Earlier today, senator sherrod brown, want to be ron wyden and carper came to the floor to speak of the usmexico trade agreement. The senate is expected to hold a final vote on the u. S. Mca trade deal tomorrow. Tomorrow i will do something ive never done in my time in the house. Ir will vote for a trade agreement the first time in my career and im voting for that because of the work that my colleague from oregon senator wyden and i did to fix president of trumps deal to secure new protections for American Workers for the First Time Ever in spite of the president s intransigence and winding up with with corporate interests because the trade agreement for the First Time Ever put workers at the center of the agreement. South korea and japan wont one after another permanent trade relations with china every one of these trade agreements and actions were written in the house again Free Trade Agreement because yes all of these were written by corporations to maximize fits camp compensation to enrich stockholders always at the workers and communities like mansfield ohio and toledo. I was talking to a friend of mine and she knows. She knows what happened with theseha trade agreements. We all know how they undermine communities. Always an they can because they were written by corporations in secret. Because of these tax policies where you pay to lower tax rate if you overseas then you pay in the United States in spite of the first top speed of tax breaks for the Business Model is you shut down the production in ohio and gainesville or cleveland is you get a tax break, move overseas and move your product back. Thats been th kind of businessl based on the trade policy for years. President trump promised something different, to renegotiate nafta. The problem is it was the same old Economic Policy that can pug corporate interests at the center of the trade agreement. They are always supporting the upcorporations and wall street over consumers. As we know down the hall where senator mcconnells office is, he walks down to confirm the far right judges to do the same thing. The initial draft is another betrayal the president promised. The white house looks like a retreat for wall street executives and a retreat for the drug company executives. It took Speaker Pelosi and the unions months and months and months working together to improve the deal. The president resisted and resisted. We have a provision we would talk about that says violence against workers is a violation of the agreement. It might sound obvious. The workers dont have that right and its not something they want to do very often if ever. My wife whose dad was a utility worker in the union for 35 years talks about growing up. They were on strike twice. Workers never get back fromm a strike they never really recover but sometimes they have to. It needs to be a trade agreement to make sure the workers rights are protected. Weve improved. They make it nearly impossible to win a case where they violate the commitments and importantly, we secure the problem defeat for provision. The provision the senator and i wrote and fought for is the first improvement since weve been negotiating them. We know why they closed factories in ohio and oregon and open them in mexico repay the wages. They have nonexistent environmental laws. American workers cant compete when Companies Move overseas exploits lowwage workers. Its by raising the standards. Making sure the standards are important. No matter where they are located we take away the incentives. Companies in the u. S. They will be less likely to do that. Then they will be able to fire products because they are more likely to be in the middle. It had been violated and we take action against that company. The company. We apply punitive damages when ththe companys chief, break the law, stop the workers from organizing and if they keep doing it, the final enforcement, wehe stopped their goods from coming into the United States. We have to say okay, you are cheating and breaking the law, violating workers rights on it or not going to have access to the u. S. Market. Thats enforcement. When they have the power to form the unions and negotiate it helps our workers. Right now they could be paying as little as 6. 50 a day. The minimum wage in tennessee, oregon, ohio is higher than that in our country this is 6. 50 a day. Weve already heard some credit say that they will force the wages to rise. I know a lot of ceos tha that me seven or 8 million a year and want to keep wages low but they accuse us of forcing the wages and thats kind of the point. Thats what we want to do if it takes awayy incentives for the seventh and eight 9 million from looking abroad to hire cheapr labor and make more mony for themselves. I want to especially thank senator wyden. Without him and his staff and endorsing the proposal and pushing aggressively, we wouldnt be here. I want to be clear we will be straight with the american the perfect agreement. Ct they fixed it over the president s opposition and the democrats fix isnt going to bring back the auto plants. I have concern that its much weaker than the Administration Says they are. We know the administration always exaggerates its successes and doesnt tell the truth about many of the things it does. We know that it was a corporate trade agreement and now workers are at the center. We will be watching the president he needs to ensure that they comply and we strengthen them if we need to. One trade deal democrats fix also wont undo the rest of the economic policies. Its a policy that as i said we havent raised the minimum wage because the president took overtime pay away from 50,000 by changing their overtime pay. This isnt going to fix all of g that. It isnt going to stop outsourcing when we have their tax plan that gives companies the tax break to send overseas. Im going to keep fighting the trade policies and tax policies just as we did with the agreement. They are taking another trade deal brought to us by President Trump and they made the pro worker. H more it must be includedlu in every future trade agreements. I would like to pose questions to my colleague from ohio wa whos done so much to wk on these issues. I want to thank him for his extraordinary