Pat, thank you very,
very much. I beg your slight indulgence at the beginning of this
because I’m suffering from those air miles. Actually,
it’s a combination of allergy and a cold, and I don’t recommend it
to anybody. But if I stop occasionally, you’ll understand why.
Pat, thank you for a
very generous introduction. Most importantly, thank you for your
role and the role of all of these workers and supporters of Boeing.
What an extraordinary company. I am delighted to be here at Boeing,
although I think, because of this speech, it’s going to be one
airplane every 13 hours today, I’m afraid.
I see our former
ambassador to China and former governor and former secretary of
commerce here, Gary Locke. It’s great to see you. Thank you for
being here with us. And thank you, all of you, for
welcoming me to this really beautiful state.
As you may know, I’ve
been traveling an awful lot, so when I was told we were landing in
Washington, you can imagine my relief when I remembered that it was
this Washington -- the one with Mount Rainer in the
background and Puget Sound at its feet, and the jet plane capital of
the world right here in Renton, too, and I’m very, very honored to
be here with all of you. Thank you.
My wife Teresa and I
have always loved coming to the state of Washington. We have a lot
of similarities with our great state of Massachusetts, but I’m very,
very glad to be back here today. And being outside here like this,
standing here, it kind of brings me back to a few years ago. The
people of Washington State are not only warm and welcoming, but your
judgment is impeccable, and I particularly appreciated that in
November of 2004. Of course, I’d have been a little bit more
grateful if you’d spent a little more time sharing wisdom you’re
your friends and relatives back in Ohio. It would have -- no.
But the fact is the
quality of your engagement has long been on display in the
representatives that you send to Washington through many, many
years. From Warren Magnuson to Scoop Jackson to your outstanding
House delegation and to my former Senate colleagues Patty Murray and
Maria Cantwell, you have always sent the very best to Washington,
and both your state and our nation are better for it.
I am especially
pleased to be back here at Boeing. I landed many, many times at
Boeing Field. I’m delighted to be here next to the Renton Field.
Today I finally get a factory tour, and you have no idea how much
fun that is for me. Flying has been in my family for generations. My
dad was a pilot who enlisted in the Army Air Corps a year before
Pearl Harbor and he took me on my very first flight in a Piper J-3
over Washington, D.C. when I was about ten years old. And I’ve been
a pilot myself ever since college. And like most pilots, I try to
fly whenever I can, whatever I can.
A few years ago, when
I was still in the Senate, I made a trip to the Middle East and I
was at lunch at an Israeli air force base down in the southern part
of Israel. And the colonel who was in charge was an ace from
Israel’s Six-Day War and he knew that I had been requesting the
opportunity to fly in Israel, so that I could get a bird’s eye view
of the security challenges. And Tel Aviv had refused to sign off on
the idea of this senator going flying, but I kept badgering. And
during lunch at the base, I asked the colonel, “Hey, check with Tel
Aviv one more time, see if we could take a flight.” And he comes
back to me and he says, “Senator, I hope you didn’t eat too much
because we’re going flying.” So the next thing, I’m
driving out with him. I leave my party at the lunch. I drive out to
the airfield, they give me a helmet and a suit and we jump in this
jet trainer and he says, “The moment we’re off the ground, it’s your
airplane.” I said, “Man, he didn’t even check my logbook and --
nothing.” This is -- I’m okay with this.
So I grab the stick,
up we go, we start flying around. Next thing we know, I’m flying --
about three minutes into the flight, I’m flying towards the Red Sea,
and there’s a voice in my ear in the helmet saying, “Senator, you
better turn faster. You’re going over Egypt.” And so I
turn real hard. And then I asked him if I could do some aerobatics,
which I love to do, over the desert. And he gave me the thumbs-up,
so I did some rolls and a great big loop, and turned the plane
upside down. And below me, spread out below me, I could see the
whole Sinai. I could see Aqaba. I could see Jordan. I could see a
lot of Israel. And I thought to myself, “Wow, this is fantastic.
