Sherrod Brown

Mr. BROWN of Ohio

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 440, had I been present, I would have voted ``yea.''

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Chairman, I would like to speak respecting the opinion and statement of the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Regula) on the point of order. Mr. Chairman, this is a question of, by and large, moving money from the Medicare trust fund, the money that Congress has decided should go to insurance companies, and, as a result, costing Medicare beneficiaries an additional payment out of their pockets. It is basically a zero-sum game. Are we in this body going to say insurance companies are going to get the money, or are we going to say we are going to charge beneficiaries for that money? I would appeal based on that.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Chairman, I have one additional speaker. Is it possible that he can speak before that?

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 3 minutes. Mr. Chairman, last week, the Bush administration on Friday afternoon when no one was paying attention, right after he made a speech at the convention assuring seniors that Medicare would be strong and prosper, and right as Labor Day weekend began and no one was paying attention, the President announced a dramatic increase, a historically high increase in Medicare part B premiums paid by seniors and the disabled, a 17 percent increase, the single biggest premium hike in Medicare history. Most seniors rely on the Social Security cost-of-living adjustments, COLAs, to offset Medicare premium increases. Though the administration has not published it yet, the Social Security COLA will be about 3 percent, making the Medicare increase almost six times what the COLA increase for Social Security will be. Usually they are announced at the same time. This year, because of the election, presumably, the President thought he could sort of quietly do this right before Labor Day. He did not really want to announce them at the same time, presumably because the premium increase for Medicare was five to six times what the COLA increase would be. Why are those premiums rising so dramatically? The Bush administration spokesman says it is because seniors are going to receive enhanced benefits. He did not acknowledge that the premium increase will help cover enhanced benefits for HMOs, $12 billion worth. So we have a $130 increase for seniors' premiums, and we have $12 billion more going into HMO pockets. HMO profits already are soaring; they increased 50 percent last year. Yet the Bush administration is tapping the Medicare trust fund and making seniors pay more out of pocket to finance a $12 billion HMO slush fund. That is just the beginning. The total HMO payment changes in last year's law will cost taxpayers $46 billion. So even as it is emptying the Medicare trust fund, the Bush administration has the audacity to ask the American seniors to pay more. The change would require each of 40 million senior and disabled Americans to pay $139 more next year for Medicare coverage. My amendment would stop the premium increase. Unfortunately, my friend, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Regula), is using his discretion to object to the amendment on procedural grounds. I urge my friend, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Regula), to reconsider because we need to look at this bigger picture: how much money are we paying the insurance companies; how much are we telling seniors they have to reach into their pockets. There is no justification for pouring billions into the pockets of already very profitable HMOs and asking seniors on fixed incomes to absorb a 17 percent increase just to appease a President bent on privatizing Medicare. Asking seniors to finance the President's privatization agenda is not just unjustifiable; it is, frankly, shameful. If this amendment does not pass, seniors will see their premiums rise sharply while HMOs take billions more in so-called bonus payments. The chairman can and should permit a vote on this amendment so we can begin to restore the trust of seniors and the fiscal integrity of Medicare.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from California (Mr. Stark) for yielding me this time. I rise in support of the Stark amendment. This whole Tom Scully issue is a sorry page in a sordid chapter in congressional history. Think about this whole process of the Medicare bill passing this Congress if this new law that seniors, most seniors I know, think was foisted on them, this bill written by the drug industry and the insurance industry. The vote to pass Medicare was taken in the middle of the night. The debate started at midnight. The vote was taken at 3 o'clock. The roll call, unprecedented in congressional history, was kept open for 2 hours and 55 minutes until Republican leadership could twist arms all over this House floor back in the cloakroom; waking up the President in the middle of the night; trying to change Republican votes; trying to literally bribe at least one Republican Member of Congress, who talked about it on radio the next day; the millions of dollars in campaign contributions that were used to pass this Medicare bill. Tens of millions of dollars went to President Bush's reelection from the drug industry and the insurance. Tens of millions of dollars went into Republican leadership campaign coffers from the drug industry and insurance industry. And then to top off this sordid chapter in congressional history, Mr. Scully, the gentleman, a good public servant, but the gentleman that was negotiating on behalf of seniors, on behalf of taxpayers, was negotiating this bill, and he was lining himself up for a job soon after the bill was signed by President Bush, a job representing and lobbying for drug companies and for insurance companies. What is wrong with this? This amendment needs to be passed to at least undo part of this very sordid chapter in congressional history.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleagues, the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Gordon), the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Barton), the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Bilirakis), and the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Dingell), for their dedication to this bill. I also want to commend Cheryl Jaeger and John Ford of the staff of the Committee on Energy and Commerce for their good work. Youth suicide is an issue that strikes a deeply personal chord for all too many Americans. An intern in my office lost five classmates to suicide, the most in her school's history. This legislation recognizes that the causes of youth suicide are complex and individual; but every one of these tragedies is, in fact, preventable. It reflects the fact that preventing suicide requires an approach that is both comprehensive in its scope and targeted toward the populations most at risk. We will continue to work with the Department of Health and Human Services and mental health advocates to address one outstanding issue concerning parental consent; however, it makes sense to move forward and ensure that the good ideas in this bill are implemented as soon as possible. This legislation honors the courage of the families both within this Congress and across the country who have endured the tragedy of youth suicide and who seek to stop this crisis in its tracks. I am pleased to support this important legislation.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer).