commitment to the rights of workers. Essentially they lose their economic heartbeat by trade policies that cheap workers. You have been at this for more than a quartercentury. We want you to come out on the floor year after year and let me give you my calculation of this package that we worked on that you deserve so much credit for. Because for the first time it allows our country to hit the worst actor of the hardest by stopping ripoff artists at the individual factory level, and its the strongest because it allows us to get companies who repeatedly violateat the law and are able to stop the products of exploitive labor at the border. My question to you, i want to ask you a couple but i want to get this over to you first. It comes close to what the new regime would consist of. Thank you for your help. We have seen trade agreement after a trade agreement that simply is not even when the labor standards with fairly strong they are not really ever enforceable. Part of what we recognize we went back and looked at what happened after it passed and we tee any attempts at labor enforcement the companies were the governments that dont want to enforce the labor law find a way as lawyers are really good at doing its just taking forever so whenever you push them to do something, they end up staying in court. There was a case that we went on for seven or eight years and you cant really get justice delayed is justice denied you cant really get enforcement of the people whove done the violation take forever sovi speed is one f the things you mentioned at the outset how important that is. Another part of it is you need one of the things would be the ability to kick off the investigation to start to call the tollfree number thatol they can register that they have seen child labor violations and workers. Theyve seen wages denied for all kinds of reasons they can go to get quick action. And then if a Company Keeps doing, we found cases where a company would get a little slap on the wrist and do it again and again. So, what we did is we increasedo the penalties for firsttime and its proportionate to the violation so t its not a huge penalty. We can deny the company nafta benefits. If you are going to break the law and attack workers and keep the union and the night they took those that have earned it, i can see the market dry up in the United States so that is the best incentive to stop we keep the product out of the market out of the United States. It gets at the individual factory level and stronger because it stops repeat offenders who come up with products using exploitive labor and i want people to know my take is given what wev we haven over the last 25 years it is far better than anything weve seen. We set up just a we didnt know whether to laugh or cry at all over the world people are coming forward but that was useful. It didnt come close to what had been done here and let me ask a couple specific questions because i think ive heard lots of people in all the campaigns and the like talking about was the smartest and now we just walk through a much stronger str this is than anything we have seen in the last group or century. You mentioned about how they can use this hotline to enforce their rights. If they report violations of their rights at a call center and the government believes the complaint has merit, my understanding is than the government is obligated under the law to send them to that facility. Is that correct . Whether it is a call center or auto factory, if the violations occur and there is evidence that there are violations and in many cases we know about them because the workers have spoken out, then cospectors can go into those factories and one of the outcomes of this, we know that corporations dont want that kind of punishment. We know that they dont want to see an inspectors looking at their business because thereve been legitimate reasonable accusations of lawbreaking so thats going to mean they just quit breaking the law. We took an agreement so it has these labor provisions. We are going to pass an agreement that works and some are going to think twice about to shut down production in youngstown. Take us through what kind of actions can be taken against a facility in other words my understanding is they find violation when they inspected they have a host of remedies and they touched on this in the committee but what kind of actions can be taken against that particular facility. Let me talk for a second about the census that is important and if the Company Cheats in an auto facility and Mexican Community and we find the labor violations and take action against the company, the action isnt just against the ampanys facility in that community. If a Company Cheats and is trying to send, if theyve broken the law on a member labor violations, but applies to any but they ultimately send them from any one of its factories in mexico, so it keeps all kinds of attempts they might have oil laboring in products from somewhere else, so we look at that in a pretty broad way but fundamentally it works this way if we find a violation, the first there is a fine and it is essentially proportionate to the violation. So meaning that it isnt as punitive the First Defense isnt especially punitive. The second and third gets more serious and the second offense the fine is much greater beyond proportionality if you will and the third is when we step in and deny them the benefits and access to the markets. By the third of violation, whether it is a violation of labor law by the third violation, the enforcement and penalties are such that the companies are going to quit doing it. Thats the whole point. I dont want t to levy the sign, i want a wall for the Mexican Government has passed and the labor law and that are under the nafta agreement. Said, would you be saying that if it is found about theree were labor violations by the already car factory the penalties could apply to any car that might come into the United States from that factory throughout the investigation not just Going Forward . You cant cheat one place and expect to get them all into the United States without the tariffs. We thought a lot about this. We looked over the last 20 years we looked up what