Marcy Kaptur: “I think I recall that during the debate over NAFTA, the gentlewoman from Ohio, myself and others raised the point that…”

“I think I recall that during the debate over NAFTA, the gentlewoman from Ohio, myself and others raised the point that we thought the Mexican peso had been artificially propped up and overvalued in order to try and sell the NAFTA agreement. In fact as I recall, we said we thought it was about 20 to 25 percent overvalued. Of course we were wrong. Apparently it was 40 to 50 percent overvalued. This was clearly on the part of the financiers on both sides of the border and some of the highest political officers in both countries an attempt to distort the ultimate impact of this agreement. In fact, the Mexican opposition party has filed criminal charges against their former president for concealing and manipulating the value of the peso, which has now crashed. What this means, of course, is that the average Mexican worker, who has seen their wages decline rather dramatically over the last 20 years, will see another 40 or 50 percent decline relative to United States goods. Instead of having an average of $1,600 a year in buying power, that is, if they used all of their disposable income they could buy $1,600 worth of our goods, which was always the fallacy of NAFTA, it was never designed to sell goods to Mexicans, it was always designed to get cheap labor in Mexico to ship the goods here, now those Mexican workers will have total incomes in United States dollars of $800 or $900 a year.”