The Progressive Caucus

Floor Speech

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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 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.

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