06 October 2010
U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk visited South Florida to promote the administration’s plan to double exports in five years as a way to create nearly 2 million U.S. jobs. That plan includes approval of pending free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama.
Kirk, 56, is a Texan, lawyer and former mayor of Dallas. He supported the North American Free Trade Agreement. He is the first African-American to hold the Cabinet-level post as the U.S. trade ambassador.
Q. Is the US embargo on Cuba working?
My primary responsibility as U.S. Trade Representative is to advise the President and Congress on development of our trade strategy. Strategy and principles related to the embargo have come typically out of the National Security Council and the State Department.
President Obama has been fairly upfront that after 50-years-plus, it’s time for us to revisit the efficacy of our strategy with Cuba in terms of the embargo. He took the first step -- in relaxing the travel restrictions for (Cuban-American) families.
He’s made it plain that the United States would love to have a more robust engagement with Cuba, but that is conditioned on the Cuban people having the ability to determine their own future in terms of freedom and human rights and that Cuba should release all political prisoners of conscience.
Beyond that, I would have to defer to the State Department and the White House.
Q. Do you get a lot of lobbying on the Cuba issue?
A. Not much, because people understand my role. We’re guided by the congressional prerogative on this and whatever the President may determine.
Q. Does Cuba come up with other countries in talks on trade or trade policy?
At the Summit of the Americas (when we were in Trinidad in early 2009,) there was some discussion broadly about Cuba’s participation, but generally, it doesn’t come up.
Q. What are your chief concerns regarding the pending free trade agreements?
A. We start with one fact we’re confronted with: A 9.5 percent unemployment rate is just unacceptable. It’s not just constraining our economic growth. It is having a chilling effect on consumer confidence. So, all of our strategies economically are designed to attack that, not just in a temporary way but in a way that lays the foundation for a much stronger economy and much more productive job growth in the future.
Within that, the good news is that one of factors most contributing to our economic recovery right now is that our exports are growing. Trade represents only 13 percent of our GDP, which is less than the percentage in other developed economies like Korea or Japan, where it can be north of 60-70 percent of GDP. But some economists tell us that exports right now are contributing as much to our economic growth as consumer spending, which is huge.
So, as a practical matter, we see this as a great opportunity to move on the President’s initiative to double our exports in five years, which will allow us to create almost 2 million jobs. We’re looking at everything to move toward that goal. That includes access to capital; export promotion, which the Department of Commerce, Small Business Administration and Export-Import Bank take the lead on; and market access issues, which is our strength. And within that, it really highlights the importance for us to resolve the outstanding issues on all these free trade agreements.
From our standpoint, every job is worth fighting for. So, I’m careful when folks say to me: “Korea is $10 billion, Colombia is only $2 billion and Panama $1 billion (of potential U.S. export growth yearly). So why not just do Korea?” And I tell them each of the agreements has the potential to be accretive to overall GDP and help job growth.
There are states like Florida where agreements with Panama and Colombia are decidedly to your advantage, because you are – to your credit – the gateway to South and Central America.
But I don’t have a bias either in terms of scale or timing. There are issues unique to each agreement that have prevented them from moving forward. As we get them resolved, we can take them to Congress.
We have a head-start when it comes to Panama, because we had a fairly defined set of issues, and Panama had a change of administration that is helping us make good progress. We have an extraordinary opportunity with the expansion of the Panama Canal -- and with work going on in ports in Miami, Norfolk and Baltimore -- to exponentially increase trade coming into the U.S. east coast.
Q. The Bush administration, which favored free trade, couldn’t get the free trade agreements through. And now, you have an environment where many people see trade as outsourcing U.S. jobs and not creating them. How do you change perceptions to get for the free trade agreements passed?
A. There’s this fiction that hangs in the air that the Obama administration doesn’t care about trade, compared to the previous administration which was supposedly more aggressive. But (part of the problem on free-trade agreements) was the manner in which they administered their trade policy. There was a complete breakdown in dialogue with critics and with labor. For example, we had a labor advisory committee, which didn’t meet for five years previous before me coming to office.
Were we better served as a country with (opposing) camps saying, “I don’t like you. You don’t like me. We’re not going to talk?” Almost nothing got done.
So, with our President and his respect for workers, the easiest thing we could do was reach out and engage not just labor but the business community, farmers… We called everybody back to the table. And I said, “I know there’s hurt feelings. But let’s find out what’s troubling you and what we can fix.”
