Obama says Americans still support trade, if fair

Despite an election in which anti-trade rhetoric played a key role, President Barack Obama said Americans favor open trade under the right conditions.    Although the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has been buried by the election of Donald Trump as the next president of the United States, the current president said Monday the world’s greatest superpower can’t become isolationist, because it depends on international trade and stability for its security.
   Before departing on an overseas visit to Greece, Germany and Peru, President Barack Obama said in a White House press conference that Americans realize the world is interconnected “and that you’re not going to put that genie back in the bottle,” but they “want to make sure that the rules of the game are fair.”
   “The majority of the American people still support trade,” Obama said. “But they’re concerned about whether or not trade is fair, and whether we get the same access to other countries’ markets that they have with us.”
   The Obama administration negotiated the TPP, a multilateral free trade agreement among a dozen Pacific Rim nations. The White House promoted TPP as being in the interest of American workers, saying it would open up mostly closed markets to U.S. goods and noting how it includes many labor, environmental and other standards that would bring other nations into close parity with regulations faced by American companies, thereby leveling the playing field in terms of production costs.
   However, Obama’s arguments were largely rebuffed by lawmakers who sided with the populist sentiment against outsourcing of manufacturing jobs that helped carry Trump to victory after he promised retaliatory tariffs on some countries and unspecified pressure on domestic corporations moving plants overseas. Congressional leaders never scheduled a vote to ratify TPP and all indications are that the deal is dead and that it will not even get reviewed during the upcoming lame duck legislative session.
   Obama suggested that the way for America to adapt to the forces of globalization is to better educate its workforce.
   “The American people recognize that their careers or their kids’ careers are going to have to be more dynamic,” he said. “That they might not be working at a single plant for 30 years. That they might have to change careers. They might have to get more education. They might have to retool or retrain. And I think the American people are game for that.”
   The public doesn’t realize the extent to which trade helps support the economy and how trade deals make it easier for companies to increase sales, Obama said.
   Many politicians have helped create a negative perception about trade.
   “I think when you’re governing, it will become increasingly apparent that if you were to just eliminate trade deals with Mexico, for example, well, you’ve got a global supply chain. The parts that are allowing auto plants that were about to shut down to now employ double shifts is because they’re bringing in some of those parts to assemble out of Mexico. And so it’s not as simple as it might have seemed,” he said.
   According to Obama, the answer to middle-class dislocation and income inequality is a higher minimum wage, stronger financial regulations, stronger worker protections, trade with conditions that prevent other nations from utilizing child labor and other short cuts.
   “People will still be looking to the United States. Our example will still carry great weight. And it continues to be my strong belief that the way we are going to make sure that everybody feels a part of this global economy is not by shutting ourselves off from each other, even if we could, but rather by working together more effectively than we have in the past,” he added.
   Obama also said lawful immigration helps keep the workforce young and dynamic, and is one of the reasons the U.S. is in a better economic position than most competitors.
   Several nations involved in the TPP are also members of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), a regional economic forum for promoting integration that is holding a Leaders Summit in Peru this week. Asia-Pacific nations belong to more than 100 free trade agreements, which have helped open and grow the regional economy.
   But Marie Sherylyn Aquia, chairwoman of the APEC Committee on Trade and Investment, said in a printed question-and-answer paper distributed by APEC on the eve of the event, that the number of trade agreements is sowing confusion and becoming counterproductive in some ways.
   The group wants to correct this “noodle bowl of trade agreements” with an umbrella agreement called the Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific. How the vision for a common trade zone will be pursued is still being studied, she said.
   Trump has said that he wants to renegotiate trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement, or even scrap them, and make individual deals with each country, going through the tariff code line by line if necessary.
   Sherylyn Aquia said she is worried about pushback in the region against globalization.
   “All the things that we are enjoying now like smartphones, traveling across the world, more information at hand – we stand to lose some of them if we persist with this protectionist mode,” she said, adding that more stories about how people are benefitting from trade need to be broadcast to counter negative perceptions some have. While tariffs in the region have gone down in recent years, non-tariff barriers such as import licensing continue to exist, she said.
   More effort needs to be made to make trade easier for micro, small and medium-size businesses, especially in the electronic commerce sector, but Sherylyn Aquia said many of those companies are already indirectly involved in trade because they provide supplies and services to larger companies that export.