With a full-page ad in this morning's Washington Times, the U.S. Business and Industry Council continued its major ad campaign to spotlight the devastating, economy-wide effects of the intertwined and worsening trade policy and manufacturing crises.
Today's ad (link below), features an Open Letter to the President on his administration’s almost complete neglect of the cascading crisis in domestic manufacturing, while his economic team focuses obsessively on the financial industry.
The ad explains that the only sound way out of the current financial crisis is “to produce our way out’” using the wealth-creating manufacturing industries to make more products here at home, while reducing imports. “The global Ponzi scheme of every country getting rich exporting to America is over,” said the Council’s president Kevin L. Kearns.
The 1,900-member Council warned, “No American company can, on its own, counter the unfair foreign trade practices” that are at the heart of our industrial and technology base decline.  “This is the job of the Congress and the Executive,” said Kearns.
Foreign governments collude with their companies to produce unfair competitive advantages through currency manipulation, tax rebates upon export, IP theft, subsidies, dumping, cartels, and many other unfair practices.
The ad also highlighted the failure of both Congress and President Obama's administration to produce a concrete plan for a manufacturing revival – while hypocritically demanding detailed business plans from the U.S. auto companies to improve their viability.
In addition, the ad pointed out that wrong-doing at financial houses is rewarded, while honest, if sometimes poorly run, manufacturing businesses are forced into bankruptcy – with potential devastating long-term consequences for the U.S. economy.
The Council's ads, run in the Washington Post and the Washington Times over last month, call on Congress President Obama to refocus our international trade policies on helping U.S.-based industry combat foreign protectionism.  They warn that without this policy overhaul, producing our way out of the current economic crisis through a renewed domestic manufacturing base will become impossible for America, and the nation will remain crippled by excessive debts.
Said Council president Kearns, "Production and jobs lost to foreign protectionism are damaging enough in normal times.  Nowadays they will help make the difference between an accelerating meltdown and a genuine chance for recovery. Either President Obama becomes a major change agent and uses new trade policies and new domestic initiatives to rebuild America's productive and wealth-creating capacities, or the economy could sink into a long-term depression."
The Council's ad campaign will continue this week with a climate change ad in the Washington Post, which highlights the failure to use our trade policy to bring China's skyrocketing greenhouse gas emissions under control.

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