A week ago, I was on national TV talking about how the pending request for
"Trade Promotion Authority" is the "Fast Track" to Hell. But before I get into
that, I wanted to remind you that Bill Maher will be performing in Orlando on
February 8, and two of my supporters will join us.
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.
So "trade promotion authority" is something that's about to be proposed
again in Congress, and I was on TV recently explaining:
(a) What the
heck that is, and (b) Why it's really bad.
Listen:
Thom
Hartmann: In "Screwed" news, some lawmakers in Washington want to give the
Obama Administration so-called "fast-track" trade authority to approve so-called
"free-trade" deals, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership or TPP. That's a terrible
decision. A new report from the Public Citizens Global Trade Watch shows just
how devastating fast-track trade deals have been for the American people, and
the economy. According to the report, thanks to fast-track trade deals, over the
past twenty years, trade deficits have ballooned, millions of American jobs have
been shipped overseas, wages have stagnated, and inequality has exploded. So,
given all of the destruction to our economy and our middle class over the last
two decades, how can Washington be considering approving fast-track trade
authority and signing on to yet another so-called "free trade" deal? Let's ask
Congressman Alan Grayson, representing Florida's 9th Congressional District,
the Congressman with Guts. Congressman,
welcome back!
Congressman Alan Grayson: Thank you, Thom.
Thom: It's always great having you with us. What's your take on
this new report from Global Trade Watch about the damage fast-tracked trade
deals have done to our country?
Alan: Well, frankly, it's stating
the obvious. The basic problem is very simple. Trade is supposed to [work like
this:] "You sell me yours, and I'll sell you mine."But it's transmogrified into something very different in the United States,
ever since NAFTA went into effect. For every year, before NAFTA went into effect
- 200 years of American history - we never had a trade deficit as large as $140
billion. Now, every single year since NAFTA's gone into effect, our trade
deficit has been $140 billion or more. In fact, in the last 14 years, we've run
the largest trade deficits in human history, larger than any other country
anywhere in the world, larger than any country in history, larger than in our
own history. It's a disaster, and it's not simply an abstraction.
Let me
explain what's really happening here. What's happening is that American
consumers are buying goods and services from other countries, putting tens of
millions of people in other countries to work. That would be fine if they bought
an equal amount of our goods and services. The trade deficit reflects the fact
that they are not; they're not, to the tune of half a trillion dollars every
year. So what's happening is that they're taking those rectangular green
pictures of dead presidents that they're getting from us when we buy their stuff
and, instead of buying our stuff, they're buying our assets. They're driving the price of our assets higher and
higher, benefiting the 1% only, not creating any jobs in this country, and
pushing us deeper and deeper into debt. In fact, at this point, on the
basis of these trade deals, one seventh of all the assets in America - all the
farmland, all the homes, all the cars, all the stocks, all the bonds, all the
real estate, all the small businesses - 1/7th of all our assets are now foreign-owned.And the end game is that they will all be foreign-owned, and we will have to
declare national bankruptcy. That's where this is headed, and NAFTA and Fast
Track want to grease the skids.
Thom: You know, we've been
well-trained over the last, God, 30 or 40 years, with increasing levels of
Republican hysteria about our federal deficit-although they were notably silent
during the Reagan years. . . . In my lifetime, there's never been a serious
debate, outside the 1992 Ross Perot-Bill Clinton-George Bush debate, about trade
deficits. Why do you think it is that the average American knows about budget
deficits and our national debt, and has no clue either that we have a trade
deficit, what a trade deficit is, or the consequences, those horrible
consequences that you just described of our trade deficit?
Thom: Wow! . . . Fast Track is almost certainly
coming, [and] TPP (I prefer to call it the "Southern Hemisphere Asian Free Trade
Agreement" [or] S-H-A-F-T-A). In any case, how do you see this playing out?
Because it looks to me like there's a coalition forming between progressive
Democrats like yourself and conservative Republicans, who are concerned about
the surrender of sovereignty associated with these things.
Alan:
Well, we see it differently. I mean, progressive Democrats recognize that,
because of these trade giveaways, this trade treachery, because of this we've
lost five million jobs in manufacturing in the past twenty years, and maybe 15
million other jobs. So that's why progressive Democrats are against this.
Republicans are against Fast Track because they recognize it as a power grab by
the President. The Fast Track legislation prohibits subcommittee debates,
subcommittee hearings, subcommittee markups, full committee debates, full
committee hearings, full committee markups, and it limits us in the House of Representatives to 88
seconds of debatefor each one of us. Eighty-eight seconds to extend to
40 other countries (if we count both trade deals the President is working on),
the disaster that's been visited upon the U.S. economy simply by having a dozen
existing countries with these deals in effect. They want to put our $30/hour
workers directly in full head-to-head competition with the $0.30/hour workers in
Vietnam and Brunei and in other places like that, who have no environmental
protection, no labor rights, and in many cases are [relying on] slave labor.
That's what these deals are trying to do. It's the Fast Track to Hell.
"Fast
Track" - a bill that only Snidely Whiplash could love.
Courage,
Rep. Alan Grayson
To see the video, or to make a campaign
contribution, click here.
Paid for and Authorized by the Committee to Elect Alan Grayson
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