Eric Schmitt Decries 'Citizens Of The World' In Blistering Remarks Against Globalism

Forbes Breaking News

In a Senate floor speech on Wednesday, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) called for more U.S.-based manufacturing and decried globalism.

Transcript

00:00I recognize the senator from Missouri. Thank you Mr. President. I rise today to

00:08engage in this great debate that is raging across our country. Turn on the

00:14TV, read the newspapers, or open your phone and you'll be overwhelmed by the

00:19back and forth over tariffs, trade deficits, prices, and markets. We hear the

00:26talking heads say that America simply can't afford President Trump's

00:29insistence on more favorable trade policies. We hear much less about whether

00:36America can afford to continue down the road we've traveled these past 30 years.

00:41That's not a question that people in this city are asking. For many, it's not a

00:47question that appears to have occurred to them at all. The debates right now are

00:53about the future and how President Trump's policies will shape it. That's good.

00:59These are important debates that we should have, but today I rise because I want to

01:05speak about the past. I'm speaking as an American, but in particular as a proud

01:12Missourian, a boy from Bridgeton. My folks, they weren't wealthy. My grandfather was an

01:20infantryman in World War II and returned from the war with an eighth grade

01:24education and some money he won playing craps on the Queen Elizabeth on his way

01:27home. All of his children worked in his butcher shop growing up. Later, I remember

01:34seeing my dad work seven days a week on the midnight shift to put food on the

01:37table and a roof over our heads. He worked hard and lived honestly. And just one

01:45generation later, look where we are. What a remarkable story. About my life, I suppose,

01:54is a remarkable story. But the truth is, it's just how unremarkable it really is in

02:01this country. That was the everyday magic of America. A country where lives like ours

02:09were not just possible, but common. It was who we were. America built the modern

02:17world. Our country was forged by pilgrims, pioneers, settlers, and explorers. Men whose

02:25dreams were too big for the low horizons of the old world. Our ancestors settled a new

02:32continent, tamed a frontier, raised up a great civilization from the wilderness, and

02:37planted our flag on the moon. It was American genius that connected the world, first through

02:43the great steam engine, spanning this continent from coast to coast, then through the miracle

02:48of flight. We gave humanity the telephone, the internet, the skyscraper, modern technology

02:56and electricity, and the industrial assembly lines that built modern civilization. Even the

03:03things we didn't invent, we perfected. Everything that mattered happened here.

03:09But over the last few decades, the people in power squandered that inheritance. They sent our

03:17children and our wealth overseas to defend the borders of distant nations, while throwing

03:22open our own borders to a tidal wave of mass migration here at home. They shipped the good-paying,

03:30eco-class American jobs that once were the backbone of our economy, to places like Mexico and China,

03:36transforming once prosperous towns and cities into hollow shelves of their former selves, often defined

03:44by addiction and death. All the while, in the forgotten corners of this land, the men and women

03:51who built this country have suffered in silence. They have watched in quiet despair as their towns crumble

03:59into disrepair. Their way of life disappears and the country they love slips away from them. The political

04:06ideal of a republic is self-reliance. As our founding fathers understood, the art of self-government is about

04:12people's ability to rely on themselves. There was always trade, of course. This is a natural and good

04:20privilege of productive surplus economies. But in a republic, it was also trade between sovereign,

04:27self-sufficient communities. The citizen of the classical republic had no need for cheap trinkets,

04:33fashion, and sweatshops halfway across the globe. He and his neighbors were the ones building their

04:39homes, grew their own food, and when necessary, took up arms to provide for their own defense. People who

04:45depend on others for essential things cannot rule themselves. And if they cannot rule themselves,

04:52they cannot keep a republic. Yes, times have changed. The economy of today is altogether different

04:59than the economy our ancestors knew. But that's no excuse for standing by as our home becomes a dumping

05:07ground for cheap Chinese goods. Are we really still a sovereign people today? Our independence and our

05:15sovereignty are not commodities to be sold on the global market. We can't and won't make everything

05:23here. But we must recover the will and the ability to make the vital necessities of our national life.

05:32Our country now depends on foreign imports for most of those necessities.

05:38By nearly two to one ratio, more Americans now work in government than manufacturing. Nearly half of our

05:46cars, more than 60 percent of our machine tools, 80 percent of our pharmaceuticals, and nearly 90 percent of the

05:52semiconductor chips we need for everything from phones to fighter jets are foreign made.

06:00That is why the crisis that confronts us today is not merely economic.

06:06It's about communism and slave labor versus freedom. It's about who will win the 21st century.

06:14The stakes are high. It's about the survival of our civilization. It is about the kind of nation and people we are and will,

06:29one that creates and builds, or one that simply consumes.

06:34In this city, we tend to speak of big, sweeping abstractions. Jobs, wages, deficits, growth. We

06:45talk as if these things are numbers and graphs. We forget that every job lost to China and every

06:52factory moved to Mexico belongs to a real, flesh-and-blood American with a life and a family and a home.

07:01Each and every data point is a fellow citizen, a neighbor, a son or daughter of this great republic.