This is the perfect way to understand the Middle East -- upside-down
and backwards.” And I’m telling you, that’s been
reinforced to me more and more, day to day.
But I managed to stay
current as a pilot all the way up until recently. I haven’t been
able to fly as Secretary, so for the first time in years I am not
current. They may not let me fly loops anymore, but I have to tell
you, as you heard from Pat, as Secretary of State, I practically
live, very happily, on a Boeing 757. And we have logged -- thank you. We have logged over 800,000 miles in a little bit over
two years with a huge number of crises, as you know, and a major
need to be in personal touch with people building relationships and
working for the interests of our country.
But on that note, I
figured, since I was here, I’d just come out and ask: Don’t you
think I ought to be able to trade up? I mean, don’t you
have a spare
Dreamliner parked somewhere around here? I
promise I’ll show it off all over the world -- free publicity, just
think of it. It’s a win-win, as they say in China.
All kidding aside, I
am very, very pleased that the State Department, the Export-Import
Bank, the Department of Commerce, as Gary knows, we’ve been able to
work really hand-in-hand with Boeing, and we’re proud to do so to
vigorously support your business -- American business -- overseas.
And together we have helped facilitate tens of millions, billions of
dollars -- billions of dollars -- in aircraft sales, everywhere from
Indonesia, to Brazil, to Kenya, and I’m proud of that. I’ve
personally been able to get on the phone with a prime minister or
president -- and I’m glad to say successfully on some occasions to
be able to help close some deals. So I’m proud of those eight years
of backlog and I hope it’s going to be 20 before you know it. I’m
confident it will be because of the quality of the work you do.
Boeing is America’s
leading exporter, one of our top employers, and an incredible
innovator and competitor, and you all ought to be as proud of that
as we are proud of you. I couldn’t think of a more appropriate place
to visit on my way back from Asia to talk about our nation’s
leadership role in the glowing -- in the growing global economy. And
it’s a critically important opportunity to strengthen the long-term
security and shared prosperity of our country, and nothing is more
important.
Back east, in the
other Washington, the House -- we’ll give them a moment to take off
here. Everybody should cheer. There goes another one. Back east, in the other Washington, the House and Senate
are considering a piece of legislation called the
Bipartisan
Congressional Trade Priorities and Accountability Act. I know,
that’s a mouthful. But it boils down to whether President Obama
should have the authority to conclude and put before Congress the
two most significant trade agreements in our history -- the
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the TPP
-- the
Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The TPP is currently
made up of 12 countries along the Pacific Rim, including, obviously,
the United States. The deal, which is in the final stages of
negotiation, would encompass 40 percent of the world’s economy. And
as with any complex agreement, my friends, there are many details to
be hashed out, but the reasons why it is important are
straightforward and sensible.
First of all, in the
modern world, we can’t just expect our economies to grow if all we
do is buy and sell to ourselves. It’s just not going to happen.
Trade supports jobs and it builds prosperity -- period. And the
record of the past five, ten, fifty or a hundred years bears that
out. As I speak, exports support about 11.7 million American jobs.
And that number is only going to go up. Why? It’s pretty simple;
it’s really simple math: 95 percent of the world’s consumers live
beyond the borders of the United States. And if for some reason we
just decide to give up and not to do business with them, to shut
down because we think somehow it’s a loss of a job here, believe me,
a lot of other people will welcome that at our expense.
And as a veteran of 28
years in the Senate, who voted on every trade agreement during that
period, I know and understand the delicate relationship between the
trade issue and American workers. For years, we built a consensus in
America based on the argument that the benefits of trade would be
passed up and down the economic food chain, benefitting everyone. I
have to say that, regrettably, in recent years, the consensus for
trade that was built on that principle -- [noise from plane taking
off]. Do you feel like that’s a baby leaving the family? But it’s good. The consensus that allowed us to engage
in trade through all those years, the principle that it was built on
has actually become frayed, because not enough of the benefits are,
in fact, being passed on. And the anger and frustration that has
come from that has translated into opposition to trade itself, when
the real focus ought to be on the other policy reforms that are
necessary to address that concern. For example, on improving tax
policy, on strengthening international labor and environmental
standards, as is actually being done in these two deals that I’m
talking about. The solution lies not in shutting the door to trade
itself, but in transforming the system to make it work for
everybody.
