The Progressive Caucus

Floor Speech

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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 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.

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