[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> before we start, these

little black things in front of you are microphones. they are alive during the whole event so if you are clicking your pen or tapping the table or wrestling pages, that will all be picked up on the sound so please keep that to a minimum. it also means when we get to the question-and-answer part, just make sure you are talking in the vicinity of one of those microphones so folks can hear you. thank you. we will begin. welcome to the session. thank you for coming. my name is celeste drake. i work on trade and globalization policy for our 12 in half members. i'm very excited to introduce the panel and the important topics we will discuss. trade policy in washington d.c. can be extremely frustrating.

too often they apply the simplistic free trade at versus academy economy and think they have set all they could say on the topic but they couldn't be more wrong. intellectual property rules are critical part of u.s. free trade agreements and trade policy but they represent a clear deviation from free trade. advocates are often labeled as protectionist even though we support duty-free treatment for most goods from most developing nations and that's a distinctly free-trade position. that's one interesting thing about this administration and its recent action on tariff. the decision to protect national security by imposing so-called 232 tariffs on global imports of aluminum and steel and the decision to address china's intellectual

property theft. they represent outside the box thinking. if such willingness to promote these tariffs isn't the start of a trade war, is it going to hurt working families? we've all heard these allegations and worst on talk shows and online, but what's the truth. are they bad because they're imposed by this president? are they long-overdue? will they help create good paying jobs for u.s. workers? those are the questions we will investigate. joining me are for terrific panelists. i will introduce them briefly in of a medical order and then we will get down to discussion. we are joined by a respected

litigator elizabeth bolton. she's currently in consulting counsel and a former assistant general counsel and associate general counsel for the united states trade representative. also trade counsel for the ways and means committee for the u.s. house of representatives. next on the far right, elizabeth drake is a partner at shaker and associates. she has a broad array of international trade law matter including section 30 301 petition and china safeguard. she has represented clients in proceedings before the u.s. international trade commission and the court of international trade. third we have robert scott, senior economist and director of trade manufactured. he has published widely in

academic journals and the popular press including the international review of economics, the stanford law and policy review and the l.a. times. finally, on the near right we are pleased to be joined by the president of the united steelworkers association in pennsylvania. he started working at the plant 11 years ago making armors for the soldiers. he has seen the impact of global over capacity firsthand. we will begin with some discussion amongst the panelists and then will open up for questions from the audience. for anyone interesting in tweeting about today's panel you can use # truth in trade. that's # truth in trade. i will start. question for everyone. let's say we just stepped into an elevator and will take us about one minute to get to the floor were going too. tell me your thoughts on the steel and aluminum tariffs. what is your one minute

answer. rob do you want to start. >> sure. i think the steel and aluminum tariffs are once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to address critical problems that have been building up for the past two decades. the problem is massive amounts of overcapacity in steel and aluminum centered in china and hun handful of other countries such as russia, vietnam and korea. these tariffs are important to opportunity to build a wall around the unfairly treated middle that's distorting trade and costing us tens of thousands of jobs in the u.s.

>> i start from the premise that aluminum and steel are vital to our national security. national security is actually much broader than national defense and includes critical infrastructure, transportation, bridges, food security to these are industries that we need to have in the united states and the question then is how to ensure that these businesses that are being driven out of business through imports are sustained for the long term so we actually can sustain our national security. >> i would say it's for our national security, my plant makes the humvees for the dod, job creation, it's a trickle-down effect the end it's put out that one or two jobs can create other jobs in the industry, that's a fact as part of our national security and part of job creation. >> i would say these tariffs are long overdue when china joined the wto everyone predicted they would slowly become a market economy and play by the rules in exactly the opposite has happened. they are still capacity has quadrupled since that time driven by nonmarket economy policies and that's completely

distorted china's market and global markets given the scope and scale of the problem. we've tried dialogue and traditional trade remedy tools, we've tried wto challenges and it just gets worse and worse. it's required a global solution for the sake of our own security but hopefully we will get the global community acting to address this problem before it gets even worse. >> thank you. there seems to be pretty unanimous thoughts on this particular panel that the steel and aluminum tariffs are good, but let's get into it a little bit more. we heard about china cheating at the wto, we heard about jobs having a downstream effect on other jobs in the steel industry and a little bit of infrastructure and food security but we've also heard tariffs generally are bad. they're like a dirty word and we've heard a lot of fear mongering about what could be