So let me be clear: If
we pick the wrong culprit, we will cut off our nose to spite our
face. And so as orders shift from us to the rest of the world’s
producers, the result would be boarded-up windows and “going out of
business” signs in places from one end of America to another. We
could see dockworkers with pink slips in their hands instead of
container ships steaming into and out of ports. We could even see
aerospace companies shutting down some of those assembly lines
because there’s been a reduction in the incentive for people to buy
planes from our country. The truth is, the only people we know or I
know who would benefit from a decision by the United States not to
participate in the TPP would be international competitors. And
believe me, they would be delighted.
Here in Seattle, you
know this. You know this instinctively and you know it empirically
too. In 1971, the city of Seattle was in such decline that one of
the most famous billboards in our country read: “Will the last
person leaving Seattle turn out the lights?” A little over 40 years
later, the census bureau named Seattle the fastest-growing city in
the United States of America. That transformation is thanks in part
to the fact that your state is among the leading exporters in our
union, with sales topping $90 billion in 2014 -- more than a 200
percent increase from just a decade ago.
The
Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue area is our country’s fourth-largest export
hub by volume. And even though Boeing tops the list, your state’s
exports don’t just come from a handful of companies. Washington has
more than 12,600 exporting firms whose sales abroad support about
400,000 jobs. And in addition to aircraft, the state is renowned for
its software, its coffee products, its apples, its wheat, its fish,
its wine, its machinery, and its lumber. And what is more, some of
your top customers are among the 11 other countries participating in
the TPP, including Japan, Canada.
So let’s be clear.
Washington State is a trade leader because you discovered a long
time ago that it’s in your best interest to do business with the
world. Now, no one compelled this decision. No one compelled your
predecessors to engage in lucrative trade deals. You saw the common
sense of it. In fact, more than a century ago, the workers for a
company right here in Renton were making railway cars for export to
the Far East. And they did it because Seattle is the gateway to the
Pacific and because it simply makes good economic sense to go where
the customers are.
Guess what? That logic
still holds today. And if you only sell to a limited market, believe
me, your standard of living will stagnate or decline. Obviously, on
its face, that’s not a very smart formula. The bottom line is that
if we want to make it in America -- in every respect make it -- we
have to sell what we make in America to partners across the equator
and every part of the world, from pole to pole. And to give our
firms the best chance to compete, my friends, we need agreements on
trade.
So the rules of the
road are clear. And this brings me to the second big reason why the
Trans-Pacific Partnership is so vital: It will enable us to play a
critical role in helping to determine the highest standard rules for
trade.
In the United States,
we’ve fought hard for years -- it didn’t come easily; go back to the
1800s. Not everybody was treated the way they are today in the
workplace. It was a hard-fought struggle. And for years we fought to
make sure that workers were protected so that economic growth
doesn’t come on the backs of exploited people. And we care that
businesses adhere to environmental standards so that families
continue to enjoy clean air and the water that they deserve, no
matter how close they live to factories or to other industrial
facilities. And we believe that rather than putting aside the things
we care about in order to compete with the rest of the world in a
low-standards race to the bottom, we should help bring the rest of
the world up to meet the high standards by which American businesses
now operate.
That is exactly what
the legislation before Congress would allow us to do.
My friends, we can’t
farm out to other nations the core interests of the United States of
America. When it comes to the jobs of U.S. workers and the paychecks
of U.S. families, we’ve got to be our own prime contractors; we
can’t entrust to any other country the responsibility for preserving
the American Dream.
