Marcy Kaptur: “this morning constituents of our Ninth District of Ohio woke up to reports of more job cuts at our local Jeep plant. The…”

“this morning constituents of our Ninth District of Ohio woke up to reports of more job cuts at our local Jeep plant. The Toledo Blade ran two headlines. One reads, ``Jeep reductions: Firm warns up to 2,035 Toledo jobs to be cut.'' The second headline read, ``Expanded PT Cruiser Output Bypasses City of Toledo for Mexico.'' Welcome to post-NAFTA America. Here we have a company shifting production from the United States at the expense of our workers. Make no mistake, these are excellent jobs we are talking about. These are not minimum-wage jobs with no benefits. These are not low-tech jobs. They are the type of jobs that any community in America would fight for. These are middle-class jobs. That is what Toledo and the State of Ohio did, in fact. They went out and fought for the Jeep jobs. The taxpayers invested hundreds of millions of dollars to keep those jobs in Ohio and in the United States, and now Chrysler is cutting 2,000 jobs in Toledo at the same time as it is adding production lines in Mexico to make the popular PT Cruiser. Now President Bush wants to expand NAFTA, he tells us. Is this the promise of NAFTA, 2,000 more families out of work and good jobs in our country? Is this what the future looks like under a hemispheric NAFTA known as Free Trade of the Americas, FTAA? Is this what you get with Fast Track? President Bush went to Quebec City last week to push for NAFTA's expansion to the free trade of the Americas.…”