make:
  We could give our workers a living wage that would allow them to 
support their families;
  We could provide better primary and secondary education and more 
affordable higher education;
  We could offer employment through the hundreds of thousands of jobs 
we could create by investing in infrastructure repairs and upgrades;
  And we could do a lot better than TPP.
  So before we move forward, my congressional Progressive colleagues 
and I have come to the floor to urge Members on both sides of the aisle 
to take what limited time we have to change the course. We have just 
one last opportunity to fix this deal, to protect American workers, and 
to ensure a deal that will actually boost our economy, not just the 
profit margins of multinational corporations, and we need to take that 
time.
  With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield to a Member who has been as outspoken 
as any of us as we talk about the need to reexamine this flawed 
agreement. I yield to the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Slaughter), 
our ranking member on the Rules Committee.
  Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, I do appreciate the gentlewoman yielding 
to me.
  Mr. Speaker, this is a debate I seem to have had before. I was here 
for the NAFTA debate.
  Congressional districts throughout this country, including my own of 
Rochester, New York, will find it very difficult to survive another 
trade deal that sends our jobs overseas to countries that ignore human 
rights violations and undermine our laws in public health here at home. 
During my time in Congress, I have never seen a trade agreement that 
the United States participated in that benefited either the American 
manufacturer or the American worker, and everything I know about Trans-
Pacific Partnership suggests it will be more of the same.
  Despite a bipartisan push by 158 Democrats and Republicans in the 
House of Representatives, the trade deal announced this week will do 
nothing to address the largest trade barrier our manufacturers face, 
which is currency manipulation. As with past trade deals, a side 
agreement in the TPP related to currency manipulation is window 
dressing that is unlikely to be enforced at all, as most of the NAFTA 
side agreements were not, and will do little to stem the flow of 
American jobs overseas. As with past trade deals, this will force 
American manufacturers to compete with foreign companies that receive 
unfair advantages from their governments. For this reason, Ford Motor 
Company has come out in opposition to this trade agreement.
  The TPP has been negotiated under a cloud of secrecy--by the way, 
they all are--by multinational conglomerates, and we know from the 
United States, the financial services industry and the pharmaceutical 
companies--both have only one priority, their bottom line--were very 
important in those negotiations. Now that an agreement has been 
reached, the negotiators will no longer be able to keep the contents of 
the bad trade deal hidden from the public.
  As you know, Mr. Speaker, were any of us to look at the trade bill 
that they did make available over here, we were not able to take a 
pencil or paper with us. We had to have somebody with security 
clearance go with us--our own staff could not go--and we could not 
speak about it. That is some strange idea, I think, of democracy.
  I have been in conversations with parliamentarians from Australia and 
from Canada who have had the very same problem. As a matter of fact, in 
Australia, if any of the parliamentarians wanted to see the trade bill, 
they had to sign a paper they would not discuss it for 4 years. For 
three of the greatest economies and democracies in this trade 
agreement--the United States, Canada, and Australia--to allow their 
parliamentarians to be put into that kind of restraint is one of the 
most egregious parts of these trade agreements.
  Now that we will be able, since it has been signed, to look at it, 
negotiators are going to have a lot of explaining to do. Because as 
Americans learn more in the coming weeks and months about how this 
agreement will impact their day-to-day lives with things like unsafe 
food imports--we are pretty certain about that because we already 
turned around a great number, tons of seafood coming in; 98 percent of 
the seafood that we eat is imported, and about 2 to 3 percent of it is 
inspected--the momentum of a bad trade deal will continue to grow.
  Let me tell you why we, the Canadians, the Australians, the European 
Union, and the United Nations are upset about this. There is a thing 
called the investor-state dispute settlement, and it is onerous. It 
gives to three corporate lawyers the right to settle disputes.
  Any investor-state in this agreement can bring a case against any of 
the other countries in the agreement if they think that a law or a 
practice in that country affects their bottom line. We know that 
everybody is worried about that here because one committee of the 
House, just in talking about it, did away with country-of-origin 
labeling.
  So, as I have pointed out, both the United Nations and the European 
Union have done papers on the fact that this is a very bad way to run 
anything, to let three corporate lawyers make that decision; but we are 
going to be stuck with that, unfortunately, unless we can kill the 
bill.
  What is even more abhorrent is that some of our trading partners, 
Malaysia--Malaysia has the worst human rights record on the face of the 
Earth. We know that. The State Department has always given them a very 
low grade. They have slave labor. We know that they do sex trafficking, 
and they just recently took the Prime Minister off on some kind of 
charges. There is no reason in the world that we would include them in 
a trade agreement. Then there is also Brunei, which practices sharia 
law. These two countries, under the investor-state dispute settlement, 
can make sure that our laws do not interfere with their making a 
profit.
  We are better people than that, Mr. Speaker. We are going to be 
looking at this very closely. It is really not a trade deal. In my 
view, it is a race to the bottom.

