I was drafted in the Trade War

Every Southern governor has participated in the trade war to create jobs. We started it after World War II with our right-to-work law, raiding the northeast for its textile industry. We enacted sales taxes for the public schools, balanced our budget with a Triple A credit rating, instituted the technical college system for the skills that are now building automobiles for BMW and the Dreamliner for Boeing in South Carolina. And Southern governors are still competing in the trade war with tax deferral packages, bringing back automobile jobs that John McCain said in the campaign would never come back.

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I was drafted in the trade war by the northern and southern textile industries to testify before the old International Tariff Commission against Japan's dumping textile imports below cost. We lost the case, but I got President Kennedy to promulgate his 7-point program stabilizing the textile industry in May of 1961. Under the War Production Act of 1950 permitting the President to act, we had a hearing finding textiles as second to steel most important to our national security.

But Japan kept cheating, and we couldn't get Presidents to enforce our trade agreements. I helped pass protectionist enforcement measures through both Houses of Congress only to be vetoed, one by President Carter, two by President Reagan, and one by President Bush I. But then China began acting like a Southern governor, leasing you the building for nothing; guaranteeing cheap labor with no labor problems; and a guaranteed profit so long as you furnished the technology and production techniques. Corporate America, seeing protection for its investment and jobs in-country continually vetoed, resorted to the old axiom: "If you can't beat them, join them." And under President George W. Bush, we off-shored almost a third of our manufacture and manufacturing jobs.

Three years ago, the Princeton economist, Alan Blinder, projected that for ten years running the United States would off-shore on an average of three to four million jobs a year. More jobs are lost today from off-shoring rather than from the recession. Yet Washington does nothing about off-shoring because that's what the business leadership wants.

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