Marcy Kaptur

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, today the House will vote on House Resolution 57, a privileged resolution to assert Congress' constitutional duty to vote on the expenditure of our taxpayer dollars regarding the recent Mexico rescue package. The resolution will require the Comptroller General to perform an audit of the Mexican rescue package and report back to the Congress within 7 days. One man in the White House, one Speaker and three other men here in Congress do not a republic make. We ask the Speaker to grant our privileged resolution the right of full debate. Authorizing billions of dollars without a vote of this Congress is wrong. Vote for your right to know. Vote for our people's right to know, vote for our taxpayers' right to know, vote for House Resolution 57, and vote ``no'' on any motions to table this bill.

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me. I will not take a long time. Obviously, those of us who strongly supported that resolution are extremely disappointed. We consider this to be a historic moment in the House because of that ruling, and the fact that we were just silenced without even the ability to debate for 1 hour in the full House. Now, I understand the gentleman and the majority control the committees, and I understand what happened in the committees, and why we do not have a bill on this floor today. But let me say to the gentleman I encourage you on your efforts in the committees. We do not expect anything of consequence to result from that. But I know that there are Members along with myself on both sides of the aisle who are very concerned about this historic move of the House to silence the Membership on the largest use of unappropriated dollars in the history of this Nation.

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. I have a parliamentary inquiry, Mr. Speaker.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, am I correct in understanding that the motion to table this appeal is not debatable?

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. It is interesting, because I come from the Midwest, midwestern part of our country, as did the gentleman from Ohio, Congressman Brown, who has joined us, the gentleman from Vermont, Congressman Sanders, comes form the northeast, the gentleman comes from the Deep South in Mississippi, the gentleman from Oregon, Mr. DeFazio, it has been very interesting to me to see the breadth of support inside this institution on this issue.

Ms. KAPTUR. I want to thank the gentleman from Vermont [Mr. Sanders] for joining us this evening, the gentleman from Oregon [Mr. DeFazio], the gentleman from Mississippi [Mr. Taylor], and the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Brown].

Ms. KAPTUR. I am telling you, if those people on Wall Street and in the banks around this country made as risky investments as this group did down in Mexico, our entire banking system would be in a state of collapse.

Ms. KAPTUR. It is absolutely with significant risk.

Ms. KAPTUR. The Mexican economy is not strong and stable, and the nation is not politically stable, which is why there is all of this moving up and down of the value of the peso. Mexico owes somewhere between $160 and $200 billion. That is with a ``b.'' That is in public debt that is owed to other creditors. This is only one small piece of it. This is probably the piece that they thought they might be able to bite off without too many people disagreeing, but there is a lot more money owed, and then inside Mexico, because of the strange relationship between their private sector and their public sector and their banks, there are all kinds of debts internal to Mexico, and with interest rates going up there and with the inflation rates going up, it is a very unstable economic situation inside of Mexico. The value of their money has just been cut in half. Lots of businesses there have loans. The relationship of those businesses to their banks, to the inflation rate, et cetera, is a very unstable situation, and the largest revenue generator to the Government is Pemex, the oil company. Over, I think, nearly half the revenues of that Government are generated by Pemex, so that is another place that the oil revenues are pledged as collateral to their own Government. I happen to believe that Mexico's main problems are not economic but, rather, social and political; in other words, if you could get a system there that operated in a more democratic fashion, could you begin to put the pieces in place of an economic order that shared the wealth with the vast majority of people rather than just at few people on the top.

Ms. KAPTUR. But maybe you do not know what my finances are like. I mean, would you not want to know the credit history of that person, what kind of assets the person had? And there is absolutely a risk that something might go wrong. Cosigning the loan does not absolve risk.

Ms. KAPTUR. That is correct. The gentleman is correct. I kept listening to the President when he said, ``Oh, this is not anything serious. This is just cosigning a loan.'' I would say to the gentleman from Oregon and the gentleman from Vermont what if someone came up to you and said, ``Would you sign a loan with me for $50,000? Right now, sign it?''

Ms. KAPTUR. Half of that is weapons.

Ms. KAPTUR. That is right.

