[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 4]
[House]
[Page 5660]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                AMERICA IS SADDLED WITH BAD TRADE DEALS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. Sherman) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, how does America get saddled with these bad 
trade deals?
  If we look at our free trade agreements, we see a 425 percent 
increase in our trade deficit with those FTA countries. You get that 
statistic if you include NAFTA, which, of course, is the granddaddy of 
all of our free trade deals, and that doesn't even count our worst 
deal, which was granting most favored nation status to China.
  So how do we end up with such bad deals?
  First, the elites convince themselves that it is good for the 
country. They do this because they love the theory of the economic 
textbook and don't feel comfortable looking at the practice of how 
business actually works.
  Second, the elites benefit from these deals. These deals help 
economists and Wall Street and attorneys, so they convince themselves 
that they are good for the country as a whole and create a subcultural 
echo chamber in which it is a subcultural norm that all smart people 
realize that these are good trade deals. In having convinced themselves 
to support these deals, they use a combination of condescension, false 
appeals to patriotism, and sneaky tactics to saddle the American people 
with these trade deals.

                              {time}  1045

  Take a look at the effect on working families. America needs a raise. 
To get it, we need a severe labor shortage. We would have millions of 
additional jobs, a desperate labor shortage, if only we had balanced 
trade with the world.
  Let's look at TPP and its inclusion of Vietnam. We were told that the 
Trans-Pacific Partnership will give us free access to the Vietnamese 
market. There is only one problem: in Vietnam, there is no freedom and 
there is no market. In fact, we will not have access except as the 
Communist Party of Vietnam decides to grant it on the basis of crony 
capitalism, but our workers are going to have to compete against 40-
cent-an-hour Vietnamese labor.
  Now, we are told that in Vietnam, under this deal, it won't be 
illegal to organize a union. They won't put you in jail for organizing 
a union. What they will do is they will plant drugs on every union 
activist and arrest them for that. You are not going to see free unions 
in Vietnam, and that will hurt working families in the U.S.
  So how do they sell it? They claim that it may take jobs away, but it 
is a necessary sacrifice because we have to contain China. As the 
ranking member of the Asia and the Pacific Subcommittee, I am here to 
tell you the TPP is great for China.
  First, we are told, well, we get to write the rules. No. These are 
Wall Street's rules. They are not the rules of the American working 
family.
  Second, TPP enshrines the idea that currency manipulation is just 
fine. So China gets the single most important change in the rules of 
international trade.
  Finally and most obscurely, there are the rules of origin. Now we 
know that, under this deal, goods that are made in Vietnam or Japan 
come right in to the United States with no tariffs. What you don't know 
is the goods that are 50, 60 percent, 70 percent made in China then go 
to Vietnam or Japan where they can put a made-in-Japan sticker on it 
and send it to the United States--that is when they admit that it is 50 
or 60 percent made in China.
  As a CPA, I will tell you, if you are in a position to admit that 
your goods are 60 percent made in China, that means they can be 90 
percent made in China. So China gets to fast-track their goods into the 
United States, no tariffs, and we get no access to the Chinese markets. 
So it is a really bad deal.
  How do you pass it? You use sneaky tactics. They don't have the votes 
to pass it now. The American people would rise in opposition to try to 
pass it now. So they are going to wait for the lame duck and then have 
a group of retiring Members of this body shaft the American people with 
the TPP.
  We do have a solution. We need to get all three remaining 
Presidential candidates to declare, if sneaky tactics and lame duck 
sessions are used to impose TPP on America, that they will, in their 
first month in office, pull us back out of TPP. Unless we hear that 
clearly from the three Presidential candidates, all of whom oppose TPP, 
that they not only oppose it, but they will erase anything that happens 
in a lame duck session, then the elites will prevail. We will lose jobs 
again. Our workers will have to compete with 40-cent-an-hour labor. 
Chinese goods will be fast-tracked into the United States with ``Made 
in Japan'' and ``Made in Vietnam'' stickers on them.
  It is time for the Presidential candidates to go beyond saying they 
are against it. They have to declare that they will make sure that any 
lame duck approval of TPP that happens in December will be erased the 
following January.
  

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