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Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Tragically, the government of Colombia exhibits the behavior of an addict. And, just as regrettably, the United States is co-dependent, so addicted to so called free trade that it plans to award Colombia an agreement based solely on promises.

Addicts always promise. They’ll stop, they pledge. Their co-dependents desperately want to believe, so they cooperate with the addicts’ demands.

Colombia, the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists, has pledged to try to stop the murders to persuade Congress to approve a Free Trade Agreement (FTA). Promises, promises.

And the United States has agreed to accept those promises rather than demand performance before signing an FTA. American’s Wall Street banks and multi-national corporations crave another FTA so badly they will believe anything.

When the Colombia FTA was first proposed, Congress refused to approve it because so many trade unionists are assassinated each year by the Colombian military and paramilitary forces that the murders exceed the number of unionists killed in all other countries of the world combined. In 2007, the year that former President George W. Bush completed the agreement, 39 Colombian unionists were slain.

The Colombian government knew why Congress denied approval. It could have responded four years ago by protecting trade unionists and preserving their lives. It did not.

Instead, the murders increased. In 2008, 52 Colombian trade unionists were assassinated, one a week. In 2009, the number declined by 5 to 47, but it was back up to 52 last year. Six have been slain so far this year, including Hector Orozco and Gilardo Garcia, members of the agricultural union known as Association of Peasant Workers of Tolima, who were threatened by the Colombian military just before they were assassinated. Promises, promises.

In response to the concerns expressed by Congress about the murders, the newly-proposed FTA requires Bogota to improve safeguards for workers by April 22, and to develop a plan by May 20 to enhance the capacity of regional judicial offices because the murders of trade unionists go unpunished by the Colombian government – giving the killers an impunity rate of approximately 95 percent. And by mid-June, the Colombian government promises to increase penalties for threatening workers.

The government of Colombia could have completed all of those steps four years ago. It didn’t bother.

To this point, Congress has taken the moral high ground by refusing to approve the trade deal. It said, basically, as long as Colombia continued to countenance the slaughter of its community and labor leaders, Afro-Colombians and indigenous people, America would not give it special treatment for trade purposes.

In addition, Congress recognized the FTA’s potential to devastate Colombian farmers. The FTA would speed forced displacement of Afro-Colombians and indigenous people by encouraging increased exploitation of their land by business interests, such as palm oil companies, half of which are owned by paramilitary groups. Expelling these farmers from their land would further swell Colombia’s internally-displaced population – the largest in the world at 4.3 million.

Making matters worse for Colombian farmers, the main U.S. beneficiaries of the FTA would be big agricultural companies which would be permitted to dump cheap, subsidized food stuffs into Colombia duty-free. This would result in farmers’ impoverishment and land loss because small growers would not be able to compete with the low-cost American produce.  In Haiti and Mexico, domestic food production was wiped out by similar free trade agreements. It’s likely that Colombia would follow the path of Mexico, where, as the ability to grow legitimate crops became economically impossible, farmers turned more and more to producing illicit drugs. Colombia already produces as much as 80 percent of the world’s cocaine.

Business groups, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, protested the refusal by Congress to approve the FTA, contending that increasing American exports and jobs was more important than protecting Colombian lives and human rights.

The Chamber’s position is not only depraved, it’s based on flawed calculations of exports and jobs. Just like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and granting China entrance to the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Colombia FTA will cost America jobs and exacerbate the U.S. trade deficit.

Previous projections by the Chamber and the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) that NAFTA and China’s WTO membership would improve the U.S. economy proved catastrophically off base.

When the U.S. signed NAFTA in 1993, it had a $1.7 billion trade surplus with Mexico. After the agreement, that surplus quickly morphed into a deficit, which ballooned to $64.7 billion in 2008. These annual deficits cost the U.S. 560,000 jobs between 1993 and 2004.

Similarly, the ITC predicted that the tariff reductions China offered when it entered the WTO would result in a trade deficit of $1 billion a year. Instead, between the years of 2001 and 2008, the actual result was deficits of $185 billion, and the loss or displacement of 2.3 million American jobs.