Ms. KAPTUR. On that point, if you look at what we are spending on as a Nation, the very first set of categories have to do with Social Security, and especially Medicare, the cost that the taxpayers subsidize Medicare. Defense is a large expenditure. Then comes interest rates. Right after that, the fourth largest category of spending in this Government is to pay the interest on the savings and loan bailout which totals over $1 trillion. Our children's children will be paying for that. So when we get in these debt financing arrangements, what we are talking about is obligating the people of our country so far down the road you can hardly even see the end of it. But in this situation with Mexico, we are not talking about money we own to ourselves. We are talking about money that is owed to investors and creditors to foreign nations. This is a very different animal than that exchange stabilization fund was meant to be used for in the past. I think what we are seeing is a different form of foreign aid, which does not have to be voted on here in the Congress, and that is not how a democracy should function or a democratic republic should function. We should have the debate here. We as a people must make a decision about what our relationship is to various countries around the world.

Ms. KAPTUR. The date on the letter was December 6, 1993, but the respective sections from the Congressional Record were dated November 15, 1993, remarks by Mr. Gonzalez on NAFTA, page H9661.

Ms. KAPTUR. I want to thank the gentleman from Mississippi for being the lead sponsor of this privileged resolution. The people of Mississippi should be very proud of the gentleman, an independent, strong-minded Member who stood up to the most powerful interests in America, both political and economic. In response to something the gentleman said, let me just mention that I received a letter this week from a woman from Coral Gables, FL. She supports us in our efforts to get a vote on this measure tomorrow. She sent this beautiful letter really saying the people of America understand what is going on and encouraging us in our efforts to get at the truth and to get the figures for the American public. But it was very interesting. She attached a letter to her letter to me that had been written to her by the chairman of the Banking Committee in the House 2 years ago, Congressman Henry Gonzalez. In this letter, and she even highlighted it in yellow ink for me, she quotes some of his statements which I think are so instructive I wanted to read them tonight, in which he said that during NAFTA, the NAFTA debate, that he endeavored to bring out that NAFTA was more than just a trade agreement. It is a free trade and finance agreement. And he underlined finance. And he was concerned that the finance and banking portions would turn out to be the driving force, backed by the largest banks and financial interests in this hemisphere. And he said NAFTA will have profound implications for the safety and soundness of the U.S. banking and financial services industries, the integrity of the basic banking laws of this country and counteraction against international money laundering. Now that NAFTA has passed he said the stage may also be set for another savings and loan style bailout as United States bankers pursue risky investments in the unregulated Mexican market. To his letter he then attached even more lengthy hearings that he has held in his committee. I just want to read one paragraph here by two gentlemen, Mr. Niko Valance and Mr. Andres Penaloza, who testified before his committee that the omission of an exchange rate stabilization mechanism in NAFTA was deliberate and a mistake. Mr. Valance argued that without an established exchange rate, stabilization mechanism, it is possible for foreign corporations to exert pressure on the Mexican Government to devalue the peso, thus lowering wages in terms of other currencies. In addition, Mr. Davidson cautions that the relatively volatile currency in Mexico poses increased potential exchange and interest rate risks to U.S. financial institutions. The fact that these issues are not addressed in NAFTA was of considerable concern to many of the witnesses.