Right now in the Asia
Pacific, we have the chance to finalize a trade agreement that is
truly unlike any other ever negotiated: an agreement where every
participant has to comply with core international labor and
environmental standards; where every participant has to refrain from
using under-age workers and unsafe workplaces; where every
participant has to ensure that nationally owned companies compete
fairly with ones that are privately owned; and where every
participant has to fight trade-related bribery and corruption,
support legitimate digital trade, safeguards -- intellectual property
safeguards, and guarantees the promises that they make are promises
that they have to keep, because they’re enforceable in the
agreement. We didn’t have an agreement, none of that happens. That’s
not a complicated choice. By any standard, the agreement that I just
outlined is an historic trade agreement.
The TPP is not your
grandparents’ trade agreement; it’s not your mom and dad’s trade
agreement; it’s not even your older brother or sister’s trade
agreement. This is a new, new entity, and ultimately, this is a 21st
century agreement where the key understandings and high standards
are baked right into the four corners of the text -- not in a side
agreement, not in a letter, but in the text of the agreement itself.
Now as you know,
Congress has already begun a new round of deliberations on trade.
Parts of the debate have been on related issues, but on the key
question of whether the Trans-Pacific Partnership will be good for
our country, the arguments against have been sincere, they’ve been
passionate, but I have to say to you today that I believe they are
also deeply flawed.
For example, opponents
contend that Congress and the public haven’t had a chance to read
the text of the proposed deal. Well, the truth is members of
Congress, who were sent to Washington, D.C. to represent the public,
have had access to it for years. Now, of course, some
confidentiality, I think most of you understand, is required in any
kind of multilateral negotiation. There are obvious reasons why we
don’t release every single sentence every day as it’s being
discussed. When you do that, words get distorted, arguments are
undermined, and ultimately, consensus and a deal become much harder
to arrive at. Even labor contracts and other contracts here in this
country are more often than not done in a way that they’re
negotiated and then presented to people.
And there’s one thing
that I learned in this job from negotiating with friends and foes
alike -- it’s that you have the best chance of success when you’re
not negotiating in public every day. It’s the only way to keep the
process moving forward and to gain the concessions that we seek from
other countries. Senators who are unhappy about this might recall
the locked doors and closed windows that marked America’s
constitutional convention 228 years ago, without which we wouldn’t
even have a Senate today.
The important thing
about the TPP, my friends, as with our Constitution, is that the
final text will be made public. In fact, it will be posted online
for a minimum of 60 days before President Obama even signs it. And
only after the public has had a chance to review it would it then go
before Congress for hearings and for a full and open debate in the
United States Congress. My friends, that’s not secrecy at work;
that’s democracy at work, and it’s the way we’ve done business in
our country for a very long time.
A second argument we
hear against TPP is that other countries could use it to dismantle
America’s environmental standards, Wall Street reforms, minimum wage
laws, food safety guidelines, and on and on. I have heard that
argument about every single trade agreement that we’ve ever passed,
and it has never happened. And if that were true, I can promise you
I would oppose the agreement myself. But it’s not true. The
agreement won’t take away any sovereign rights of our nation, of any
nation. It’s not going to allow anyone to change our laws other than
the United States Congress. Rest assured, with the TPP in place, we
will retain our ability to protect our clean air and water, regulate
our economy, and uphold all of the laws of our nation. And I have
fought my entire career for many of those things, and I don’t intend
to start undoing a lifetime of work now and turning my back on all
of that overnight.
The third major
argument that you hear against TPP is the standard line about
outsourcing and globalization. Now, this is a kind of gut reaction
that I respect. It reflects the real impacts that Americans feel
sometimes as the result of technological and economic transitions
that are always taking place in a nation on the move. It’s a genuine
feeling, and I’ve talked to many workers in many states through the
course of my career who have been affected by change, and many of
you know them. Some of you may be them.
But I want to
emphasize: This concern needs to be directed at the right target.
