[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2363-E2364]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

FAST TRACK FELL VICTIM TO POLITICAL DEMAGOGUERY

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HON. PHILIP M. CRANE

of illinois

in the house of representatives

Thursday, November 13, 1997

Mr. CRANE. Mr. Speaker, I was deeply disappointed in the fact that
this body was unable to consider and pass the fast-track trade
legislation authored by Chairman Bill Archer and myself.
In particular, I was disappointed in the petty politics engaged in by
fast-track opponents. I fear that, thanks to the campaign waged by big
labor and their politician lackeys, the United States will lose its
leadership position in world markets. Until now, trade agreements have
been negotiated on our terms. My greatest fear is that the defeat of
fast track in this session of the 105th Congress will effectively
prohibit the consideration of this trade authority until the next
millennium. I want to make the point to my colleagues that this will
result in future trade agreements being negotiated on the terms of our
trading partners. Given the increasingly global nature of markets, this
Congress has put U.S. businesses and jobs at a significant economic
disadvantage in the world economy.
To further illustrate the political demagoguery on this issue, I
commend to the attention of my colleagues an article in today's
Washington Times by Donald Lambro entitled ``Low Bridge for the Fast
Track Flap.'' I will not add to Mr. Lambro's observations, instead I
simply say--Amen.

[From the Washington Times, Nov. 13, 1997]

Low Bridge for the Fast Track Flap

(By Donald Lambro)

If we learned anything from the fast-track trade fight, it
is that demagoguery is alive and well in Washington, economic
ignorance runs deeper than ever in Congress and the news
media, and the business community still doesn't know how to
sell the benefits of the global economy.
Even by past legislative battle standards, this one reached
a new low in fear-mongering and deceit. The tools of big
labor, Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt and Reps. David Bonior
and Bernie Sanders, a socialist, came up with every
hyperbolic attack line they could muster. Mr. Gephardt even
blamed increased drug trafficking in the United States on the
North American Free Trade Agreement--not on its true cause,
President Clinton's abandonment of the war on drugs.
In the final weeks of debate, the AFL-CIO's paid
congressional army of trade protectionists waged one of the
most dishonest lobbying campaigns that this reporter has seen
in 30 years of covering Washington. In one of the battle's
most skillful bits of anti-trade demagoguery, aired on the
CBS Evening News, Bonior and Sanders went down to Juarez,
Mexico, with a CBS film crew in tow. Visiting one of its
worst slums, which predates NAFTA, Mr. Bonior pointed to the
shacks and said, ``This is the global economy.'' It was a
totally one-sided editorial against trade by two veterans,
big government leftists that could have been produced at the
AFL-CIO, and probably was.
Similarly one-sided stories filled the news programs of the
past several weeks, bashing NAFTA and repeating big labor's
protectionist line. Nowhere was it reported that U.S. exports
to NAFTA partners Mexico and Canada had reached nearly $200
billion last year--an all-time record; that both have become
America's biggest export markets,

[[Page E2364]]

with Mexico's market bigger than Japan's; that the North
American economy is forecast to grow by 3.5 percent this
year, higher than the other industrialized countries of
the world; or that all those predictions of a ``giant
sucking sound'' of jobs leaving the United States have not
come true.
Despite all the doom and gloom fears that trade expansion
will destroy jobs, the obvious fact is that trade has helped
to create millions of new, higher-paying jobs, driving the
U.S. unemployment rate to the lowest level in nearly a
quarter of a century.
Last week's Labor Department unemployment report showed the
jobless rate falling to 4.7 percent, flattened by the
creation of an astonishing 284,000 jobs in October alone.
Since 1993 the U.S. economy has created more than 13.5
million new jobs. ``Clearly, NAFTA has not hurt the U.S.
economy,'' trade analyst Rebecca Reynolds Bannister writes in
a study for the Progressive Policy Institute.
And contrary to the Gephardt-Bonior-Sanders disinformation
campaign that the United States is losing higher-paying
manufacturing jobs, the most robust job gains last month were
in manufacturing. Half the 54,000 jobs in this sector alone
were in machinery, transportation and construction. Big U.S.
companies like Boeing have hired 32,000 workers in the last
18 months and will add another 11,000 jobs to its factory
lines. Other companies like Caterpillar were expanding their
payrolls to keep up with mounting exports to Latin America.
Rather than worry about losing jobs, the biggest complaint
among U.S. business leaders in the country today is the lack
of labor, qualified or otherwise.
But too little or none of this is getting reported to the
American people. One reason is an abysmal level of ignorance
in much of the news media and in Congress about trade and the
global economy. An otherwise intelligent editor of a major
newspaper recently told me that ``America doesn't make much
of anything anymore.''
This common perception, wholly untrue, reflects what many
Americans think of the U.S. economy. Combined with the belief
that imports destroy jobs and a misunderstanding about the
global economy's benefits, this is what is now driving so
much of the public mistrust about NAFTA and other trade
deals.
The truth is we will begin losing jobs if we don't
negotiate lower trade barriers abroad because U.S. companies
will move plants to these countries to avoid paying import
tariffs.
But the myth of U.S. deindustrialization goes on despite
all the evidence against it. Our gross domestic product, the
measure of all the goods and services we produce, stands at
nearly $8 trillion, bigger than any nation on Earth. If you
want to see what America makes, look at the New York Stock
Exchange listings or the NASDAQ in your local newspaper.
Millions of privately owned businesses add to the nation's
growth rate, which was expanding at a 3.5 percent annualized
rate in the third quarter--faster than any other
industrialized nation.
We are the biggest producer of food on the planet. We are
the biggest producer of farm and industrial machinery, of
airplanes, of computers and of software. At our present rate
of growth, it is quite possible that our GDP will reach $10
trillion by the beginning of the next decade.
Americans have produced this level of GDP. But because we
produce more products and services than we can possibly buy
ourselves, we sell the rest in global markets. And those
sales have been a major factor in our robust job-creation
rate that is higher than any industrialized nation on Earth.
Mr. Clinton complained this week that ``this is no-
brainer.'' Trade has not destroyed jobs, it has created them.
U.S. leadership in the global economy is one of the great
success stories of the 20th century. Sadly, the U.S. business
community had done a very poor job of promoting this story to
its workers, to Congress and to the media.
Mr. Clinton deserves a lot of the blame for not beginning
early enough to get the votes needed to pass fast-track. But
I think American business is also much to blame for this
week's setback. Until corporate America gets into the
trenches and begins doing a better job of combating the
demagogues and educating the country about the benefits of
global trade, we're going to have even more trouble getting
trade bills through Congress in the future.

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