Manufacturing Forum in Pittsburgh
Posted by Vriz on April 14th, 2008
Today, AAM hosted a presidential forum in Pittsburgh to give the candidates an opportunity to fully discuss their stance on trade, China and the state of the domestic manufacturing.
Barack Obama made his remarks to the audience first.
He spoke of Chicago’s shuttered steel mills and the laid-off workers he helped as a community organizer. His heavy criticism went to the “Washington insiders”: the Bush administration and the elected representatives who, influenced by lobbyists, put the interests of wealthy corporate CEOs above the interests of their constituents when voting in favor of trade deals like NAFTA, CAFTA and the PNT with China.
Obama promised to “finally confront the issue of trade with China.” His solutions were to “use all the diplomatic avenues open to me to insist that China stop manipulating its currency,” if elected President; and to not “ignore violence against union organizers in Columbia, or the non-tariff barriers that keep U.S. cars out of South Korea” in the trade agreements that he will negotiate as President. Obama added that his administration “won’t just negotiate fair trade agreements, we’ll make sure they’re being fully enforced.”
To stop the bleeding of American jobs overseas, Obama proposed that the Patriot Employer Act must be enacted “so we can stop giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas, and start giving them to companies that create good jobs with decent wages here in America.” He added that “we’ll modernize our steel industry, strengthen our entire domestic manufacturing base, and open as many markets as we can to American manufactured goods when I’m President.”
Obama stressed that rebuilding America’s infrastructure and investing in the “green energy” sector will create additional opportunities to have good-paying jobs in the U.S. that “can’t be outsourced.”
When Hillary Clinton took the podium, she too criticized the Bush administration for its failure to effectively enforce our trade laws. “For seven years, the Bush Administration has ignored or under-utilized legitimate trade enforcement tools as countries like China have violated trade rules and hurt U.S. manufacturers,” Clinton said. “It has also dragged its feet in addressing China’s currency manipulation and actively worked against efforts to provide legitimate relief to threatened U.S. industries.” She noted that the trade deficit has nearly doubled to $708 billion and China’s holdings of U.S. public debt have risen to almost $500 billion. “President Bush has allowed China to become America’s banker, making it harder to promote our interests and push back against their unfair trade practices.”
To address the unfair trade practices that countries like China are for now able to engage in with impunity, Clinton unveiled a new plan to strengthen trade enforcement.
She proposed that we need to better use and strengthen the trade enforcement tools that we already have in our arsenal. As President, she would fully utilize the WTO dispute settlement mechanism to challenge practices that violate WTO commitments; work toward establishing WTO rules and policies that respect and strengthen workers’ human rights and protect the environment; and push to speed up the decision making process at the WTO.
Among her other proposals, Clinton mentioned a new Intellectual Property Enforcement Network that would improve inter-agency coordination and create a new international task force to work with foreign governments on IPR enforcement.
Hillary Clinton promised that she would “crack down on China’s unfair trade practices,” if elected President. Her proposals on Chinese currency manipulation were specific: adjust export prices to account for the price distortion caused by currency misalignment; disallow the federal government to purchase products or services from China; direct U.S. banks to pause in issuing loans to China; pressure the IMF to consult with China; and/or impose a 27.5 percent tariff on all Chinese goods. She would also provide “Section 421” relief for U.S. industries hurt by surges of Chinese imports and apply countervailing duties to non-market economies like China, who subsidize their export industries.