The U.S. already runs a trade deficit with Colombia. It was $1.86 billion in 2009. The Economic Policy Institute calculates that the proposed FTA with Colombia would nearly double that trade deficit by 2015, which would cost the United States another 55,000 jobs.

Frankly, the EPI calculation, which factors in effects on trade like currency manipulation, is far more credible than the ITC and Chamber reports, which ignore these issues.

Bogota wants the FTA because it believes the deal will be good for Colombian business interests. One immediate bonus, for example, is that the FTA would eliminate tariffs on 80 percent of Colombia’s exports to the U.S.

To get what it wants, the Colombian government is willing to say anything. Just like an addict. Promises, promises. The Colombian government’s past performance shows its pledges to protect workers from assassination are empty.

America must reject the role of co-dependent. It must demand the proof of performance before rewarding the government of Colombia with an FTA.

Without proof of performance, the government of Colombia will get away with murder.  It will export more of its goods – crude oil, coffee, fruit and flowers — to the U.S.  And unwitting Americans will buy more blood red Colombian roses.

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Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute.  He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union.

Travis McArthur

By Travis McArthur
Public Citizen Trade and Finance Researcher

In Rep. Brady’s announcement of last week’s hearing on the Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA), he said, “According to the President’s own statements, [the pending trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea] have the ability to create over 250,000 American jobs.” Speaker Boehner’s blog has also been claiming this 250,000 jobs gain figure.

But did the President ever say that the three FTAs will create 250,000 jobs? No. Rep. Brady here makes at least three errors. If you correct for one, the “jobs created” number goes down to 78,000. If you correct for two, the jobs number goes down to 39,333. If you correct for three, the job gain turns into a job loss of 3,200 jobs.

Back in November 2009, Obama gave an interview to Reuters on the eve of his trip to Asia in which he stated, “And right now we have about 9 percent of — a 9 percent share of Asia’s — not just China, but Asia’s trade overall, and it’s estimated that for every 1 percent of increased share that we get, that could mean 250,000, 300,000 jobs.” (more…)

Ian Fletcher

By Ian Fletcher
Senior Economist, Coalition for a Prosperous America

Globalization and, more specifically, free trade have a remarkable capacity for inducing dreamy thinking in American minds.  The “everything will be all right” lullaby arguments called forth by the subject are endless.  These lullabies are not especially hard to construct, as many popular arguments for free trade sound persuasive—until real numbers intrude.

For example:

“Free trade is good for America because it means a billion Chinese .are now hungry consumers of American products.”

But America is running a huge deficit, not a surplus, with China. ($272 billion in 2010, about 54 percent of our total). China deliberately blocks imports, mainly with non-tariff barriers, in order to decrease consumption, increase savings, and boost investment. (This high investment rate is the main reason its economy is growing so fast.) As a result, even the limited purchasing power China’s mostly poor pop­ulation does have rarely gets spent on American goods. The dream of selling to the Chinese functions primarily as bait to lure in American companies, which are forced by the government to hand over key technological know-how as the price of entry. They then build facilities which they discover they can only pay off by producing for export. The China market remains the mythical wonderland it has been since the 19th-century era of clipper ships and opium wars (when it was hyped as aggressively as today, by the way). (more…)

Stan Sorscher

By Stan Sorscher
Labor Representative, Society for Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA)

Last spring, a congressional staffer introduced me to a new expression. She said, “Our job is to make business succeed.”

My message to her had been that careers in science and technology were threatened as our economy de-industrialized. As manufacturing work goes to low-wage countries, the engineering and R&D jobs will go, too. American engineers and technical workers will have fewer opportunities for career growth. Already, engineering and science graduates compete with hundreds of thousands of foreign temporary high-tech workers for entry-level high-tech jobs. About half of all engineering and science students find work outside of engineering and science, when they graduate from college. Our policies are undermining high-tech workers in America.

She was gently explaining how I had missed the point. Her job was to make business succeed. I was worried about workers. Her priorities and mine did not match up.

I assume she meant large businesses, with very large PACs, who have more influence with congressional committees than I do.

Shortly afterward, US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said it more artfully in a radio interview, “Our job is to make businesses succeed… so they can create good new jobs.” (more…)

The U.S. government created the “free trade” treaties and destroyed any and all patriotism in business that ever existed in the U.S.A.!