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Gordon), the sponsor of the bill, who has been a leader on this issue.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Davis). (Mr. DAVIS of Illinois asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I support the legislation.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. I do not oppose. I support.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, President Bush has spent a lot of time in my State of Ohio in the last few weeks. He was in Brecksville in my district just this weekend. He comes to Ohio to try to argue for an economic policy that has seen one out of six manufacturing jobs in our State disappear. His answer to every bad piece of economic news is more tax cuts for the wealthy, a person making $1 million gets a $123,000 tax cut, and more trade agreements like NAFTA that continue to ship jobs overseas. Clearly his economic policies are not working in a State that has 220,000 fewer jobs than it did when George Bush took office. Instead, as Senator Kerry suggests, we should extend unemployment benefits. We should reward those companies that manufacture domestically. We should penalize those companies that go offshore like Halliburton and continue to ship jobs overseas, that continue to take tax advantage of the American people and continue to lose jobs in our Nation.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, here we are again debating overtime in the Labor, Health and Human Services bill. I feel like it was just last year when we had this same debate, because we did. Last year I supported a Democratic overtime pay amendment which proposed to prohibit the Department of Labor from using funds to enforce any regulation that would cut overtime pay. When the amendment was voted on in the House, the Republican majority blocked its passage. However, the Senate approved an amendment offered by Senator Harkin to block the Bush administration from issuing the overtime changes, protecting people's overtime. The House then reversed course, against leadership's advice, and bipartisanly voted to instruct the negotiators to instruct the Harkin language, therefore preserving workers' overtime. Even though both the House and Senate voted to protect overtime, a few hand-picked Republicans on the conference committee, all doing the bidding of President Bush and the Republican leadership, removed those protections from the bill. The Economic Policy Institute study calculates that under the revised Bush overtime rules, kindergarten and nursery school teachers, firefighters, police, nurses and hundreds of thousands of other workers would lose an average of $250 a week in overtime pay. Millions more lose future eligibility for it. Under the Bush rules that cut back on overtime, we will see an explosion of executives in the United States workforce, companies redesignating regular workers to avoid paying overtime. It will not be executives the way we think of executives in the traditional white-collar sense. Instead, it is workers who supervise only two coworkers, such as a shift manager in the toy department of Wal-Mart. That person could be classified as executive and then lose overtime eligibility. Companies can exempt more than one executive for the same workers, as long as they maintain a 2-to-1 ratio of exempt to nonexempt employees. Supervising, therefore, does not have to include the right to hire and fire, as executives usually have, or even take up the majority of the executive's time under the new rules. A worker could spend all day serving customers, sweeping the floor, doing the same things coworkers do, be called a supervisor, and then be denied eligibility for overtime. Similarly, the new rules create a broad new exemption called team leader that can exclude workers from overtime pay under the administrative classification. This is a huge loophole. Team leaders could have no supervisory authority at all, but still be prohibited from receiving overtime. The new rules make it easier to exempt workers in financial services and in computer-related occupations, among dozens of other job categories. Tonight the Labor-HHS bill was pulled off the floor and Members of Congress were sent home, that is why there are few here now, because Republican leadership lacked the votes to defeat this amendment on overtime. The Department of Labor's mission statement describes it as the primary agency to promote the welfare of job seekers and wage earners. That is why the Department of Labor was created decades ago. It was established solely to represent the interests of the American workforce. Now, under Secretary Chao, taking her orders from President Bush and especially from Vice President Cheney, and especially from the Chamber of Commerce, and especially from the American National Association of Manufacturers, the Department of Labor now represents corporations at the expense of workers. That is why the assault on overtime pay coming from our government's Department of Labor against the workers it should be representing. My colleague, the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey), wants to offer an amendment that prohibits the Department of Labor from implementing these new rules on overtime pay, which would protect American workers, if we could win our amendment, and protect American families from the rising cost of living. We have the votes to pass it, but Republican leadership, at President Bush's request, pulled the bill off the floor, and we are not going to vote on it. We have the votes to pass it, as I said. In a democracy, you know, you vote on things. If you have enough votes, they pass; if you do not have enough votes, they fail. It is as simple as that. But here tonight we saw something that cannot quite be considered democracy. We do not vote on something because the leadership on the other side of the aisle, taking huge campaign contributions from darn near every corporate interest in this country, we do not vote because leadership on the other side of the aisle simply does not want to lose. Their corporate contributors do not like that. The will of the American people has been stifled. A major appropriations bill has been held up. Also the Republicans do not lose a vote that their corporate backers want, that the majority of this House, the representatives of the American people, support. You can call that government, but it sure is not democracy.