Outsourcing occurs because of the mobility of capital and labor and
market competition. And the remedy is not to pull back from trade
agreements themselves or to attempt to stop globalization, because
that’s not possible. Globalization has no reverse gear, my friends.
As technology continues to evolve, as more and more people in the
world have smartphones and look and listen to what people are doing
and thinking in other countries, the world will become more
interconnected, not less. And no politician anywhere in the world
has the power to change people’s desires to be connected, to be part
of the world, and in many ways to share what they see other people
having that they want themselves.
So no matter how hard
people may try to pretend otherwise, no matter how many politicians
may stand up and appeal to the instinct to play to that fear, the
fact is globalization is here to stay. No one can put that genie
back in the bottle. What we can do is mitigate the negative impacts.
And in the end, when you measure all the benefits against all the
negatives, I believe the balance says it is absolutely a good thing
for our nation and for the world.
From our nation’s
earliest days, we have been trying to encourage more people -- just
think about this. For years, we’ve encouraged people: Embrace
democracy, be like us, join capitalism, compete in the free market.
We’ve urged them to adopt our economic system, our rules. We want
people to support an open marketplace and capitalism and the free
flow of investment. We deeply value the ability to start up a
company, make a product, sell it worldwide, take a risk. That’s how
we’ve always defined America. And we have argued for centuries that
the most responsible role government can play is to respect commerce
-- not impose government will, but develop a framework of the core
principles built on freedom -- freedom to take a risk, freedom to
invest, freedom to take the job you want -- and then get government
out of the way and let the private sector do what it does so well in
this nation.
Well we now have
nations around the world eager to embrace that or already embracing
that. Their economic interests compel them to do so. They know it’s
the only way that they can be competitive in today’s globalized
world, and they don’t want to get left behind. We too have to accept
the fact that changes to the global economic system will happen with
us or without us. So instead of resisting change, we ought to be
investing in our people in order to make sure we can take advantage
of that change.
We have to continue
taking critical steps that will make us more competitive and spread
the benefits of globalization far and wide, including, as President
Obama has proposed, through trade adjustment assistance, through
lifelong learning, through support for innovation and research; from
helping every young person to get a higher education, and from
reauthorizing crucial institutions such as the Export-Import Bank,
which are helping local, small manufacturers like the Measurement
Technology Northwest Inc. and Engineered Compost Systems expand
their global footprint abroad. We also need to help hire new workers
to fill the export orders that are coming from new markets overseas,
including from countries in the Asia Pacific, as we know and as Pat
just mentioned to you.
More of us also need
to share the confidence that our parents and our grandparents had
when they built this country out of the ashes of war -- and frankly,
the confidence that so many young entrepreneurs are exhibiting
today. Remember, just three decades ago, experts were predicting
that competition from the Japanese on their semiconductors --
remember this? -- computers and cars would cause America to become,
and I quote, “a nation of short-order cooks and salespeople.”
Today, Japan’s
automakers have set up plants that support jobs for tens of
thousands of workers here in America. And despite all of the
publicity about outsourcing, in the past five years, our
manufacturing sector has been growing at twice the rate of the
overall economy. Sometimes it really amazes me, folks, how short the
public memory is. A lot of people forget that only six years ago,
when President Obama first took office, right before he took office,
we were on the brink of economic disaster. Iconic companies were
filing for bankruptcy. Unemployment was approaching 10 percent. Our
entire financial structure was on the brink of collapse. And when I
say this, I am not exaggerating. I’m just repeating what a
Republican secretary of the treasury said when he came to the
Capitol Hill to implore my Senate colleagues and I to authorize a
bailout of the system. And today, while nobody is claiming victory
yet, the United States has added 12.3 million jobs over 62 straight
months of private sector growth -- the longest streak on record.
We’ve put more people back to work than all of the other advanced
economies combined. And a big cause of this turnaround is that our
experts have reached a -- our exports have reached a record level.