has happened when we looked back over the last coupleac of decades with te very good staff in the finance committee and with our office and found every possible example because of how the violations occur and how you stop there violations so we built a process that is complicated and it took a while and as i said, the president handed down another corporate tradens agreement that helps at the expense of workers and we were not going to let that happen this time. Thats why they took a long time to pass because for a whole year they were resistant to the good flavored enforcement and wanted to pass and help their corporate buddies. Remember there was a provision in there to help with drug companies. We said no to, speakethat, spear pelosi said no to that. We want a disagreement to center around workers notpa to help wal street or encourage to outsource jobs. T i appreciated this colloquy and i have a couple of town Hall Meetings at home here this weekend working class neighborhoods where trade has been important. One out of four jobs in my state serevolves around trade. If anybody said you think anything is really going to be accomplished with what you and senator brown are talking about, im going to a day went through the entire enforcement process in terms of the key provisions, and we laid out for the country and the senate that you have led an effort to speed up by more than 300 the timeline for an enforcement action. It used to take years and years sometimes. You have short end of that quity literally more than 300 . You have been part of an effort that is tougher because you can go after the individual factories, and then finally i think this proposal gets to the heart of what we need to be doing, because it means if you rip off the workers, we are going to stop the products they produced at the border. So, my guess is there will be a lot more discussion and i assume we have another valuable colleague from the finance committee that has been heavily involved in these issues for a lot of years, but i want to again say when we got that bill everybody said it will probablyl probably have some discussions about it and that will be pretty much it. I saw this when you and i announced the success of getting them into the bill they thought this was great to be another trade agreement written by the corporations mostly written ando secret that will serve the corporate interests and pass the bottom line and help the milliondollar executives make multimillion dollars a year and help the major stockholders and they were fine with that because that is what too often this body does and they found that this trade agreement is actually putting workers aty the center. That was your goal and my goal into people at the town meetings in eugene and portland all over are going to hear from you about how this will help the middleclass fundamentally. I appreciate the time. I think that this has been central to what we will be debating and voting on tomorrow morning. I want to thank senator brown. This bill would not have happened without the top trade enforcement led by senator brown. This bill would not have happened, period. With that, i will yield the floor. The senator from delaware. Madam president , before the senior democrat and Ranking Member of the finance committee leaves the floor and before the senator from ohio leaves the floor, i want to thank them both. We wouldnt be here on this day without you and your leadership, both of you. When he says that hes never met an agreement he even wanted to think about supporting, thank you for making this one that virtually all of us can support. Madam president , [inaudible] over and over an again but im going to say madam president. Today to discuss the treaty to replace north american Free Trade Agreement known as nafta. Those on the finance committee had an opportunity to evaluate and about a halfdozen or so had the opportunity to be given to different jurisdictions with respect to this trade agreement. Madam president , as you know, the trade deals are often those that have hundreds of provisions relating to any number of issues but ultimately, the trade cereements from the trade legislations move through the Senate Finance committee and we just heard from two of our Senior Members. As another Senior Member to the committee for many years now, ive considered many tradey bils and looked at what impact those would have on american consumers, producers, manufacturers, farmers and businesses and citizens. After all, the economy depends on making sure other countries can sell to us and that we can sell to other countries especially close allies like canada to the north and mexico to the south. Following years of uncertainty thanks to the president trade war, i believe this agreement will provide a measure of certainty for those who help drive our economy. Provisions are included and will help our state the producers gain better access to theet canadian markets important to maryland, virginia andut other places where they raised chicken. For the trade deal increasing Market Access for m dairy farmes in delaware, those across the country to sell milk products like powdered milk to canada. Financial trade commission estimates about this will allow for an additional 315 million in exports annually that is 315 million increase in exports just on the milk dairy side feels to canada every year. We evaluate as what it is, a trade deal i believe that it makes significant improvements on the agreements including the original nafta. If not stronger language to ensure that the obligations to all three counties under the multilateral environmentallt agreements including to the montreal particle can be fully i will come back and talk about that in a short while. Thanks primarily to the democrats though it is no longer the case that the failure of one ratify can be used to prevent the others from being heldvent accountable for failingg to honr their obligations. Environmental violations will be kerry as trade violations. So when the United States does bring the cases under the new nafta environmental obligations of those cases will be easiertho win Going Forward. This agreement also includes significant winnin funding for l states including