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The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. PEASE). Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. BROWN) is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, this November, representatives from 135 Nations are meeting in Seattle to decide the all-important global trading agenda for the World Trade Organization.
Unfortunately, these trade bureaucrats and their army of attorneys are not going to discuss the overwhelming need to reform the World Trade Organization before expanding it. They are not going to talk about fighting the spread of AIDS in Africa or stamping out slavery in Thailand. They are not going to talk about Mexican workers who are paid pennies an hour to work in shiny American factories or Indonesian children who work 18-hour days for less than a dollar a day to make a pair of shoes that sell in this country for $120.
Rather than address the fact that so many of the world's people continue to live in grinding poverty and continue to barely survive, most of them on less than $1 a day, the trade bureaucrats in Seattle are going to discuss how to sell them compact discs and cellular phones.
My colleagues can count on this, our own United States Trade Representative is not going to mention that millions of American children are growing up in poverty while their parents continue to struggle to find jobs that pay a livable wage. Our own U.S. Trade Rep. is not going to mention that, even though Wall Street is booming, 90 percent of its benefits go to the richest 5 percent of Americans, and our own United States Trade Rep. will not mention that the living wage for most Americans has not increased appreciably in nearly 30 years.
The WTO has weakened the standards we erected to ensure our children are not exposed to imported foods soaked with the same pesticides we banned in the United States. The WTO has undermined the laws and regulations we created in Congress that were intended to protect our privacy, our health, and our environment. The WTO has made improving the lives of workers less important than improving the rights of property holders and intellectual property rights.
Instead of creating a global supermarket for America's goods and Services, we have created a system of rules that puts more emphasis on property rights than on human rights. So it is vital that we in Congress, that the American people, realize just what is at stake when the world's largest assembly of millionaires meets in Seattle this year.
We have got to keep fighting to make labor, standards, and environmental rights and human rights as important to our trade bureaucrats as intellectual property rights.
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