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, when President Bush took office, he assured seniors he would honor the Nation's commitment to Medicare. He said Medicare is the binding commitment of a caring society. He did not say temporary commitment. He did not say faltering commitment. He said binding commitment. By any standard, raising the Medicare premium by 17.4 percent, that is more than five times the projected increase in Social Security benefits for seniors, raising the Medicare premium by 17.4 percent is a breach of that commitment, the largest increase in Medicare's 38 year history. At the Republican convention on Thursday night, the President said, ``I believe we have a moral responsibility to honor America's seniors.'' The next day, late in the afternoon, right before Labor Day, Friday afternoon, the Labor Day weekend, in spite of his comments the night before, the President quietly announced this 17.4 percent increase in premiums for senior citizens to have to pay into Medicare. Right before the Labor Day weekend. Is that what it means to honor seniors? After President Bush signed the Medicare drug law a year ago, he launched a very expensive taxpayer-financed ad campaign featuring the slogan: ``Same Medicare, better benefits.'' Those ads failed to mention the 17 percent premium increase even though the administration planned it as far back as March 2003. They failed to mention the 10 percent increase in the deductible for doctors' services which was written into the new law. It failed to mention the fact that both the premium and the deductible will continue to increase year after year after year without any corresponding increase in coverage. Those ads, those taxpayer-financed ads, trying to sell the American people on the new Medicare bill failed to mention that while seniors will be paying more for the same Medicare, HMOs will be, ``earning'' might not be the right word, but earning more for the same Medicare. $16 billion more, in fact. This bill, this Medicare bill, clearly written for the drug industry and for the insurance industry, clearly has put seniors in the back seat. The drug industry, the insurance industries have contributed literally tens of millions of dollars to President Bush's campaign. The insurance industry gets a taxpayer subsidy of $16 billion. And then seniors see their premiums go up and see their deductibles go up. They have got to find the money somewhere. Under the Bush plan, in order to pay the insurance companies those subsidies, they need to raise the premiums for seniors more than $100; they need to raise those premiums, a 17 percent increase. They need to raise those premiums for seniors to make up that money. These benefits are being lavished on HMOs as a bonus and incentive for HMOs to accelerate their enrollment of Medicare enrollees. Now HMO profits last year without this increased by 50 percent, yet seniors are paying higher premiums so that HMO profits can soar even further. Senior and disabled Medicare enrollees on fixed incomes will pay more. HMOs will earn more and big drug companies will charge more. The Bush administration in an amazing sleight of hand insisted on prohibiting Medicare from negotiating bulk discounts on behalf of 39 million Medicare beneficiaries on the prescription drugs the same way that large insurance plans do, the same way that the VA does in our government. As a result, the drug industry, because of this protection of the drug industry by the Bush administration, the drug industry stands to earn an additional $160 billion in profits during the next 10 years. $160 billion in profits in the next 10 years. Again, more campaign contributions to President Bush from the insurance industry, more tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to the Republican leadership and to the President from the drug industry. It is the same old story, the President says the right thing and then he does the wrong thing. It is the same old story, the President always responding to the best heeled, most organized, wealthiest corporate interests in this city. Last week, the President again called himself a compassionate conservative, as if eroding senior's fixed incomes is compassionate, as if coercing them into fly-by-night HMOs, as the Medicare bill does, is compassionate, as if relegating seniors to a bargain-basement prescription drug plan is in any way compassionate. After all, this President has proposed cutting $60 billion from Medicaid; he had to because the tax cuts that went overwhelmingly to the wealthiest people in our society, he had to find the money someplace when it is the only source of nursing home care for 70 percent of people who need it. It is consistent, but it is not compassionate.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Vermont (Mr. Sanders).