binding provisions about overfishing, conservation of marine species and debris. When we talk about debris, keep this in mind. In the oceans of the worlds medical grade pacific garbage patch largely plastics it is twice the size of texas not twice the size of delaware or twice the size of maryland, twice the size of texas. And in agreement to 88 million for the environmental monitori monitoring, cooperation and enforcement, the new nafta creates an environment enforcement mechanism that gives the stakeholders and expanded role and enforcement matters. This will go a long way to ensuring that environmental violations can be designatedd ad remedied in the substantive and timely manner. So, my colleagues we have a friend we asked him how hes doing and he replies compared to what . Compared to the previous trade agreements that this body has considered common new nafta and its implementing legislation of the strongest environmental provisions we have seen to date, period. That is good news especially for the trade deal put forth under this administration. Now does the new nafta include everything that my democratic colleaguesnd and i and some republican colleagues would have liked to see with records for the environmental protection, no it is not. It fails to commit the United States toar the courts. It fails to provide the amendment i mentioned earlier for the montreal protocol which could bring the Global Community together to reducelo the use of these carvins in products like air conditioners and freezers and preeven prevented by the usf those products, prevent u presea half degree p celsius increase n Global Warming by the end of this century so we are doing this one thing and like so many in the Trump Administration proposals, the new nafta bill fails to even mention the word orimate change. The trade agreemen agreement isn important tools and resources that will be primarily negotiated by democrats to strengthen the deal, called the administration to hold them accountable. The senate will be in order. Madam president , would you say that again. The senate will be in order. Thank you, madam president. I will say this again, the trade agreement does have important tools and resources that will be tenderly negotiated by democrats to strengthen the deal. The administration held accountable to enforce nafta and countries environmental obligations and help to ensure those who break the rules are actually held accountable. Mr. President , madam president , madam president , as the senior top democrat on the Environmental Public Works Committee here in the senate, i am especially aware of the extreme and destructive policies put forth by the current oadministration. To lead the fight against the reckless rollbacks, too many unbelievably qualified candidates and their relentless attempt to chip away at the nations bedrock environmental protections. We know what to expect from this administration when it comes to environmental policies. And as a result, i know the provisions thanks to the hard work of both democrats and the house and the senate and republicans, too. Its stronger than where we started. Not perfect, and we must do more Going Forward, but its better thant weve ever done before, ad that must be recognized. I want to pause for ant moment o thank the ambassador and his staff for their hard work and colleagues and with me. Its been an extraordinary outreach and great responsiveness and i just want to say thank you to the ambassador andan his team. The trade rep in the last administration, and if i could let me end with this. While its good news that we are able to reach an agreement on the new nafta, i want to caution my colleagues that the uncertainty caused by the haphazard approach to trade is far from over. The multifront trade war with our allies and trading partners is approaching two years now. Thats two years of american farmers, manufacturers, retailers, smallbusiness experiencing increased cost from the terrace while simultaneously being walked out of overseas markets due to the retaliatory tasks. Tasks. That is two years of uncertainty and disruption for the americani businesses that have adequate Gd Investments and decisions on hold. Or and two years of uncertainty for the American Workers who ensure if the jobs continue to exist as the trade were derived by. And where has that gotten us . Well, a limited trade agreement with japan that may be better than nothing but is largely an attemptf to cover some of the negative effects that would draw from the transpacific trade partnership, tpp, as our economy. For those that dont remember, tpp Transpacific Partnership as you recall negotiated in the last administration was a 12 nation trading bloc negotiated by primarily the trade representative and his staff that included 40 of the worlds economy. In one trade, 12 nations and guess who i did, we did and guess who was excluded, china or the bad behavior they sometimes efollow. On the other side, they were looking in. And somehow we walked away from that and what we have come up with in its place is something that is in my view not nearly as bold and unfortunately, not the evth that we have taken. Im still reviewing phase one of the china trade deal that was signed i think today but from what ive seen, they fell short to the economy that President Trump has for some time. As best i can tell, the reforms in the economy just a bit not make the final cut. So, as we enter this new year and in the decade i hope that the president will rethink what many believe are senseless approaches to trade and return to a multilateral approach much like we have on the Transpacific Partnership, for the United States works with our allies and trading partners to constructively right the global rules of the trade. Experts and academics from the Jewish Community including Antidefamation League Jonathan Greenblatt testified on the rise of antisemitism in the u. S. Before the House Homeland Security subcommittee on intelligence and counterterrorism. Witnesses discuss the role social media and big tech has played in fostering hateful rhetoric and what can be done to combat antisemitism on the national and global level
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