the unintended negative consequences on our economy of these tariffs. i would like to open it up to anyone on the panel to say, what you think really the impact of these tariffs are going to be on our economy. will it be a big or small impact and will be more positive or more negative and could you explain why for somebody who's not really familiar with the idea of tariffs but has just heard a lot about how they are essentially a dirty word. >> i think the steel tariffs could be beneficial to the mexican economy if handled right. by that i mean in a way that allows other countries to coordinate in targeting countries like china and russia and vietnam that are generating this excess capacity, distorting world markets and costing us jobs. i think we need to encourage those countries to eliminate that excess capacity in order to rebalance trade. if we don't, it's not just a

question of the jobs at stake in the steel and aluminum industry but these numbers are critical for the production of hundreds of thousands of other products ranging from auto parts to washing machines and windmills and aircraft parts, all those jobs are risk if we continue to allow china and russia in these other countries to produce this metal at deeply subsidized prices. that is part of what that risk. >> does anyone want to add to that. >> i will say, as for the consumer that i deal with on a regular basis, we don't go out and buy steel by the ton. we don't go out and buy like we buy cheese. for a consumer to say well it's going to go up, yes steel is going to go up and prices because you getting a better made product instead of a product that is made overseas.

it's key as a trickle-down effect to create other jobs. you need to support the data to say what's going to go out because if steel went up that means the cost of auto may go up. in that case it's down in the car places should be down. car prices still stay the same. car prices are not going to get a discount price. you have to show data to show what's gonna go up and what's not gonna go up because the regular consumer is not going out and buying steel by the ton. >> you make a really important point. just because the price of manufactures are paying goes down, we as consumers don't always see that in the price of the goods. similarly, if the price of inputs go up, it depends on a

lot of things, the market power of the particular manufacture, the shape of the demand curve, all this other stuff that folks don't need to know about, but they do need to know that just because the price of an input those up doesn't necessarily translate into widespread inflation. >> if i could just add to that, the price of aluminum dropped between 2011 in 2016 by 30%. that was not because of fundamentals. it was because of excess capacity. we have a situation where american producers are subject to constraints that others are not people glibly say that american producers are competitive. that's not the case. were just required to be profitable. let's put these tariffs in context and put the price in context. the price has been unnaturally deflated for many years and the tariffs are one way to try to get the price back to where it was even before the financial crisis. >> that's completely) the question is what are you buying for the cost and what

you're paying in tariffs is the viability of the domestic steel industry and aluminum industry. if you want prices to be a rational level to allow producers to generate a return and be sustainable, the whole impetus for the different levels was allowing the steel industry to return the 80% capacity of utilization which is what's needed for them to be sustainable. that's sort of the trade-off. that is what you are buying with the additional tariffs. if you don't do that, the conclusion was of you not able to reach those capacity levels here in a downward spiral. we are ready had ten plants closed and thousands of people lost their job. >> really good point. i want to go back to something rob said when he started off. he was talking about the importance of these particular tariffs being promoted in a

coordinated and strategic way and talking about how you could get them right or you could get them wrong. one of the things we keep hearing is if we get them wrong it will be the start of a trade war. i know president transcended improperly to call it a trade war and a scare tactic to get the average american to oppose these tariffs. and they keep her from payless. do you think we are already in a trade war? if so, who started it and who's winning and who's losing? does anyone. >> all jump in. i do agree that the rhetoric is completely overblown. the section of the law, there's been 26 investigation and the whole world and fall apart. there's been numerous voluntary restraint agreements have been reached over the years in various sectors

including steel and that's kind of what were seeing with korea. everyone just needs to calm down and take a deep breath and just realized that this could be a very important tool for getting to a more sustainable, rational road for the steel and aluminum industry, but to the extent that there are distortions and conflicts, in my view that really started with china's own drive to build up the steel industry at any cost without any rational demand to support the amount that they were building. they have more excess capacity and our total capacity. it's just completely irrational and for years and years, even at the highest level of the chinese government they said we would do something about it and you just see their capacity go up and up and up. unless something dramatic is done, i don't know how you can expect that you will get different results during the same thing over and over again. >> i would say we are at war and we are at war for american jobs. just to think that china can produce more steel in one

month than the u.s. canon one year is phenomenal. it's something that's unheard of and that's an attack on american jobs. yes, we are at war but it's not a trade war. it's war on american jobs being lost. that's something that we have to take care of here with these tariffs that are being put in place. >> thank you. and just to note, the microphone in front of you are live so please keep any clicking or wrestling of papers to a minimum. that will help with our sound quality. seth, i want to go back to your comment about national security. we've heard a little bit about some people questioning whether the steel and aluminum tariffs are actually legitimately related to national security and focusing this is just a front for protectionism, can you tell us a little bit more about why steel and aluminum are related to national security and a little bit of history about