I often get the question: How the hell did you take this job (after you supported NAFTA)?
Q. You are known as a conciliator and a bridge builder.
I work for someone who rejects these false choices that if you’re for trade, you’re labeled a blind free trader and don’t care about workers rights. And if you raise objections, then we accuse you of backward thinking, anti-trade. The reality is a lot of Americans even in (trade-reliant) places like Florida had begun to question the value proposition of trade, because they hadn’t seen the job- creating opportunities commensurate with the consumptive benefits of trade.
So, we decided to tackle it honestly. Trade has worked from the consumer standpoint. Families all over America are able to clothe their children, feed their families, send them school, buy equipment for work -- all at wonderfully reduced prices because of trade. But that benefit is so diffuse many don’t see it.
Yet when a factory closes, and someone goes on TV and blames it on NAFTA, we all know that pain. So, we’ve spent time not just in places like Miami but also in (factory-based) Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio trying to find a way to thread that needle and to move forward.
Q. And how far have you come, and how far remains to go?
A. We’re going to find out when we take these free trade agreements to Congress.
One thing we have done since we came in is to give trade enforcement as high a priority as market access. Some ridiculed enforcement as nothing more than a sop to labor. But they now realize that part of restoring public confidence in trade policy is that people know this administration will stand up and fight for our exporters, our manufacturers and our rights.
That means we got to bat when China is dumping cheap products on our market and putting us out of business. We got to bat for our intellectual-property industry as we have with Canada, Israel and Turkey. We go to bat for our agricultural interests as I have with the European Union and Russia.
Some people legitimately had felt: “Our partners are running roughshod over us. We open up our market. You can go in any car lot, any store and buy any product from around the world. But we’re not getting the same equal treatment.”
And the time we’ve spent proving that we will stand up and fight for the rights of American manufacturers, ranchers, farmers and workers, I think, is beginning to help dissolve some cynicism on trade.
The other thing we recognize is we’re not operating in a vacuum. Panama and Colombia, as much as they are strong strategic allies, aren’t sitting back and waiting. They’ve signed free trade agreements with Canada and others. If we don’t want to go in and take advantage of these free-trade opportunities, our competitors will. This is now an issue of us potentially losing market share we once had.
Q. Is labor the biggest challenge?
A. Labor still has very, very strong objections. Some senators have questions whether labor has a veto, and I say, “They absolutely don’t have a veto. But we are in a much better place, because labor has a voice, they are at the table, and they know this administration will listen to them.”
But the farmers also have a voice and manufacturers and the service sector. I don’t have the luxury of putting the interests of one group ahead of another. But we rarely talk about our service industry. Eight out of 10 jobs in this country are now created in the service sector. Florida’s economy is service-driven.
We’re listening to people on both sides of the debate to try to find common ground.
Q. Is there a single biggest challenge – showing that trade means job gains, not losses?
A. The more we can demonstrate to the American people that trade means more than consumer benefits, the more the American public can see a dotted line between our being globally connected in a commercial way to job creation, the better off we are.
Some is our fault. We haven’t told as good a story as we can. I was in Seattle and sat down with international longshoremen, and they were reading to me an issue paper they got from Washington (criticizing trade.) I know that they have to do that. But I was like, “Are you kidding? Do you know where you work? You’re on a dock. You spend your day loading and unloading.”
Q. What’s the filter against trade in the United States?
A. Some of it is our media cycle, but some is we have a very advanced and mature economy. Trade is 13 percent of our economy, so people don’t pay much attention to its benefits here, compared to people in Singapore, where trade is 110 percent of their economy.
And for a while, our economy was so big, we were so awesome, that we could meet our own needs and help other countries grow. But one lesson we learned in this recent economic crisis, and President Obama said it beautifully: “The world just can’t depend on the U.S. consumer to prop up their economies.” We have to sell more. We have to save more. And we can’t sell more, if we don’t make more. So, we need a re-balancing -- in a way that as we help emerging economies to meet their challenges to grow, we can be more attentive to our needs.
Q. But is there a measuring stick on how far we’ve come on trade?
A. The important thing is the President has put the issue of trade, exporting, job creation and economic development front and center. He’s given me the task to do what I can to demonstrate to the American people that we can meet our economic challenges and grow. One way to do that is with smarter trade policies and completing our work with Korea, Colombia and Panama. I’m confident we can get it done.