The U.S. government needs to create real jobs!

I blame our Democrat and Republican party members of the U.S. Congress and the U.S. government that created various “free trade” treaties and other laws during the past 30 years that allowed, caused or economically required our U.S. businesses to move their U.S. factories and U.S. jobs overseas and then lay off all of their U.S. employees and take advantage of lower labor and less expensive environmental manufacturing costs available in foreign countries or face bankruptcy.

I also blame President Clinton when he signed NAFTA into law, and that was the first of many treaties created by many subsequent “free trade” legislation actions! Why did he sign it into law? He did not have to.

I can only remember Ross Perot objecting to NAFTA with any force and loudness! He said that NAFTA would, “Suck the remaining jobs from the USA to Mexico.”  He was right, but the Republicans and the Democrats were both promoting NAFTA.

I want to read President Obama’s new South Korea Free Trade Agreement. Does it further cause the relocation of more existing U.S. jobs to South Korea?”

How about also creating new laws to prohibit the import of services (the same as exporting the jobs) such as accounting, telemarketing, customer assistance service, computer aided drafting, engineering, legal research, etc. that are now easily provided by workers overseas through the internet at a small fraction of the costs paid to U.S. citizens to perform those services?

Without extremely high (several hundred percent) USA import tariffs, U.S. workers and businesses must compete with international foreign workers at very low foreign wage scales and very low foreign environmental manufacturing process costs.

Gerald R. Spencer, P.E., President
Spencer Engineers, Inc.
Houston, Texas

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To submit a blog to Free Speech Zone, e-mail it to bstack@usw.org. Keep it to 250 words or fewer. You MUST include your full name, hometown, and state. You may attach a photograph of yourself. Please include a phone number. This WILL NOT be published. Posting any given blog is within the discretion of the USW.  No blog using foul language (this is a family site), false information (we don’t want to get sued), or unnecessary personal attacks (again, we don’t want to get sued) will be used. Wait a reasonable period of time, then blog again! This is a Free Speech Zone.

Amy Bruno

By Amy Bruno
Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch Development and Online Associate

While President Obama and corporate lobbyists attempt to sell the Korea trade deal, South Korean farmers and a mass of labor and environmental organizations in the United States are strongly and clearly opposed. Protesters depicted in the video below urged the South Korean government to abolish the trade deal “fearing it would harm both agricultural producers and cattle farmers.”

Public outrage about the deal in the United States is no surprise as a September 2010 NBC/WSJ poll found that 69% of Americans believe free trade agreements with other countries have cost jobs in the United States. View a compilation of statements in opposition to the Korea trade deal here.

In another protest in Seoul on Sunday, Lee Chun-seok, spokesman for the main opposition Democratic Party, accused the government of making “massive concessions against our national interests,” his party said. “We cannot find the principle of reciprocity anywhere in the agreement.”

It is clear that President Obama did not take stock of American citizens’ opinions nor South Koreans’ welfare when reaching a decision to push the Korea trade deal. Now it is up to the 112th Congress to decide whether to settle for the deeply flawed pact or reject another NAFTA-style deal with no realistic promise of benefitting Americans or South Koreans.

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This piece is republished from Public Citizen’s Blog on Globalization and Trade.

Travis McArthur

By Travis McArthur
Public Citizen Trade and Finance Researcher

Obama’s Friday announcement of the tiny changes to the Korea FTA tried to portray the deal as a winner for the U.S. economy and American workers:

I am very pleased that the United States and South Korea have reached agreement on a landmark trade deal that is expected to increase annual exports of American goods by up to $11 billion and support at least 70,000 American jobs.

A “factsheet” accompanying the announcement reveals that the U.S. International Trade Commission’s (USITC) study on the Korea FTA was the apparent source of these figures:

With the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) estimating that the tariff cuts alone in the U.S.-Korea trade agreement will increase exports of American goods by $10 billion to $11 billion, advancing this agreement will secure the tens of thousands of American jobs supported by those exports…

A New York Times article published today reveals the real story on these numbers:

But the pact is likely to result in little if any net job creation in the short run, according to the government’s own analysis….