what a section 232 tariff is. >> when we start with what section 232 does. it was first enacted by congress in 1965. think it's important to remember that congress did this eight years after we signed the gap. congress is clearly where that signing on to our debt obligations is going to have some ramifications for the ability to protect. [inaudible] >> it was trade agreements signed in 1947 that was the precursor to the wto that we have today. that's a little bit of the history of section 232. it's important to recognize that the patriot act plays a role in all of this in congress is extremely worried that we did not have a way of

planning for the protection of our critical info structure. that was included in the patriot act which distinguishes between national security and national defense. i say all this because when them emma was released that national defense only needed a certain percentage of aluminum and steel in order to support his needs, that was taken as a proxy for the fact that this is not a national security issue. in fact it's just a subset of national security. cbp, customs and border protection had been charged with developing the framework for critical info structure and for identifying the critical sectors that are elements of our critical infrastructure. they did designate aluminum and steel as critical components needed to sustain. >> thank you. elizabeth, just to continue on this theme of 232 tariffs, we've been hearing a lot that they are controversial. they're rarely used. can you talk about that. >> they are relatively really used, they have been used in the past. i honestly think a lot of

controversy around the tariffs doesn't have as much to do with the tariffs as with the atmosphere and the personalities that are associated with them. i think a more calm discussion that actually looks at the merits and understood the background and reasoning, there can be a lot more room for agreement that something like this was needed to address a problem that has been basically on addressable up until now and i completely agree with understanding national security broadly not just what is needed for defense but roads and energy and so forth. there was a challenge where they said this is in for national security, this is for economic security and the judge rightly said i have limited ability to review this, but to 32 itself says economic security is a part of national security. this claim has no basis and there is any of the findings

that it is essential for national security. it was interesting to see a judge on the court reached the same conclusion as others that have looked at it more closely. >> i'm glad you brought that up. rob, china seems to be a particular problem in steel and aluminum but you also mentioned russia and vietnam. why are the steel and aluminum tariffs not just on those three countries? why are they burdening other trading partners. >> two reasons. first, if we just put tariffs on those countries it would be far too easy for china and russia and vietnam to export their goods to third countries such as japan or korea or even canada and then simply move them from those countries directly to the united states. we want to block off that option. i think there's a second and even more important reason which is that we want to

provide incentives for other countries to join us in circulating the wagon, building a wall around the unfairly traded metal. this is the only way in which we will be able to remove the excess capacity from the world market, if we make it impossible for these countries to export their unfairly priced metal to the rest of the world. this imparted because i'm very concerned about the ability of china to export its steel to korea which transforms an enormous amount into cars and korean cars are now the third largest source of imports of motor vehicles in the united states and much of those vehicles are made with subsidized steel from china. were not allowed to impose duties on those cars because of their use of subsidized steel. even though korea in this case

has agreed to a tariff, a quota of its own steel of 30%, we said nothing in that agreement about korea the ability to use subsidized steel from china and other countries as mentioned. i think the agreement is a good place to start. i don't think it's what we necessarily could have achieved with it. >> thank you. before opening up questions to the audience, i'd like to get some audience participation. i just want to come back to you and make this a little more concrete and abstract. we know there were layoffs announced that fall before the announcement of the tariffs at your plant and can you talk about with that really does to the members of your local and

what you're experiencing and how things are maybe different or still the same at your plant given the recent tariff announcement. >> this is right outside philadelphia. we were one of the main producers of alloy military steel. back in 2005, at the height of the war, we had around 400 to 425 members or employees at the plant. today we only have barely 200. in august were going to be going down to 71. this is what not having tariffs in place does. we had a bridge art that was adjacent to our plant dedicated to steel. that has closed in the past few years because that industry and those orders are not there due to not having tariffs in place.

