Page:Congressional Record - 2010-12-10.pdf/39

December 10, 2010 countries, China and other countries, pay people a few cents an hour, and bring their products back into the United States.

Mr. Tom Donohue is the president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He got a lot of publicity during the last election because the Chamber of Commerce became the funnel for a lot of money that went into campaigns around the country. They raised tens of millions of dollars, a lot of the money, that was undisclosed. All the rich folks and billionaires gave money to the Chamber of Commerce, and they were able to elect candidates who were sympathetic to their point of view.

Let's find out what their point of view is. This is a quote going back to 2004:

That was Tom Donohue, president and CEO of the largest business organization in America. They are in favor of offshoring American jobs. They think it is a good idea. They understand that if corporations throw American workers out on the street and go to China and pay people there pennies an hour, it will make more profits. Give them credit. They are upfront about it. We don't care about the United States of America. We don't care about young people. We don't care about the future of this country. The future of the world is in China.

Here is a quote that appeared in one of the papers:

That was in 2004. This is an AP story.

This is the head of the largest business organization in America. That is where all these businesses come together to develop policy, to lobby us, to provide campaign contributions—

That is really patriotic. That is standing up for the United States.

What more do we need to understand why we have lost millions of good-paying manufacturing jobs, why wages are going down? What more do we need when the president of the Chamber of Commerce tells us he thinks it is good public policy to send jobs to China? I don't think there is much we have to discover. They are telling us this.

In a moment what I will be talking about is how these ideas from the big-moneyed people become implemented in policy which has to do a lot with lobbying and campaign contributions. Before I go there, I wish to give some more examples about how business leaders feel about the workers of this country and the young people.

This, again, is a quote. I apologize. It is a few years old, from 2004, January 19. This is from Alan Lacy, the CEO of Sears Roebuck and Company at the time:

I.e., you have a World Wide Web and you can do your work in China or India—

So we are going to see, I think, a huge incentive to ship some of these more commoditylikecommodity-like [sic] knowledge workers’ jobs offshore.

So here we have our blue-collar jobs decimated, and we told the kids not to worry. You didn't want to work in the factory anyhow. We have good information technology, computer-based jobs for you. But then you have the heads of large corporations saying: Why do I want American young people to do this? I can have Indian young people do it who will work for a fraction of the wages. We all see this. It is nothing new. You try to get a plane reservation and you are talking to somebody in India. Please, do not hear me as being anti-Indian or anti-Chinese. That is the furthest thing I would want anyone to think. We want to work with people all over the world. But we don't have to destroy the middle class of this country to help people around the world. You don't have to be a corporate CEO to sell out your own people who built your company to run abroad. This Senator is not anti-Chinese, far from it, anti-Indian, anti-Vietnamese. I guess I plead guilty to being pro-American. Maybe that is suspect here.

The former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina, ran for Senator. This is what she said when she was the CEO of Hewlett-Packard in 2004:

I could go on and on and on, but I think we have the point. The point is that when things get rough for corporate America, as they did recently for General Electric, they run to the taxpayers in order to be bailed out. But their overall philosophy is that their goal in life is to make as much money as they can in any way they can, and, therefore, you run to those countries where wages are low.

We are seeing it all the time. It is not just blue collar; it is increasingly white color. We have radiologists who are reading X-rays in India. People behind the computer can do work in India as well as here, and these corporate folks have taken advantage of that and sold out the young people of this country and the working class.

It is virtually impossible to find anything in a Walmart or other stores such as that that is made in America today. This is essentially true for clothing. An increasing amount of clothing comes from Bangladesh. Today, there are 4,000 garment factories in Bangladesh making clothing for Walmart, Gap, JC Penney, Levi Strauss, Tommy Hilfiger, and many others. Garment workers in Bangladesh, some 3.5 million of them—and the number is growing—are among the lowest paid workers in the world. They have difficulty buying enough food and shelter for their own needs.

The good news is the minimum wage in Bangladesh was doubled. It went from 11.5 cents an hour to 23 cents an hour. So when you buy your shirt made in Bangladesh, you have young women there coming in from the countryside who are now paid, because of a doubling of the minimum wage, 23 cents an hour. Is that something our people should be asked to compete against? Should we say to the American worker: We can get you jobs. We are prepared to invest in the United States. We are an American company. You helped make us great. Thank you for the work you have done over the years. Thank you for purchasing our products. Thank you for making go us strong. If you are prepared to work for $1 an hour, $2 an hour, $3 an hour, we will come back.

By the way, in the last campaign, what did we hear rumblings of? Abolishing the minimum wage. The minimum wage is now $7.25 an hour. There are people out there who say: Look, if I can hire somebody in China for $2 or $3 an hour and you want a job in America and I have to pay you $7.25 an hour, why would I want to do that? If we abolish the minimum wage, I may hire you.

What a wonderful prospect for our young people to think about, working for $4 or $5 an hour.

If we want to understand why the middle class is collapsing, why unemployment is high, why our manufacturing base has been decimated, why it is hard to purchase a product made in the United States, it has a lot to do with our trade policies, which were pushed by people such as Mr. Donohue of the Chamber of Commerce and many others.

But it is not just a disastrous trade policy that has brought us to where we are today. The immediate cause of this crisis is—and this gets me sick thinking about it—what the crooks on Wall Street have done to the American people. These people fought for a period of years to deregulate the banking industry. These people said to us: Well, if you just would do away with