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland).

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur).

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I am a little puzzled by this debate. I heard my friend from Texas talk about all the great promises of free trade and how these trade agreements are going to mean so much to our farmers and to our workers and to our businesses. I have heard the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Crane) say some of the same kinds of things, but I guess I am puzzled because I have heard that throughout my entire 12 years in Congress. I have heard every trade agreement that comes to the floor, so many speakers say over and over and over again that if we pass these trade agreements, we are going to have more jobs, we are going to do more exports, we are going to have our balance in trade; and look what has happened in the last 12 years. Our trade deficit when I came to this Congress was about one-fourth of what it is today. We import $1.5 billion more every day than we export. George Bush, Senior, said for every $1 billion of trade, either export or import, it was equivalent to somewhere in the vicinity of 14 or 15 or 16,000 jobs. Well, we have almost a $500 billion trade deficit. Do the math. That is an awful lot of lost jobs. When we pass these trade agreements, we continue to hemorrhage jobs. We continue to have job loss. We continue to lose manufacturing jobs. One out of six manufacturing jobs in my State has been lost since George Bush took office. We have lost 165 jobs every day of the Bush administration. So the answer to that is let us do more of what we have already been doing, let us do more tax cuts for the wealthiest people in society, hoping that maybe some of it will trickle down to more jobs, and let us do more trade agreements which ship jobs overseas? People in our communities say these trade agreements are not working. China, entry of China in WTO; NAFTA; Singapore, Chile, Australia, Morocco, these trade agreements are not translating into more jobs, and people at home know that. In spite of what people in this institution say, in spite of how people in this institution vote, the fact is we continue to lose manufacturing jobs in this country. We have lost millions of jobs in this Bush administration, and then we turn around and do the same thing over and over and over. We make the same promises over and over and over and the results are the same. When we will ever learn? Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, while the Jordan Free Trade Agreement passed in the last year of the Clinton administration represented a step forward in free trade policy, recent free trade agreements provide a template to purposely and purposefully circumvent labor and environmental laws. To make matters worse, USTR and its pharmaceutical allies are now including language in each trade agreement in front of this body to ban reimportation in all agreements they negotiate. The Morocco Free Trade Agreement is the latest example of this trade, we call it, devolution. Last week we voted on the U.S.-Australia FTA. While Australian workers, to be sure, enjoy the benefits of good labor laws and the enforcement of those laws, the precedent was the same. Labor and environmental protections were given short shrift in the core text of the agreement, while USTR focused on ensuring the gold standard for the pharmaceutical industry. It is almost as if the U.S. Government dispatched the USTR again to protect the big drug companies in this country. It is no surprise, with the rest of the record in this body and in this administration in protecting the drug companies on every single issue possible. But Morocco is not Australia, and I have significant concerns about labor and working conditions there. Like Singapore and Chile, the labor provisions in the Morocco FTA are intentionally unenforceable. Violations of core labor standards cannot be taken to dispute resolution. The commitment to enforce domestic labor laws is subject to remedies weaker than those available for commercial disputes. Again, the commercial part of the agreement is always better, if you will, than the labor part of the agreement, because of this body's and this administration's low regard for worker rights. This violates the negotiating objective of Fast Track that equivalent remedies should exist for all parts of the agreement. Further, the ``enforce your own laws'' standard allows countries the opportunity to rewrite and weaken their labor laws to attract investment and seems to be a magnet for corporate interests all over the world to lobby those legislatures and those congresses and parliaments to weaken their own labor law, because they are not international labor organization standards. Today we will vote on the U.S.