this is what happens when you don't have tariffs in place. you're losing jobs, your closing parts of your plant, my plan, if you want to talk about national security was one of the main producers for the military steel. back in 2005 around 2009 we were the only plant that made any money for the company based on the military that we had coming through the plant. we turned on a dime to actually support the military and the military vehicles in our program. this program was based on trying to send steel over to afghanistan to reinforce the vehicles because the vehicle they had was not being, it was being destroyed from bombs and guns and those natures that were going on. we lost a lot of our smaller customers due to that. those customers would be the ones that would keep us afloat

during the slow times of steel, but our dedication to the country in the military took that away. it really destroyed my plant in particular. we are the poster child of not having tariffs in place. they really took what we had in the plans and took it down to basically nothing. you go from 400 to 71 people and even lower based on the company and their plan to just make us a heat treat facility. right now there's not another plant out there that can produce steel the way we can and the military alloy that we can and make it the strength that we can. there's not a lot of industries out there that can compete with the plant because this is what it was for so many years. >> thank you.

that's really important. >> just a footnote to add to the point that was mentioned about the bridge building unit, this was a key issue raised in 232 hearings, one of the managers at the bridge building association mentioned that one of the things they are challenged with his bridge components being imported from mexico and being made out of chinese steel. this is another illustration of the way these unfairly traded products are filtering through global commerce in a way that sending a very negative impact on a wide range of products in the u.s. >> another plant i want to make, if this plant is going down to 71 and possibly could be closed in the next year or two then where will we get the steel? who will we rely on to give us the steel for the u.s. military? i have the facts to say that

we produce over 200,000 tons of steel in the past three years between the war and those are facts but that's not something i'm just throwing out so the question is, national security will be affected if we don't have this plant to make the steel. if we had a rely on another country, we may be in some trouble. >> that's a really great point and that gets back to the question of the fact that 232 is a really important section of the trade-off and it's not just a friend to adjust dumping or other things but it's really important all of us. at this point i would like to open it up to questions from audience. just raise your hand if you have a question and i'll call on you. >> if steel mills are opening up and jobs are increasing, will that not have an effect on your plant.

>> those plans are carbon plants. it's a more open market for carbon. aluminum is another market. we are in a specialty market and there's not a lot of specialty customers out there besides the dod. until there's some type of military spending plan and some type of other plan to bring down the cost, ultimately overcapacity has come down because what happening is the service centers that we build with our still overcapacity. that has to come down even more for us to even start trying to think about rehiring. there are effects but it's not affecting us at this time. >> we were mentioning the coordinated strategy or coordinated process that she

hopes will result in the final version of the steel and aluminum tariffs but i wanted to ask first of all, is it a corrugated process so far or other risks with the exemptions and exclusions that the administration and companies in other countries are talking about. how do you present perceive tha that? also, second part, if there are exemptions and exclusions then you just end up in a place where a lot of interests are fighting over particular steel and aluminum products in the real beneficiary might not be mr. thompson but it might be. [inaudible] there are associations who are fighting over these various resources. >> on the first question, that's a good question and i think rob had mentioned that ideally this result in chlorinated action by all major markets to eliminate

that excess capacity. we have seen the eu, for example, being temporarily having an exclusion in the same time they announced that they are now starting an investigation. that could be one element of the solution but canadians as part of their exclusion have developed a canadian steel border team or something of that nature where industry and government officials are trying to make sure they don't become just a conduit for subsidized or overcapacity flowing into the u.s. in return for them getting an exclusion. i think it is an element of what they're trying to build into these countries specifically, but they also need to take some action to create more coordinated global approach to basically squeeze out opportunities to disrupt other markets around the world. on the exemptions process, it just started, there has been something like a thousand

requests filed and only a handful have been released. they are very, very specific in terms of specific widths and lengths and chemical content and what have you, but part of it is they do need to identify whether or not there's any domestic source and then there's an option for domestic producers and others to object to any request that's made. and he gets too early to say how that will shake out, i've been talking to people who are part of the process during the 201 safeguard back in 2001 and they defined those exemptions pretty narrowly and really based on if there's domestic capacity or not. i think that is a legitimate basis to try to fine-tune things and shouldn't be a way to get some shenanigans or weaken that overall relief because it is based on helping the industry.

>> rob did you want to follow up on that? >> on to say one quick thing on aluminum, we are being very vigilant about the number of exemptions and exclusions are granted. you really have to take some imports of the u.s. market in order to get these to restart and have long-term viability. we want to make sure it's not just open season on imports because that will defeat the purpose. there is a question with the national press club, you made points about steel trade and you also said but i really wish trump wouldn't use the words trade war when he talks about this. towards extent is the administration stepping on itself through some of the rhetoric. >> i think the administration really prefers to make