[[Page 15914]]


  Mrs. WATSON COLEMAN. Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the 
gentlewoman from New York for her comments and for being with us today 
as part of the Progressive Caucus.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to a Member who has been outspoken on behalf of 
working families and American workers, Mr. Pocan from Wisconsin.
  Mr. POCAN. Mr. Speaker, I am really glad to be here today with the 
Progressive Caucus Special Order hour, and I would like to thank the 
gentlewoman from New Jersey (Mrs. Watson Coleman) for all her hard work 
on behalf of the Progressive Caucus and on behalf of this issue on the 
Trans-Pacific Partnership.
  As we know, over the weekend and all last week, the U.S. Trade 
Representative Office's cooks have been in the kitchen, and they have 
told us now the Trans-Pacific Partnership is done; but from everything 
that we can tell, it is not fully baked. In fact, at best, it is half-
baked when it comes to labor, environmental, and consumer concerns.
  Now that a final deal has been reached, we asked the administration 
to let the American public immediately see the full text of this 
agreement. This negotiating process has not been transparent up to this 
point, despite claims from the U.S. Trade Representative Office. We 
know that about 600 people, largely corporate CEOs, have been involved 
in the drafting of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but not Congress, and 
certainly not members of the public. The secretive nature of these 
negotiations is compounded by the pressure to throw together this deal 
based on the political timelines of our negotiating partners rather 
than with the regard of the U.S. worker in mind.
  Reports throughout the course of the negotiating process have raised 
serious questions about the impact of this agreement on a number of 
areas ranging from workplace and environmental protections to food 
safety, but, most importantly, jobs and wages. We all know this economy 
has been rebounding. The stockmarket is significantly up from the 2008 
crash. Corporate profits are up. CEO pay is up. Productivity is up. But 
wages for the American worker have, unfortunately, been dead flat, and 
the Trans-Pacific Partnership will lead to the loss of good-paying jobs 
right here in the U.S.
  Through several decades of unfair trade rules, corporations have 
outsourced production and offshored jobs, and the TPP will only 
exacerbate this problem. In fact, on Tuesday, in its initial analysis, 
The Wall Street Journal has projected an increase in the manufacturing 
trade deficit of $38.2 billion. That means jobs and wages right here in 
the United States.