They are up nearly 50 percent since 2009.
That tells a story.
And it’s no accident, folks. That’s the result of the most
determined, competitive, entrepreneurial business and talented
workers in the world. It’s also the result of some smart policy --
policy that is based on the idea that when we increase what America
sells overseas, our payrolls get larger, our paychecks get fatter.
On the average, export-supported jobs pay significantly more than
other jobs. So we’re talking quality jobs, not just quantity. And if
we were satisfied with this progress, well, perhaps we could just
sit back and forget about new trade agreements and the chance to
further pry open the international markets where 19 out of 20 of the
world’s consumers live. Try that.
Happily, we’re not
satisfied. Because we know that even if we attempt to stand still,
nobody else will, or most won’t. And we’re going to get blown away
economically in the process. We have to keep finding new markets. We
have to keep creating those new jobs. And we’ve got to ensure that
our workers -- farmers, ranchers, businesses -- receive equitable
treatment in that marketplace. We can’t do that, folks, by sitting
on the sidelines. You can’t be on the side of the road while other
countries are writing the rules of the road for the rest of the
world’s trade. We’ve got to be engaged. We’ve got to lead. And by
the way, most Americans inherently understand that.
A recent poll shows
that almost three out of five of our citizens view foreign trade as
an opportunity, not a threat. And here’s the reason: The U.S. market
is one of the most open in the world. Seventy percent of U.S.
imports cross our borders tariff-free. You’ve all seen these
duty-free stores at airports, right? Well, America is pretty much
one big duty-free shop. That’s not the case with all -- excuse me --
with all of our partners. Our automakers face tariffs of up to 30
percent in Malaysia. Our poultry farmers face tariffs of up to 40
percent in Vietnam. Washington apples are charged a markup of 17
percent in Japan. And what about the great wine that you produce
here in Columbia and the Walla Walla Valley? Tariffs on wine in
Japan and Vietnam are as high as 50 percent. Not only that,
America’s environmental and labor standards are among the highest in
the world.
And that’s why we have
so much to gain and nothing to lose by reaching deals that lower
trade barriers, lower the tariffs, raise global norms -- and we
should also remember that if we don’t clinch free trade agreements
in the Asia Pacific, it doesn’t mean that those agreements may not
happen. It just means that we may not be part of them and we may not
shape them. The standards will be driven down instead of up, and the
business we might have had will go to our competitors instead. Even
now, Washington apples are losing out to Chinese apples in Malaysia
because Beijing has a preferential trade agreement with that country
and we don’t. And Japan and Australia just signed a pact that will
allow Australian beef into the Japanese market at a lower tariff
than American beef. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to
sit here and watch. And I’m sure it doesn’t make a lot of sense to
you.
It’s not just giant
firms like Boeing, by the way, and Starbucks, and Costco, and
Microsoft, and Amazon that we’re caring about here. Small and
medium-sized businesses are really the linchpin of the American
economy. In fact, they’re the source of two out of every three new
jobs that we create in this country. But these firms also confront a
unique set of challenges when they’re trying to increase exports.
For example, the
Cascade Design Company that is based in Seattle
exports outdoor recreation equipment to some 40 countries. But it
could sell far more if its customers didn’t have to pay high tariffs
in exactly the markets that we will open through the TPP.
There’s a long list of
examples like that; I’m not going to go through all of them. But the
TPP will lower tariffs on American exports. It will ensure that TPP
countries treat American products the same way that we treat
products from their own firms. It will cut red tape. It will reduce
bureaucracy for our small businesses and family farms. And it will
help our companies participate more directly in new global supply
chains that are creating unprecedented opportunities all around the
world. When you add it all up, the economic case for trade promotion
authority and for TPP is not even a close call in my judgment -- it’s
overwhelming. And as Secretary of State, let me put this in a
perspective of global challenges.