headlines. they prefer to bombast over actual strategy. that's part of the problem. they seem to be shooting themselves, each other as they make policy. one day were making good policy on steel, the next day they announced they're going to suddenly rear and negotiations which the president opposed to not part of the reason he was elected because he opposed. then on friday announced the treasury announced that in their semiannual foreign-exchange report that they were not finding any countries guilty of currency manipulation. that is the most important determiner of whether or not the u.s. has in proving trade manipulation. china and others have been manipulating it for years for this is the single most important reason why we have large trade deficits for this

administration has no trade strategy for dealing with those issues. they engage in what i call trade policy by press release. >> one of the benefits of the way the president is talking about this issue is that it is focusing on this idea that in the approach on trade would be to our long-run benefit and these tariffs and the discussion around overcapacity has started to focus people on what exactly state capitalism is, what it means, and when you link it to the made in china 2025 strategy, even people like senator cornyn are saying actually we might uni be in a trade war and i'm not sure were fighting back. that's what he said last year. even if you wouldn't frame it that way, i still think maybe it's not unhealthy to discuss

whether we are responding to a trade war. >> obviously everyone can have their criticisms about how things are rolled out were advertised or described, but i think that if you look at the work that was done, if you look at commerce reporting on the 232, if you look at the reports on china's compliance, there is a lot of substance there. they are very, very good. they're also rejecting the laissez-faire wisdom that has been what everybody has been saying for about 20 years and say no this isn't working. the system is not working we need to do something about it. i get frustrated sometimes that people don't look at the substance because it's easy to say the rhetoric is silly or bombastic and then just our everything that's done rather than understanding that there's actually some really good work being done here and it's about time to challenge the way things were done

previously. that's my hesitation. [inaudible] [inaudible] as i understand it the quota is a limit on total korean exports to the united states without regard to the origin of the steel. it is the largest importer for chinese steel according to statistics from the un.

i've tracked this in some the reports i've done. as i have said, i wrote this in a number of commentaries while the tariffs were being debated, i think they should have been used to encourage other countries to restrain imports to the u.s. but also unfairly treated products. you can remove them from world markets from the korean market. i think if you look, i published an op-ed in earl april and quoted leo gerard who said something fairly similar saying he wanted

candidate exempted but only if they agreed to participate for the restraint of unfairly traded products. he had the same thought in mind as i did. >> does anyone else want to add to that. >> i would just add, i think what were seeing about these tariffs is really showing one of the weaknesses of the world trade organization. it's not really structured to address issues of overcapacity , it's not really structured to get these issues of how we get countries that are similarly being harmed by overcapacity and steel aluminum's to work together to address those issues in court nation. we are seeing some of that coordination happening now has elizabeth was talking about with the eu doing a safeguards investigation, but it really is showing that we need, as

rob was saying, a comprehensive approach to trade strategy. we started with some good tactics with these particular tariffs that were talking about today, but what we need is conference of trade reform and that means some reform at the wto, some reform in nafta and a lot of our other trade policies and our overall, what's our domestic economic policy and how does that help achieve the goals we want of good jobs and good wages and how does it work together with the trade strategy to do that and not be a source for outsourcing of jobs and exploitation and abuse of workers overseas. >> mark, did you have a question. >> yes. >> my question is for mr. thompson. he's been talking about the practical effects but before we get to that, you said the competitors of your specialty and over staffing that you see

more than the capacity. you know how much more? >> i don't know how much more but i know the service center is still trying to get that overcapacity out before they can even start ordering from us. >> now let's get back to what's happening to your members, use of 450, and i have 271, i'm sure you've been talking to the men and women who have been laid off since then, what has it been like for them? >> it's kind of heartbreaking but because most of our members are veterans, you've got members have been there for 25 years were ready to lose their job, that's 25 years of not being in the workforce, i'm setting up all types of programs for them to be reactivated to finding a job, what's out there as far

as computer classes, knowing how to conduct an interview, this is what i'm dealing with because you have guys in the 50s that are ready to retire but our kind of older in age to whether or not familiar with the new way of how to go online and put an application and rather than just walking up and getting a paper application. it's just been trying to get politicians to understand what's going on and i've been in good support with my district and his team has been very helpful trying to give assistance to the veterans who will be affected. going through unemployment we have a taa program that i

filed for for trade cases and plants that are affected with trade. that's been very effective getting our members acclimated to help with schooling. the usw has been very helpful in all that they can do reaching out. it's not been a good situation. especially now for our older members. they'll be affected in a worse way because our younger members are affected but they're more are committed to the workforce. it's a difference. >> folks were watching who