-Morocco Free Trade Agreement containing the same flawed policies on labor and on the environment and on reimportation. The same provisions in Morocco are in the Central America Free Trade Agreement. This agreement does not look much different from CAFTA. So for those of you, and I think it is pretty clear a majority of the Bush administration would have brought that agreement up this summer, those of you voting ``no'' on CAFTA, you are really voting for a pretty similar agreement on Morocco. Every free trade template brought before this House is, as Yogi Berra used to say, like deja vu all over again. First, the Medicare bill passed this year specifically prohibited the U.S. Government from negotiating lower drug prices for America's seniors and consumers. That was one this Congress and this Bush administration gave to the drug industry. Then the pharmaceutical industry punished American consumers by restricting the volume of drug inventories in Canada to prevent importation to the U.S. Then the U.S. Trade Representative and the administration included language in the Australia Free Trade Agreement that enables pharmaceutical companies to prevent prescription drug reimportation to the detriment of American consumers. Again, another bouquet from this Congress and the Bush administration to the drug industry. I do not think the connection is anything but obvious when you look at the amount of money the drug industry has given to the Republican Party, given to Republican leadership, and given to President Bush. Now similar provisions contained in last year's Singapore FTA and in the upcoming CAFTA are in the Morocco FTA bill that will be voted on. Though Morocco is not on the list of countries today covered by pending drug legislation, the importation provisions in this FTA prove this is a precedent, it was in Australia, now it is in this, that the USTR plans to extends this to all future trade agreements. There is broad support in this House, there is even broader support among seniors and among consumers, because they are not getting campaign contributions from the drug industry, for lowering drug prices and for allowing Americans to purchase safe, affordable drugs from other developed nations. I urge my colleagues to oppose the administration's back-door effort again to close drug reimportation through trade negotiations. It is important to overcome attempts by free trade proponents to reduce this debate to a choice between free trade and no trade, and frame the discussion around priorities affected by irresponsible trade policy, labor protections, the environment, and affordable pharmaceutical access for all nations. This is not a debate on whether one supports trade; this is a debate on whether one supports responsible trade. I urge my colleagues to oppose this irresponsible trade agreement. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan).

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, one of the things I have noticed in these debates on these trade issues is there is one common thread. There are many, but there is one really thick common thread that is woven through all these trade agreements, in not just these trade agreements but that is perhaps woven through much of what this Congress has done in the last 3 years, during the Bush years, and that is whatever the drug industry wants, whatever the pharmaceutical companies want. We know the drug industry is the most profitable industry in America by a factor of three or four times in profitability over other Fortune 500 industries. We also know the drug industry has 600-plus lobbyists, more than one per Member. We also know the drug industry has given more money to President Bush, tens of millions of dollars, and to Republican leadership than any other industry. And we know they have gotten their way. They wrote the Medicare bill, we know that, with the insurance industry. We know they have begun to try to dry up drug supplies in Canada, prescription drugs, so that Americans have more difficulty going to Canada to get drugs. We know that the FDA, once one of the best agencies in the Federal Government, has been co-opted by the drug industry so that on issue after issue they take the drug industry's side rather than the public safety or the consumers' side. And most importantly, I do not know that Members on the other side of the aisle are quite aware of this, but certainly the public is aware at how high drug prices, how much they have skyrocketed in the 3 years since President Bush has, I was going to say turned a blind eye to drug industry abuses but really actually fronted for and assisted in drug industry abuses. One more example of that is all of these trade agreements, what happened with the Australia Free Trade Agreement, how it would for all intents and purposes block reimportation, that is, our ability, American consumers' ability to buy prescription drugs from another country, to get drugs at half or a third or a fourth of their price. We are now seeing the same in the Morocco bill. But let us kind of scratch the surface a little and what you will find, Mr. Speaker, is in April, United States Trade Rep, Ambassador Zoellick, gave Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Southeast Asian public affairs, Ralph Ives, additional responsibilities as the Assistant U.S. Trade Rep for pharmaceutical policy. He was the chief negotiator in the Australia FTA, which included these provisions we talked about which, of course, benefit the pharmaceutical industry. Now, Mr. Speaker, we hear that this same Mr. Ives, who I said was the chief Australia FTA negotiator on pharmaceutical interests on behalf of the Bush administration, we find out next month he will leave