September 28, 2012
News Release
Contact: Sara Haimowitz, 202.688.5145, [email protected]
Canonsburg, PA ~ The Coalition for a Prosperous America’s Pennsylvania Chapter held a meeting yesterday with Congressman Tim Murphy (R-PA) advocating adoption of the 21st Century Trade Agreement Principles endorsed by over 150 associations, companies and labor organizations across the country. CPA member company, Universal Electric Corp., hosted the event.
Congressman Murphy (top photo), a lead sponsor of the Fair Currency Reform Act of 2011 (HR 639), has long been concerned with the U.S. trade deficit and harm to manufacturing and jobs.
“Congressman Murphy shares CPA’s concern that the trade deficit and resulting foreign debt harm U.S. economic and geopolitical interests,” said Dave Frengel (3rd photo), Chairman of CPA’s Pennsylvania Chapter. ”Several organizations from agriculture, manufacturing and labor developed the 21st Century Trade Agreement Principles to show a comprehensive way forward, and a departure from the past, to drastically improve trade negotiations through a national strategy.”
Joel Ross, CEO of Universal Electric (2nd photo from top), welcomed participants stating his company’s concerns about fixing the trade deficit. Dave Frengel presented the 21st Century Trade Agreement Principles to Congressman Murphy and the other attendees.
“We are doing more than merely criticizing Washington’s broken trade policy,” said Frengel. ”We have spent months developing a comprehensive new direction with these Principles. Balanced trade should be a national priority. We also need to correct current policies related to currency manipulation, rules of origin, food safety, foreign border taxes, and other issues.”
“Congressman Murphy was very interested in the 21st Century Trade Agreement Principles and offered to inform and educate his colleagues about these matters.”
The Coalition for a Prosperous America is a nonprofit organization representing the interests of 2.7 million households through our agricultural, manufacturing and labor members.
It is comforting to know that not all Republican Congressman have sold out to the Cato Institute,the Council on Foreign Relations,the Club for Growth,and the Heritage Foundation in regards to free trade.
Kudos to CPA for making some real headway with Congress.
It will take some time to re-educate members of Congress. In the late eighties, when big manufacturers began offshoring, the “experts” were saying, “Don’t worry. The future is with the small and mid-sized manufacturers.” A few years later, when the small and mid-sized manufacturers began falling to offshore competition, the “experts” were saying, “We don’t need manufacturing; we are going to be a service economy.” In 2005, when Thomas Friedman’s book “The World Is Flat,” showed us that the service jobs were going to India, the “experts” were saying, “Don’t worry, we are going to be a biotech/nanotech economy.” Well guess what, those biotech/nanotech jobs are going to China and India, too.
The problem with these “experts,” or public intellectuals as Thomas Sowell calls them, is that their influence on public policy far exceeds their actual knowledge and they never pay any penalty for being wrong.
What is the intellectual basis of “fair trade”? Fair trade will prove as disasterous as free trade. Only sky-high tariffs will get the job done and the chances of that are almost nill. Game over soon.