                              {time}  1700

  Additional reports have also said that the labor standards will 
remain subpar, that currency manipulation has not been adequately 
addressed, rules of origin for autos have been weakened, and human 
rights issues with countries like Malaysia and Brunei have not been 
dealt with properly.
  Among these concerns, corporations still have the ability to 
supersede laws of our country through the investor-state dispute 
settlement process, something that Representative Slaughter explained 
very aggressively in her comments.
  This agreement has nothing to do to effectively address currency 
manipulation, which that alone has contributed to the loss of up to 5 
million U.S. jobs.
  Despite claims by the administration that this agreement is the most 
progressive high standard deal that we have ever negotiated, the labor 
environmental rules in our free trade agreements are rarely enforced in 
our partner nations.
  In fact, 4 years ago, when we passed the Colombia Free Trade 
Agreement, to the letter of the law the Colombian Government has put 
the provisions within Colombian law and not one bit of that has 
actually been implemented and over 100 labor leaders in the last 4 
years have been killed just in Colombia.
  So these trade agreements haven't worked based on past practice, and 
without changes they are not going to work in future progress as well.
  In addition, the administration has gone out of its way to help cover 
up human rights atrocities in order to conclude these negotiations.
  Malaysia was demoted in the State Department's 2014 Trafficking in 
Persons Report due to its grossly inadequate response to the perverse 
tracking of minority groups throughout the country.
  By downgrading them within the same year that mass graves were found 
of workers in Malaysia is an insult to human rights conditions, and to 
include them and countries like Brunei that still stone gays and 
lesbians and single mothers is a further evidence that this deal is not 
ready for the public or for Congress to accept for the public.
  The Trans-Pacific Partnership is neither free trade nor fair trade. 
In reality, it is a system of rules crafted by multi-national corporate 
interests and their lobbyists that work for a select group of powerful 
people at the expense of everyone else. This just isn't about jobs or 
wages. This is an agreement about corporate profits. Past trade deals 
have been a disaster for American workers. So it is imperative that 
Congress rigorously review this deal to ensure that the American people 
aren't yet taken for a ride again.
  Again, I will renew my call and the Progressive Caucus' call to 
immediately release the text of the agreement. Six hundred corporate 
CEOs know what is in the deal, but the 435 Members of this House and 
the American public don't. That is simply wrong.
  If this deal is as good as they say it is, put the language on the 
table and let's review it with the public. My fear is that it is not. 
If it is going to cost American jobs and wages, it is the wrong thing 
to do, and we have to reject the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
  Mrs. WATSON COLEMAN. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from 
Pennsylvania for taking the time to be with us to talk about what is 
such an important issue for us.
  Mr. Speaker, it isn't often that we get a second bite at an apple in 
realtime, but this is one of those opportunities that we do have. There 
have been a number of issues that have been raised that I believe 
validate from our perspective that this is not a good deal.
  It is not a good deal for American families. It is not a good deal 
for American workers. It is only a good deal for multi-national 
corporations.
  We are engaging in a trade relationship with countries whose values 
we do not share and who, on occasions, we have actually had the 
opportunity to shame.
  I believe, Mr. Speaker, that we, as Members of Congress, can find 
this as an opportunity to work together to do something collectively, 
which is better for the American family and the American worker. We can 
do that at the same time we have an opportunity to have fair trade 
agreements and just trade agreements.
  With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Connecticut 
(Ms. DeLauro), a Member who has been as outspoken as any other Member 
in this House about the need to turn back from this flawed agreement, a 
leader on workers' rights and human rights and women's rights and 
building an economy that works for average Americans.
  Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Speaker, I want to say thank you to my colleague and 
what an honor for me to join with you and to thank you for your 
steadfast efforts in fighting for working families, for the American 
workers, men and women, and not being afraid to stand up and say no to 
what would be injustice for our American workers and their families.
  Mr. Speaker, it has been 4 days since the Trans-Pacific Partnership 
was announced. We have not yet been shown the text, but we have heard a 
chorus of spin about the supposed benefits of this secret agreement.
  After more than 5 years of talks, the parties have announced a deal 
without having released a single word to the public. The negotiations 
took place under unprecedented secrecy.
  Corporate special interests had a place at the table. Congress and 
American families were locked out. The

[[Page 15915]]

