A Policy After All This Time?
The glimmering is faint, but do I spy signs of a trade policy in the Obama Administration? The President actually called for increasing U.S. exports to Asia in his radio address last week! I hadn’t realized that this White House knew that trade involves more than imports. (Some in the Administration do know – and even know that profit is not necessarily a dirty word – for instance, Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke.) It will be interesting to see if the radio address was more than rhetoric, but it is a start.
I am not one of those who argue that this Administration hasn’t had a trade policy, but the outlines have been faint and skewed. So far, the Obama Administration has stopped Mexican truckers at the border and has made headlines for imposing penalties on Chinese tires. The Congress hasn’t helped with its insistence on “Buy America” clauses in the stimulus package and continuing bleats to punish China for currency manipulation. And the budget for the U.S. Commercial Service, my former employer and the country’s top export promotion agency, is still plummeting. One would have reason to believe that America’s trade policy is being dictated by certain labor unions, if one were in a cynical frame of mind.
Exports Are Good
Don’t get me wrong. I like the guy, but Ron Kirk was not an inspiring choice to be America’s lead trade negotiator. His background in trade is, shall we say, limited. He was mayor of Dallas and worked as an energy lobbyist before being tapped for the USTR job. Ambassador Kirk spoke to a conference I recently attended in Washington, the annual national conference of District Export Councils. DECs are advisory committees to the Federal Government about how to conduct export promotion and trade policy, so it’s a knowledgeable bunch, mostly private sector businesspeople. Kirk’s speech was entertaining and witty, but he said … nothing. He said it well, but information content was near zero, telling a room full of believers that exports are good. And there was no opportunity for questions, sometimes a sign that his staff either expected hostile questions or that the boss wouldn’t be able to handle them. One wonders, and hopes it was simply due to too tight a schedule.
Fellow attendee Johnson Choi, vice chair of the Hawaii Pacific Export Council, made the photo.