USTR to become vice president of AdvaMed, a medical supply company. We have also learned that Claude Burke, another negotiator for U.S. taxpayers, paid by our government, a Bush appointee for intellectual property rights, has already left and now is working for another drug company, working for Abbott Labs. So this revolving door of the drug industry where the drug industry gives money to President Bush, President Bush then helps the drug industry, then these people who are working for taxpayers negotiate a good deal for the drug company, then leave and come back and work for the drug industry. Is there no shame with this crowd, with my Republican friends who have fronted for this drug industry that is fleecing the American public and with the administration? That is one issue. The other, Mr. Speaker, is why do we pass a trade agreement when we see the same story repeated over and over and over? We just turn the calendar back, rewind the clock, and we see it over and over again. We see speaker after speaker come to this floor and make all kinds of promises. We have a trade surplus in Morocco, so we ought to pass a trade agreement. Just like we had a trade surplus with Mexico, we passed NAFTA; and now we have a $25 billion a year, plus-plus-plus, trade deficit. They promise more agricultural exports. They promise more American jobs. They promise more business for American companies. They promise more exports of American products. But look what happens. In my State in the last 3 years, we have lost one out of six manufacturing jobs. Does that mean these trade agreements with Mexico, with WTO in China, with Morocco, with Australia, with Chile, with Singapore, does that mean these trade agreements are working? There is no evidence that they are working. We continue to hemorrhage jobs. We now have a $450 billion trade deficit, $1.5 billion trade deficit every day. So our answer is, boy, let's do more of the same because that must be working. It is clearly not working. We have lost jobs during the Bush administration, the first President since Herbert Hoover to have a net loss of jobs. So what are we going to do? We are going to keep pursuing the same economic policy we have had the last 3 years, more tax cuts for the most privileged people in society, maybe some of it will trickle down into economic growth. Clearly that has not worked. More trade agreements, like Morocco, like Australia, like NAFTA, like China, more trade agreements. That has not worked because we continue to hemorrhage jobs. We continue to ship jobs overseas. Maybe, just maybe, Mr. Speaker, since none of that seems to have worked, maybe we ought to try something different. Maybe we ought to have a trade agreement that does not sell out to the drug industry. Maybe we ought to have a trade agreement with enforceable labor and environmental standards, international labor organization standards. Maybe we ought to have a trade agreement that puts American workers first, that puts the environment first, that puts food safety first, that puts American consumers of prescription drugs first. Maybe, just maybe, we ought to put a hold on these trade agreements that continue to ship jobs overseas and, instead, pass something that works for American consumers, that works for American workers, that works for our communities, and that works for the United States of America. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. If the gentleman will yield further, to encourage China to take our jobs, the best example, when the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland) and I came to this Congress in 1992, our trade deficit with China, meaning the number of dollars we bought from them more than we sold to them, was about $1 billion. In those days, 1992, we bought from China about $1 billion more than we sold to China. We had a trade deficit of about $1 billion. A year-and-a-half ago, that trade deficit passed $100 billion. This year it will exceed $120 billion. So we are buying from China every day about $300 million more than we are selling to China. We have a daily trade deficit with China of between $300 and $400 million. What does that translate to? According to the first President Bush, who really lost his job because he was out of touch with the workaday problems of American workers, but what President Bush I said is, $1 billion in trade deficit translates into 18,000 jobs. If we have a trade deficit every day of $300 million, we are losing hundreds of thousands of jobs as a result of that trade deficit.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will continue to yield, that is the rest of the story. That is exactly right. A 10 percent productivity increase a year ago. Then earlier this year, in April, Timken announced record sales, the highest sales of any quarter in its history, in its almost 100-year history, and Timken announced a 63 percent increase in earnings per share over the first quarter of 2003. So immensely more productive workers, 10 percent more. A year later, record sales, a year later highest earnings, a great increase in earnings per share. Do you know what happened a week later? You know, obviously. Timken announced it was going to shut down its three remaining Canton, Ohio, plants; 1,300 workers would lose their jobs, good-paying jobs, industrial workers, and Timken was going to build another plant in China. This is sort of the Bush economy. It is more productive workers, more corporate profits, higher pay for executives; squeeze the workers, squeeze their health care, make them pay more, squeeze wages; shut the plant down, more production in China. Then a whole other cycle: more profits, more sales, bigger executive pay, more squeeze on the workers.