Ms. KAPTUR. If the gentleman will yield on that, Mr. Speaker, Oil and Gas magazine also reported about that by the end of this decade, by 1997, 1998, 1999, Mexico will be a net importer of oil because the number of barrels she has been able to produce has been cut in half, and because capital investment has not been able to be made in capital plant, and because of instability among the workers in the oilfields in Mexico, where conditions are just terrible. Mr. Speaker, I think any wise investor would question that, oil being used as collateral. If I might respond to the gentleman from Vermont [Mr. Sanders], who raised a good point, when it is a small item involving the budget, we get tied up in knots here, right? When we are talking about $20 or $40 billion or however much the American people will be on the line, it is like the Stealth bomber. It goes through here, nobody saw it, we didn't vote on it. It happened, it is a happening in America, but we didn't have anything to do with it. Mr. Speaker, I remember when the President came up here with his State of the Union speech. He didn't like the fact that the Department of Agriculture had spent a few thousand dollars trying to eliminate ticks. He spent a long time talking about ticks. If you come from a rural area, a lot of my district is rural, that can be a pretty significant problem for people. In fact, we had one gentleman here in Congress, Berkeley Bedell, who had to leave Congress because he got Lyme disease. If you know anything about what can happen, it is a pretty serious area to be doing research on, so I didn't quite understand why he picked that particular few thousand dollar expenditure out. and the gentleman from Mississippi [Mr. Taylor] said ``Could we vote on it in the Committee on Appropriations?'' I asked one of the subcommittee chairs of Appropriations, ``Will this come up before your subcommittee this year? Will we get a vote? How do we get a vote on this?'' He said ``Well, you know, yes, the Treasury Department is under our subcommittee's jurisdiction, but this particular fund, I guess it is more like foreign aid, so we don't think it would come under us.'' This is the kind of fund, it is like mercury. If you have ever seen mercury and you try to put your finger on it, it keeps moving around. You can't pin it down, really; $20 billion, maybe $40 billion, and it is rising every day. So here we stand, at 9 o'clock at night Washington time, trying to say it is our responsibility to vote on this kind of money, and putting our taxpayers at this kind of risk. I yield to the gentleman from Mississippi.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I think the gentleman raises some excellent, excellent points. I know that there are working people across this country who feel that they have lost voice at the highest levels of our Government. What is equally disturbing to think about, Mr. Speaker, is that for the people of Mexico who have no voice, the working people of Mexico who have no voice, if our Government, and I think they were in cahoots with the top leaders of Mexico, has now caused the standard of living in Mexico to be cut by half, and it wasn't very high anyway, there are people who are hungry and there are people who are streaming across our borders now because our Government was too greedy for some of the interests that supported it and some of the top leaders in the Government of the United States, then shame on us as the most powerful economic force on this continent. I yield to the gentleman from Mississippi [Mr. Taylor], who wanted to make a comment.

Ms. KAPTUR. On both sides of the aisle.

Ms. KAPTUR. The gentleman is correct. If one reads the resolution, it asks for us to have the constitutional authority retained here as we would hope we could tomorrow, and then it asks the Comptroller General to report back on the specifics of the package that was negotiated by the administration. I think the gentleman from Mississippi would like to comment.

Ms. KAPTUR. What we are trying to accomplish tomorrow is to give the 435 Members of this House a chance to vote against the Mexican rescue package. We have essentially been muzzled. The executive branch, in conjunction with the leadership of this institution, went around the other 434 Members of the Congress of the United States. We want our chance to vote. continue to yield, I would like to clarify, I think that we do not even have to characterize it in exactly that fashion. We are asking the basic questions regarding the extension of these credits to Mexico. How much money is involved? What risks are there for the U.S. taxpayer? And the series of interrogatories, someone could vote in support of our resolution tomorrow, not having made up their mind but saying as a representative of the people they need more information. So I would say that the Members who would support our resolution would be both Members who already feel that they have enough information to say no to the bailout for Mexico, but I would say for the other Members of this body, I cannot imagine that any single person in this body who has not had those questions answered could vote in support of it. I can see where you could still have an open mind and say, I would like to know what risks we have, how much it is costing, what the terms are, what our exposure is. But we do not have that. So I would characterize the vote tomorrow a little differently.

Ms. KAPTUR. If the gentleman will yield, what has been very interesting is if you look back over the decade of the 1980's, this fund was used every once in a while, especially around the 1982 Presidential elections in Mexico, to prop up that Government. There were loans made from this fund, $500 million, $1 billion. Then you went up to 1988 when there was another Presidential election in Mexico, and they used $1.1 or $1.2 billion out of the funds to prop up the existing Government there. Now the Presidential elections of this past August 1994: The fund was used again over these numbers of years. Mexico has never really paid back its money. It has refinanced its debt, which is getting larger and larger and larger. That is like if you had a credit card and you never paid the principal and you just kept adding more and more debt and then you were charged a higher interest rate.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Gingrich was a very strong supporter of NAFTA, and in fact when NAFTA got in trouble, he ended up rounding up the votes to ultimately pass it. There were I think 43 votes that were switched at the end.

Ms. KAPTUR. We were trying very hard to get a vote, hopefully tomorrow. We introduced a bill on Friday. Because the Speaker will not bring up the bill, we have to use very unusual procedures to force a bill on the floor, which we expect will come up tomorrow sometime after 11 o'clock, under very prescribed rules where we will have very little opportunity to debate. But we have not been able to get any hearings in the committees of any significance. We have not been able to get a bill. The executive branch did this completely on their own, without the Congress being involved.

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.