In fact, the effect of the agreement on aggregate output and employment in the United States “would likely be negligible,” according to a federal study, largely because the United States economy is so much larger than that of South Korea. Indeed, the study found, the country’s overall trade deficit with the rest of the world is likely to grow slightly as a result of the agreement.

Back in August we debunked the administration’s Korea FTA stats, but the Obama administration has continued to tout these bogus figures. Regarding the alleged $11 billion rise in exports, the crux of the issue is that the factsheet is quoting the wrong section of the USITC report (the administration is citing Table 2.2 on page 2-8 of the report). The USITC study predicts that U.S. exports will increase by only about $4.8-5.3 billion, as Table 2.3 on page 2-14 of the report indicates. In addition, the study predicts that U.S. imports will increase by $5.1-5.7 billion due to the Korea FTA. This large increase in imports completely wipes out the benefits of the increase in exports and turns the predicted effect into a net negative.

The $10-11 billion figure that the administration is citing is merely the change in the U.S. bilateral exports to Korea itself, which tells only part of the story. As the USITC study acknowledges, bilateral tariff reductions induce significant “trade diversion” effects, which means that implementation of the Korea FTA will “rob” from the volume of U.S. exports that currently go to third countries and shift those exports to Korea, leading to little net increase in U.S. exports. The diversion occurs because many exporters of U.S. goods will stop exporting their goods to other countries like Germany and instead start exporting to Korea, just because the tariff that they face for exporting to Korea is lower than the tariff that they face when trying to export elsewhere. The shift in the destination of exports alone does not increase U.S. economic output or employment. Only net export gains matter for American workers.

This distinction between the USITC’s projections for U.S. exports to the world vs. U.S. exports to Korea is not splitting hairs in the least.  In fact, a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that analyzed changes in trade flows due to NAFTA found a small increase in U.S. economic welfare due to NAFTA-induced changes in bilateral trade flows with Canada and Mexico, but this positive welfare effect was completely wiped out and transformed into a net negative due to “too much trade diversion,” i.e. shifts of U.S. export flows from non-NAFTA countries to NAFTA countries.

Our own back-of-the envelope calculations suggest that 50% of the increase in U.S. exports to Korea, as predicted by the USITC, represents U.S. exports that currently flow to third countries being diverted to Korea due to the bilateral tariff reductions.

On the jobs figure touted by the Obama administration, the crux of the issue is that their calculation only considers the job creation induced by exports and ignores all of the jobs that will be destroyed due to increased imports. The USITC predicts that the Korea FTA will lead to an increase in the U.S. goods trade deficit. This increased deficit will lead to a net loss of U.S. jobs, not the 70,000 jobs gained as alleged by the administration.

Unfortunately, the administration’s errors in discussing the USITC’s study on the Korea FTA were being repeated by news reports in the immediate aftermath of the Friday announcement, misinforming the public. Though at least one outlet, the International Business Times, got it right, noting that Public Citizen “pointed out that Bush-era International Trade Commission studies showed the Korea deal will increase America’s trade deficit.”

As Paul Krugman said, Korea FTA proponents are flat-out wrong about the economic impact of the FTA. In fact, the FTA will likely destroy jobs, increase the trade deficit, and hinder the U.S. economic recovery.  Now that the Obama administration has taken ownership of the NAFTA-style Korea FTA without substantive fixes, it should expect more job loss in the next few years and voter rage in November 2012.

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Travis McArthur’s work focuses on documenting the effects of NAFTA-style trade agreements, revealing WTO rules that prohibit re-regulation of the U.S. financial sector, and analyzing trade, employment, and macroeconomic data. Before joining Global Trade Watch, he worked at the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, where he analyzed the effects of the TARP bank bailout on competition in the financial industry. In 2008 he worked with the Union de Agricultores Minifundistas (Association of Smallholder Farmers) in Guatemala to develop a plan to help farmers cope with the effects of the Central America Free Trade Agreement. He has also conducted research on the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement on Mexico at Oxfam America.

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This piece is republished from Public Citizen’s Blog on Globalization and Trade.