07:10Since NAFTA, 90,000 factories in our country have closed. Think about that and what it means to those

07:21families. For the people who benefited, this was just an abstract externality. For the workers,

07:29the heartland Americans, it was everything. I know these people. These are my people. These are our

07:40people. And for too long, they have walked alone. There is no memorial for their sacrifice, no national

07:48outpouring of grief for their loss, no powerful interest group to represent them in the halls of

07:53power. Let me tell you what 30 years of so-called free and fair trade has meant for the folks where

08:02I'm from. In the 1990s, our political class embraced a new line of thinking that America could become more

08:09prosperous by opening all trade barriers, regardless of how other countries treated us. The result was swift

08:17and devastating. By 2004, according to some estimates, Missouri had lost well over 31,000 jobs to foreign

08:26trade. By 2010, our trade deficit with Mexico had cost us 12,600 Missouri jobs. By 2013,

08:35we had shipped 44,200 Missouri jobs off to China. By 2018, Missouri had lost more than 90,000 jobs in

08:44manufacturing alone. Over 25% of our industrial base. Until a few decades ago, Southeast Missouri

08:52was a national hub for garment and shoe manufacturing. In the 1970s, Southeast Missouri was home

08:59to as many as 90, 90 shoe plants. The last shoe factory from that era closed for good in 2005.

09:07It had begun as a five-story, 92,000-foot international shoe plant in Cape Girardeau, nicknamed the Pride of

09:15Southeast Missouri. At one point, it employed 1,200 workers. But cheaper imports from low-wage

09:23countries began to flood the market. And by 1990, the old factory was raised and replaced with a one-story

09:29plant of roughly 300 to 500 workers. By 2001, that had dwindled down to just 50.

09:37Here's what one former employee told a local paper after the plant closed for good.

09:42Now I'm working at the Lutheran home, driving a van and making a third of the amount of money I made

09:48before. My wife also has to work, and together we're making two-thirds of what I made alone at the

09:53shoe plant. It's very upsetting. You get mad, and then you get hurt, and you think about all the

10:00jobs leaving the country and all the people losing their jobs. Tricon Industries, which makes car seat

10:07parts, shuttered its factory in Cape Girardeau, too, and moved its production to Mexico. That was another

10:14200 jobs gone. There are patriotic shoe companies that still want to build in America.

10:22Belleville Boots took over a factory in Carthage, Missouri in 2020. There are businesses that still

10:27love America, and they want to build on the generations of skilled craftsmen in places like

10:33Southeast Missouri. But for decades, our political class has rigged the rules to punish rather than help

10:41companies that put America first. This pattern repeats again and again in every industry.

10:49Missouri. Up until the end of the 20th century, Missouri still had a major electronics assembly

10:54operation. Zenith Electronics, the last major American TV maker, had a large assembly plant in

11:01Springfield, Missouri. It had been in operation since just after World War II, and at one point,

11:08it employed 3,300 Missourians. But those jobs too had started moving to Mexico in the late 1990s.

11:17In October of 1991, Zenith shut down its plant and shipped its operation down to Mexico,

11:23taking out 1,500 Missouri jobs in one blow. In Springfield, the average worker made between

11:315 and 10 bucks an hour. Down in Mexico, it was just 83 cents. The high priests of the global economy tell

11:40us that this is merely creative destruction, and that other better industries will arise to take their

11:47place of the ones that were lost. It's true that some of the workers in Springfield went on to find new

11:54jobs, but they were often much worse than the ones that they had before. Five years after Zenith shut down,

12:03laid off workers saw an average pay cut of more than 10 percent. More than half of them had held

12:09multiple jobs since being laid off, two-thirds of them with worse benefits. Even the workers who enrolled

12:15in job retraining programs fared no better than the ones who didn't. Quote,

12:21those people who had worked there for 20 or 25 years, one laid off worker recalled,

12:28they were the top end of the pay scales, and they weren't any more TV repairmen jobs out there.

12:34Toastmaster is the household name. Well, they were headquartered in Missouri,

12:39and they made their stuff in Missouri too, with factories in small towns all across our state.

12:44But as we welcomed China into the world economy, Toastmaster began to feel the squeeze of cheap

12:51Asian imports. By 2001, every Toastmaster plant in our state was gone, shipping hundreds of jobs from rural

13:01mid-Missouri to China. The last one to go in the town of Macon, near where I went to school, had been in

13:08operation since the 1950s. All that remained was a toxic waste cleanup site for the 5,500 people in the town

13:19it left behind. Although Toastmaster continued production in certain areas of the United States,

13:25Missouri wasn't so fortunate. Booneville, a town where my grandmother went to high school,

13:29was another place that lost a Toastmaster factory. In 2011, the town of about 8,000 people lost its modular

13:36home manufacturing factory to the housing crisis too. In 2012, its bread factory filed for bankruptcy.