American people and their elected representatives in Congress are 
forced to rely on leaks to find out what is in this agreement.
  But the truth is that, on vital issues like workers' rights, 
environment, and human rights, the standards are only valuable if they 
are enforced. If experience is any guide, we will do little to enforce 
those provisions.
  I remember in 2007 when my Democratic colleagues in this Chamber 
forced the Bush administration to renegotiate a number of trade 
agreements to include enhanced labor standards.
  In the 8 years since, neither the current administration nor its 
predecessor has taken meaningful action to enforce those provisions. So 
dozens of Colombian union organizers are being murdered despite labor 
provision in the U.S. Colombia Free Trade Agreement. Thousands of acres 
of Peruvian forests are being destroyed despite the environmental 
provisions in the U.S.-Peru Free Trade Agreement.
  Why would we assume that the Trans-Pacific Partnership will be any 
different when it comes to Brunei's persecution of LGBT people, 
Malaysia's human trafficking and forced labor, or Vietnam's abundant 
use of child labor?
  In fact, the administration has already shown us how little regard it 
pays to these issues by upgrading Malaysia's classification on human 
trafficking in order to sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.
  Past experience tells us what to expect in other areas as well. The 
last big trade deal, the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement, cost this 
country 75,000 jobs in just 3 years, according to the Economic Policy 
Institute.
  The TPP will be even worse. Not only is it far bigger, it will throw 
Americans into competition with Vietnamese workers who make less than 
65 cents per hour. These provisions will offshore jobs, lower our 
wages, and increase income inequality. Americans workers have seen this 
happen to them year after year after year.
  To compound these problems, it has been reported that the TPP will 
remove support from green jobs and American industry by outlawing buy 
American and buy local standards in government procurement contracts 
and potentially opening the door for Chinese state-owned enterprises to 
take those contracts.
  In common with every previous trade agreement, the TPP does nothing 
to curb currency manipulation, which basically allows countries to keep 
their goods and the price of their goods at artificially low prices. 
That means, if they lower their prices and their currency, ours are 
more expensive.
  This abuse, not in my words, but in the words of economists C. Fred 
Bergsten at the Peterson Institute, Jared Bernstein at the Center for 
American Progress--they believe that currency manipulation and its 
practice by China, by Singapore, and Vietnam, who are all part of the 
Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement--that currency manipulation has led 
to the loss of almost 5 million jobs in the United States of America.
  One of the biggest historical manipulators, as I said, Japan, is a 
member of the TPP. The administration has even floated the idea of 
adding China, probably the worst currency manipulator in history.
  China's recent devaluation just a few short weeks ago of the yuan 
cost up to 640,000 American jobs, according to the Economic Policy 
Institute. And after the administration decided to take no action 
against China, TPP partner Vietnam followed suit, and they devalued 
their own currency.
  In other words, with this agreement, we are rewarding the cheats. No 
currency forum, as the administration has talked about, because 
currency and enforceable currency regulations are not in the 
legislation.
  But they say there is going to be a forum, that we will have the 
opportunity to discuss this. Well, you can have a lot of forums, but 
unless you have an enforcement mechanism to say no, it is not going to 
be fixed. It has to be fixed in the agreement, and it is not. So the 
forum is meaningless.
  The predictable calamities do not end there. Earlier this year, WTO 
trade agreements led to the dismantling of American food labeling laws, 
country of origin labeling, so that the American public will know where 
their food is coming from.
  Again, the TPP goes even further by allowing multi-national 
corporations, as well as foreign governments, to challenge U.S. law. It 
will not be long before we start to see challenges to our food safety 
system, a system already strained to the breaking point by a flood of 
tainted contaminated seafood from the TPP countries like Malaysia and 
Vietnam.
  Finally, we know that the TPP will establish rules that give Big 
Pharma different monopoly periods across partner nations. That makes no 
sense in a free trade agreement. Why would you do this? That is only to 
keep drug prices high.
  One commonly used combination of HIV drugs cost $10,000 per year when 
bought from a Big Pharma monopolist, from the big pharmaceutical 
company, but as a generic, it only costs $250. What this agreement will 
do is to delay generics coming to the market.
  And by locking in these corporate monopolies, the agreement 
compromises our access to medicines for the people who need it the 
most: your constituents, my colleague, and mine, and all of our 
colleagues.
  President Obama said on Monday that the Trans-Pacific Partnership 
agreement ``reflects American values.'' But the administration's 
approach has been the opposite. It has put corporate special interests 
before the interests of the American people instead of learning from 
past experience. We are being railroaded into yet another trade 
agreement that risks our jobs, our wages, and the health of our family.
  But, under the law, there is still time for Congress to reject the 
Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, and that is what we need to do in 
a bipartisan way. There are people on both sides of the aisle in this 
institution that oppose this agreement.
  We need to come together and we need to come together for the sake of 
the working men and women that we represent all over this country. That 
is what our job is to do right now. We have a moral responsibility. We 
have an obligation to the people who elect us and send us here to 
represent their best interests.
  Everything that we know from past agreements and what limited amount 
of information we know from this agreement will put the economic 
security at risk for American families.
  I want to say to my colleague, thank you for doing this. We need over 
the next several weeks to be doing this every single day because the 
word has got to go out to the American public of just what is at stake 
in this trade agreement, and they will be calling their representative 
and telling them to vote ``no.''
  Thank you very, very much for the opportunity to participate tonight.

                              {time}  1715

  Mrs. WATSON COLEMAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from 
Connecticut for her eloquent and compelling words. Whenever she speaks 
up for the American people, she does so in such a convincing way and a 
way that is backed by empirical data, not just anecdotes and not just 
sort of dreams, but that which she already knows.
  So I appreciate and feel particularly honored to represent the 
Congressional Progressive Caucus here this evening to speak out on 
issues that we know are very important, vitally important, to the well-
being of the American worker and our American families.
  I do pray that our congressional body can come together around an 
issue that affects all of us in any district that we might represent, 
in any corner of the United States of America, and at any economic 
strata that we might represent.
  With that, Mr. Speaker, I have no more speakers who want to address 
this issue this evening. I thank you for your indulgence.
  I yield back the balance of my time.

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