It is no secret that
the world in the future looks pretty complicated right now. The
turbulence that we see comes from a combination of factors,
including the fact that even as the world grows closer, there are
powerful forces pulling people apart -- terrorism, extreme
nationalism, conflicts over resources, a huge number of people
coming of age in parts of the world where there simply aren’t enough
jobs. This creates a race between opportunity and frustration that
we can’t afford to lose. Expanded trade can help us win that race by
spurring innovation and -- and as we’ve seen in Asia and elsewhere
--
helping hundreds of millions of people to lift themselves out of
poverty. And poverty, my friends, is where you see much of this
violent extremism born.
Just as important,
trade agreements such as the TPP will help to knit America and our
partners together so that we are better able to cooperate on other
areas. It helps to create a community of common interests on trade
that will reinforce trust and helps us expand our cooperation in
other areas. And that matters, my friends, because the Asia Pacific
is the single-most dynamic part of the globe today and where much of
the history of this century is going to be written. It includes the
four most populous countries, the three largest economies, and a
huge and rapidly growing middle class that want to fly in the planes
that you build here.
The good news is that
our engagement in this region is welcome and making a difference
because our partners know that our markets -- and even our futures
--
are absolutely closely linked together. If we were to retreat from
the Asia Pacific, and if our friends were in turn to turn their
backs on us, we would face a much different world than we have known
in recent decades. And it would not be a world that is more secure.
So let me be clear. We
know that our goals in the Pacific are critical because we want what
most countries in the region seek: a place where the sovereignty of
every state is respected, whether they’re big or small; a region
where disputes are settled openly and in accordance with rule of
law. We -- all of us frankly -- can help make this happen if we’re as
fully involved economically just as we are diplomatically. In fact,
as my colleague Ash Carter, the Secretary of Defense, has suggested,
the Trans-Pacific Partnership is as important to American interests
in the Asia Pacific as our military posture. Completing the TPP
would send a message throughout the region as well as the world that
America is -- and will continue to be -- a leading force for
prosperity and security in the Asia Pacific. That is good for the
United States; it’s good for our trading partners; and it is
definitely good for companies and workers here in the American
Northwest.
So here’s the bottom
line: 2015 is simply not the time for us to decide that trade
negotiations are too hard, nor to -- it’s not the time to vacate the
field and ignore 70 years of lessons from the Great Depression and
World War II. It’s not the time for us to sit back and allow the
principles of free and open trade to be supplanted by the
discredited and empty prospects of protectionism and mercantilism.
There is nothing
progressive about blaming trade or trade agreements for the
inevitable economic shifts that are brought on by technology and
time. There is nothing liberal about clinging to the past when the
future is filled with opportunities to innovate and create whole new
industries. And there is nothing more in keeping with the traditions
of Washington State -- American traditions -- than to look over the
horizon for the connections that will create a stronger, more
prosperous, and secure future for the people of this region and of
all America.
My friends, more than
50 years ago, when Seattle hosted the World’s Fair, American exports
were worth only about one-twentieth of their value today. In the
decades since, our commercial relationships have been utterly
transformed; our leading manufacturers have changed; our trade in
service has exploded; and technology has made what was not even
imaginable the new normal.
We are living in a
wholly different world, an exciting time, except for one thing: the
need for American leadership. Like the generation of Warren Magnuson
and Henry “Scoop” Jackson, our generation faces a test that we
cannot allow partisanship or any other source of internal division
to prevent us from meeting. We have an opportunity before us to
shape and elevate the global rules of trade for decades to come.
We cannot shy away
from this task, just as we cannot walk backwards into the future.
Like mariners; like sea hawks -- with a small "s"; like the
proud employees of Boeing; we need to face the world and all its
challenges with the confidence in who we are, what we stand for, and
our incredible ability to compete. That’s what we must do. And I am
confident, as I look around this extraordinary manufacturing center,
as I look at all of you, that the United States will get this done
and Washington State is going to help us do it.
Thank you.
(Source: Americanrhetoric.com)
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