13:44In 2013, Nordine, which manufactured air and heating products, announced it would be moving

13:51production from Booneville to, guess where, Mexico, taking out another 250 jobs. From a moral standpoint,

13:59it was kicking somebody while they were already down, the head of the local chamber of commerce said,

14:05as he talked to a local newspaper. This is not the distant past, folks. This is the reality that

14:13millions and millions of our fellow Americans in Missouri and across the country live this very day.

14:22Haldex, a brake manufacturer, packed up and left for Mexico in 2020, eliminating the last 154 jobs left of

14:29the facility in the suburbs of Kansas City. Layoffs began two weeks before Christmas.

14:37They'll save millions of dollars a year paying Mexican workers a fraction of what they paid back home.

14:44I'll tell you one more story from the boot heel in Missouri. For decades, the Noranda aluminum smelter

14:50there was a lifeline employer for the folks in New Madrid, Marston, and surrounding communities.

15:01These were good, decent, hard-working, salt-of-the-earth folks. I visited with them.

15:05And the smelter was the engine for their way of life. But in 2016, Noranda filed for bankruptcy and

15:12shutdown. Why? Because China's cheap, state-subsidized aluminum had flooded the market, causing global

15:20aluminum prices to plunge. In New Madrid, the town of less than 3,000 people, about a thousand people

15:28had gone to find new jobs, usually at much lower pay. The county government went in the red. Local

15:34police and ambulance budgets were cut. The local school district lost $3.1 million tax payment,

15:41which forced their own layoffs, and saw a 10% drop in enrollment as families left the area.

15:47People lost homes, the mayor of New Madrid said. People got divorced.

15:52An American town filled with American families left for dead by their own country.

15:59What did we do to our own people?

16:01This is not to say that Missourians don't want fair exchange, one where they can trade and grow

16:09with the rest of the world. But the quote-unquote free trade that transpired was not free trade at all.

16:18The double-edged tragedy of this system is that not all these companies wanted to leave. Some, perhaps many,

16:25wanted desperately to stay. These people were their neighbors, their friends, their family.

16:31But over the past three decades, we punished the companies that were loyal to America,

16:35while rewarding the ones that weren't. The businesses who were eager to offshore got big

16:41bonuses at the American workers' expense. The businesses that wanted to stay here found

16:46themselves struggling to stay alive in conditions where they couldn't compete. Now, some might argue

16:53that Americans don't want to make shoes anymore. But we did a generation ago. The American workers

17:01of that age knew that there was something meaningful in creating and producing. Today,

17:06we've been taken by the idea that our social status is not what we build or create, but if we can afford

17:16to buy or consume. It's going to take generations to reverse this thinking. The post-war order has given

17:27birth to a shallow morality of materialism that measures values strictly in the terms of consumption.

17:35This is a poisonous new idea, utterly alien to the traditional American way of life.

17:41Our trade policy, like our foreign policy, failed to adapt to the new reality of the world after the fall

17:48of the Berlin Wall. The consequences were nothing short of devastating.

17:53At the dawn of the 1990s, as America looked forward to the new millennium, the architects of globalism

18:01beamed about the promise of the open society, a world without barriers or borders, where all nations

18:07and cultures and economies would meld into one global economic zone. Thirty years on, what do we have to show

18:16for it? At home, our factories and the towns that once sustained them lie in ruin, raised by the ruthless

18:24logic of the new global economy and cost efficiency. The Americans who once worked there were replaced by

18:33foreign labor overseas. The Americans who once held on were now being replaced by foreign labor here at home.

18:44Their children will graduate into a workforce where nearly one in ten workers don't even speak their

18:52own language. The twin horsemen of globalism, unprotected trade and unprotected borders have been a catastrophe

19:01for our civilization. But in many ways, I don't blame the illegal immigrant who wants to come here in search

19:07of work. But we do have a country of laws, and there are consequences. I don't blame the factory laborer in

19:16Vietnam who takes the job that once belonged to an American. You know who I blame? The people in power

19:23who allowed them to do it. I blame the corporate bosses, the special interests, and yes, the politicians

19:30who sold our country out for a seat at the table of the globalist banquet. I blame the ideologues of

19:38the status quo, the international elites, the so-called citizens of the world who see our country as a

19:45global economic zone, a giant shopping mall with an airport attached. I blame the people in cities like this

19:53one who seem to have forgotten what the men and women of the towns like Boonville and New Madrid are their

20:01brothers and sisters. Because American is not just a box you check on a tax form, but a sacred

20:09responsibility that binds us to one another, an unbroken chain between our past and our future.

20:16I do not know what the future holds, but I do know what the past has meant. I know that something

20:26has to change, and that President Trump is the first politician in a generation to even care enough to try.

20:37The 77 million deplorables who cast their lot with Donald Trump last November were the forgotten

20:44Americans, the blue-collar patriots, the conservatives of the heart, miners, mechanics, tradesmen, and

20:52farmers, men and women who worked with their hands, who grew our food, built our homes, and drilled our

21:00fuel, whose labor powered our country, whose taxes sustained our government, and whose children served

21:06and sacrificed in our wars. They stand with this President because he stood with them when no one

21:16else would. I yield back, Mr. President.

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