James P. Hoffa

James P. Hoffa
General President, International Brotherhood of Teamsters

America has been in plenty of tough spots and each time emerged as a stronger nation. We overcame British tyranny, reconciled after the Civil War, vanquished Hitler and rebuilt our economy after the Great Depression.

These are hard times for many Americans, with underemployment at 17 percent and 43 million people on food stamps. But I am convinced that we will once again restore our economic greatness.

Something to think about if you’re out shopping on Black Friday is that many of the products sold at retail stores were made in China. And that many China-made children’s products in stores like Toys R Us contain toxic materials like polyvinyl chloride.

If you decide to buy electronics on Cyber Monday, you might want to remind yourself that the U.S. makes exactly zero cell phones and fewer personal computers than it did in 1975, when the first PC was sold. (more…)

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Real men, real human beings, with feelings and families, fought and died at Gettysburg to preserve the Union, to ensure, as their president, Abraham Lincoln, would say later, that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Perversely, afterwards, non-humans commandeered the constitutional amendment intended to protect the rights of former slaves. Corporations wrested from the U.S. Supreme Court a decision based on the 14^th Amendment asserting that corporations are people with rights to be upheld by the government – but with no counterbalancing human responsibilities to the republic. No duty to fight or die in war, for example.  Earlier this year, the Supreme Court expanded those rights – ruling that corporations have a First Amendment free speech right to surreptitiously spend unlimited money on political campaigns.

Today, Lincoln would have to say America’s got a government of the people by the corporations, for the corporations.

The proposed trade agreement with South Korea illustrates corporate control of government for profit. It’s the same with efforts to revive the moribund trade schemes former President George W. Bush also negotiated with Panama and Colombia, the world’s most dangerous country by far for trade unionists, with 2,700 assassinated with impunity in the past two decades, 38 slain so far this year.

Nobody likes these trade deals – except corporations. They’re all modeled on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), both of which killed American jobs while giving corporations new authority to sue governments (read: taxpayers) for regulations – like environmental standards – that corporations contend interfere with their right to make money.

The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the South Korea so-called Free Trade Agreement (FTA) would cost America 159,000 jobs and enlarge its trade deficit by $16.7 billion in its first seven years.

Americans, now suffering though corporate-caused 9.6 percent unemployment, know a deal when they see one – and the South Korea FTA is not one. In a September poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, 53 percent of Americans said so-called free trade agreements have injured the country. Only 17 percent said those trade schemes benefited the United States. Disgust with these deals spans party lines, including Tea Partiers, 61 percent of whom said they’re bad for America.

Many politicians, particularly Democrats, abhor the schemes as well. In July, just after President Obama announced that he would try to get the South Korea pact passed, 110 House Democrats described their disdain for the deal:

“We oppose specific provisions of the agreement in the financial services, investment, and labor chapters, because they benefit multi-national corporations at the expense of small businesses and workers.”

In addition, during this fall’s midterm election campaign, 205 candidates, Republican and Democrat, ran on platforms condemning job off-shoring and unfair trade, and house Democrats who ran on fair trade were three times as likely to survive the GOP “shellacking” as Democrats who supported so-called free trade schemes.

Significantly, the South Korean public and some South Korean politicians also oppose the trade proposal. In the week leading up to the G-20 meetings in Seoul, trade unionists, farmers, peasants and students filled the streets in marches and candle light vigils to express outrage with the proposed agreement, including its provisions giving U.S. corporations the right to challenge South Korean laws in private tribunals.

In October, 35 South Korean lawmakers joined 20 U.S. Representatives in writing President Obama and Korean President Lee Myunk-bak to protest the proposal.

Despite all that opposition, when Obama and Lee emerged from talks without an agreement, the American press, pundits and “analysts on both sides of the aisle,” described the situation as a major diplomacy failure, “a serious setback for the president.”

They were wrong. It wasn’t a setback for Obama. It was the president refusing to sign a bad deal for American workers.

It was, however, a humiliation for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which just spent at least $50 million from secret corporate donors to elect Republicans who will do its bidding. The South Korea deal is a priority for the Chamber. Here’s what Chamber senior vice president for international affairs Myron Brilliant told the New York Times after the South Korean negotiations broke down and Obama pledged to attempt to complete the deal over the following six weeks:

“This will be an early test for this president with the new Congress, particularly the House leadership.”

