Opposing Free Trade Agreements

Floor Speech

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, free trade deals are not an industrial policy. Unlike most industrial countries in the world, the United States is the only one that has no overall strategy for bringing back the 5 million manufacturing jobs that we've lost in the last decade or reopening the 50,000 factories that have been shuttered.

Without enforcing current trade laws, or pressuring China to adopt fair currency policies, or using U.S. taxpayer dollars to benefit U.S. companies, we are on the losing end of free trade before the deals are even negotiated. Where's the focus on industrial education? Where's the focus on requiring other countries to live up to their trade obligations? Where's the focus on making sure that U.S. taxpayer dollars are spent on U.S. jobs?

Now, I get the benefits of free trade, but come to Waterbury, Connecticut; New Britain, Connecticut; and Meriden, Connecticut, and what you will hear is a cry for help, not for more trade deals, but for a country that recognizes what every other developing industrial country has in this world, that we need a domestic industrial policy to protect and support our manufacturers here before we engage in free trade deals abroad.

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