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland) for yielding to me, and the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) and earlier the gentlewoman from Illinois (Ms. Schakowsky) for joining us. I got here late, but I heard the comments of each of my three colleagues about job loss, and Ohio has suffered probably more than any other State. Maybe the gentleman from Michigan's (Mr. Hoekstra) State has been hit just about as hard. But we have lost one sixth of our manufacturing jobs in my State, the State of Ohio. We have lost over 200,000 jobs. In fact, if we look at it, we have literally lost 180 jobs every single day of the Bush administration. They are saying that we are seeing job growth now, and we have seen a few jobs created; but there are a couple of issues there. One is we have not nearly come back to where we were. In fact, as the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) pointed out, George Bush will be the first President since Herbert Hoover to have lost a net loss of jobs. We have had a net loss of 215,000 jobs, and now we have just had a net loss this past month, heavily manufacturing jobs, 160, 165,000 manufacturing job loss. And it is not just the people that lose their jobs. It is what it does to these communities. Cleveland laid off 800 school teachers because of job loss, and that means that the average schoolroom in Cleveland will have 30 students per teacher in an average schoolroom. The city of Lorain, my hometown, has been forced to cut its number of teachers to lay teachers off. It means worse police and fire protection for those people who live in these communities. So job loss does not just hit the families who lose their jobs, as bad as this is. It also can really devastate a community. That is the first part of it. And even though we are now seeing some job growth, and that is a good thing, as we said, those jobs do not pay as much as the jobs, as the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland) said, that were lost. We lose a steel job, an auto job, and we create a job maybe, not as many as we lost, but we create a few jobs that pay $5 an hour less. Better than nothing, but certainly not what we need to build the kind of middle-class economy and middle-class communities that we would like. But the other part of it, as the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland) said, is those who have jobs, and most people, of course, have not lost their jobs. Most people still have jobs. But those who have jobs are feeling that squeeze. Gas prices are up almost $2 a gallon. I guess I should not be surprised because the President and the Vice President both were oil company executives. Vice President Cheney is still receiving $3,000 a week from the Halliburton Company, the oil company that he used to work for that is now doing so much business in Iraq. Oil prices are up. Health care costs are way up. The cost of prescription drugs is through the roof. Yet this Congress and the President have done absolutely nothing to bring drug prices down. The drug industry has given President Bush and the Republican Congress for their campaigns literally, literally, tens of millions of dollars. And it has been a good investment for the drug companies because their profits continue to be the best, the highest profits by a factor of three or four of any industry in America. So gas prices are up. Health insurance prices are up. College tuition, if people want to send their kids to college, Ohio State is going up 13 percent next month, I believe, or in September, whenever school starts. Tuition at Akron University a year ago, in the gentleman from Ohio's (Mr. Ryan) and my district, for freshmen went up about 16 percent. So they are getting gas prices increasing, health care costs increasing, college tuition increasing. At the same time, wages are stagnant. There has been no wage increase. And I think the best example of sort of the Bush economy, we can see it at the Timken Company. Timken, for those who are not from Ohio that are listening and for those perhaps unfamiliar, Timken is one of the major success stories of American manufacturing, a fourth generation family running a steel company, ball bearings and steel supply company, in Canton, Ohio. The Timken Company, the fourth generation owners of the company and managers of the company are very good friends of President Bush. The Bush family and the Timken family have gone back for years together. The Timken Company a year ago was the site of a visit by President Bush celebrating the productivity of the workers and the success of the company. President Bush said, and we all applaud this, that Timken workers' productivity has increased 10 percent from 2 years ago to last year. A 10 percent productivity increase, almost unprecedented.