The “Brilliant” test is whether the president of the United States will comply with Chamber demands to complete trade deals that kill jobs and that Americans despise.

When Obama went to Seoul, Chamber President Thomas J. Donohue was there to, as he put it, help win the trade deal. He also was among 120 executives given exclusive access to international leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Dmitri A. Medvedev in a conference before the G-20 meeting.

The international organizers didn’t invite to the trade talks or the conference the students,  farmers, environmental groups, organized labor and untold millions of individuals who oppose the so-called free trade deals. The human beings who will be hurt most by the trade deals didn’t get a seat at the table. The corporate-people who stand to gain everything did.

Brilliant’s comments express the corporate sense of entitlement. They spent tens of millions to get what they wanted from politicians to increase profits. Now they expect it to be delivered.  It’s their recompense, their corporate reward.

If fatter profits mean fewer American jobs and wider trade deficits, that’s simply not a problem for corporations. That’s among the perks corporations got when the Supreme Court awarded them the privileges of personhood in America but none of the pesky personal and patriotic responsibilities of actual people in American society.

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Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute.  He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union.

For the decade just ended on Dec. 31, 2009,  the U.S  total trade deficit with all nations totaled $6 trillion, by far the most in our history! Why is this figure important? Answer: it’s the best single measure of how well America is competing in its own domestic market, by far the largest and richest in the world. The huge, ever-growing trade debt says we’re losing badly in that competition. Every day, the United States must borrow $2 billion abroad to cover it. How did this happen? Who benefits and who is hurt by it? Most important, can it be stopped and turned around to our advantage? Who from business should take the lead with labor to get government action? Here are the blunt answers.

First, our trade deficits needn’t have happened at all!  America’s multi-national companies were the main culprits. Until the mid-1970’s, the United States maintained total annual balance of payments surpluses with the rest of the world. But with globalization growing, those companies urged very open U.S. trade policies to gain easier access  to other countries’ markets. They went too far in attacking existing trade policies that had helped domestic industries like textiles, steel, and autos. They claimed that free trade would work wonders for America! They stand by that claim despite our ravaged domestic industry and millions of unemployed. It’s time we all face the damage and correct it for the good of our country.

Most important, where does patriotism come into play? Who should take the lead to stop this national tragedy. Answer: The same multi-nationals that caused the problem! They have the power! They’ll benefit too under the right policies. The best known solution is based on a 2003 idea by Warren Buffett, one of the wisest business leaders. He said, “Our trade deficits are selling America out from under us.” We’ve got to stop it now! We must return to balanced trade with the rest of the world! He explained what happens to any nation that doesn’t earn as much as it spends in trade with other nations – it loses its freedom of action and becomes poor. That’s the fate that patriotic Americans cannot permit happening.

A bill to implement this idea was drafted in 2006, but got nowhere under President Bush and has not been taken up by President Obama due to opposition by  some “free trade” economic advisors. An estimated 5 million jobs would be created within 2 years and without any deficit spending, just by passing and instituting the needed legislation.

Where do we stand with U.S. multinationals on this proposal? There’s been no open dialog with them. Recent confidential discussions with one leading multi-national that also has big domestic U.S. operations were disappointing.  They like free trade policies and don’t see the domestic economy as their responsibility. For now, the blunt answer is “We strongly believe there’s a balanced trade policy that’s the answer for America, but we haven’t won the multi-nationals yet.”

Will a bold leader please stand up!

Kenneth N. Davis, Jr.
President, Economic Strategy Associates, Inc.
Stamford, CT
Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce/International, IBM vice president and chief financial officer, and investment banker

Kenneth Davis

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To submit a blog to Free Speech Zone, e-mail it to bstack@usw.org. Keep it to 250 words or fewer. You MUST include your full name, hometown, and state. You may attach a photograph of yourself. Please include a phone number. This WILL NOT be published. Posting any given blog is within the discretion of the USW.  No blog using foul language (this is a family site), false information (we don’t want to get sued), or unnecessary personal attacks (again, we don’t want to get sued) will be used. Wait a reasonable period of time, then blog again! This is a Free Speech Zone.