aren't aware, tia is a trade adjustments program. it's a federal program that helps workers who lost their job if they can demonstrate that they lost their job due to trade policy. other more questions from the audience at this point? >> what's behind chinese overcapacity? how do they do it? what do they pretend? >> over capacity was a problem in the stearat steel industry around the world because everyone wants to have their own steel industry and good jobs in a way to gain access to technology an important national security. it's not unusual that they go through overcapacity and then

have to reduce capacity. the scale is just completely off the charts of what we seen before. i think a lot of it has to do not just with central government policies in terms of subsidies, loans from state-owned banks at below market rates, electricity and labor and land and other at the provincial and local level, every region wants their own plants. some of it is coordinated and some of it is a failure of coordination. that's why you have this irrational situation where every single province or region is creating their own steel industry even though there far far above any capacity they could ever justify. there's a lot of complicated history and a lot that the government in china could do, they come out with announcements every year what they're gonna do and we just haven't seen execution on the ground because these are jobs. when you are in the chinese communist party you don't really want to create a big wave of unemployment.

what they do is export that excess capacity to other countries where we work on more of a market basis and that's the challenge that were facing. trying to consciously set out to build the largest steel industry in the world, the year before it entered their producing about a hundred million tons of steel year so is the united states. now they are able to produce about 16 times that. once .6 billion tons of steel. china is now the largest exporter of steel in the world and yet very few of those exports come directly to the united states because our trade bar has been very effective at taking unfairly traded steel out of our market. that's part of the reason why it's showing up in places like japan. they're willing to import that

steel and turned it into downstream products and ship them to us. it has a pernicious effect on trade. it's not just about trade and steel and aluminum. the other point i would make is that they are consciously attempting, this was a result of a five-year plan. they have two five-year plans every five years. china has a very effective state capitalist system. yes there are problems in state government, if china wanted to reduce its excess capacity, they could do it tomorrow. this is what they do. they could threaten to shoot people who don't close their plants. it's very effective. they haven't done it. i'm sorry to be blunt, but that is the nature of the system. china wants to do this for the last point i'll make is that even though china is a huge exporter, consumes 86% of the

steel it produces, most of what they produce is turned into downstream products but as i said, win meals, washing machines, auto parts, aircraft parts but these are the things they're exporting to the rest of the world. they understand it, it's strategic. it's what they used to conquer world markets not just in these products all kinds of industrial commodities. that's why it's so important to credi cut this out of the rooted problem. >> if folks are living in a community where may be of the past ten or 15 years they've seen job loss in washing washing machine parts in aerospace and other things, that is potentially related to chinese overcapacity in steel even though they might not know that's one of the sources of the problem. >> absolutely. china is the largest exporter of manufactured products in the world and a source of half the trade deficit in

manufactured goods. china has a very big impact on distorted trade. >> i would just add to that question, this question you asked about chinese workers and part of the free-trade mix that sometimes expanded upon around washington d.c. if we just trade a lot we will get rich and if we just get rich workers will be better off because somehow they will automatically share and whatever gains go to the whole economy. what we found out is that it doesn't really work that way. there were a lot of us in the labor movement saying that all along that this isn't automatic, workers share in the gains of the economy and it has to be a deliberate policy. labor unions are a key part of that policy. we play a really important role.

it really does get the question of linking and making sure we are coordinating trade policy with domestic economic policy because the u.s. does see growth in our economy every year. the workers are getting a fair share of the growth. that's not just here. that's in china, that's in mexico, that in europe, that's in all these countries we trade with. it's one of the problems we really need to get out. other more questions from the audience? >> i have just a couple more questions for the panelists before we let you go. i wanted to get out, we were talking about, before the panel this question that we keep hearing that farmers in the u.s. are going to be the hardest hit by potential retaliatory tariffs by china and others. i was wondering if folks had thought about what, how would you respond to that. do we really expect to see a major downside in the u.s. agriculture industry and how

can we work to make sure that it's not just a couple particular states that are harmed and then the u.s. actually doesn't effectively follow through on trade policy. >> do want to talk about that. >> i guess i would step back a little bit. i think there's been a tension created between the agricultural sector and the manufacturing sector. i think that has been created by a trade policy, i was a rule of origin lawyer between 2003 and 2009. if you look at the agricultural rules of origin, the really strict but it's not a big surprise that farmers benefit from trade agreements because we designed the rules to make sure they actually benefited. if you compare them to the manufacturing rules of origin, we actually allow a lot of that stuff to be offshore.

it's not a surprise that it's the farmers being hurt because our trade policy has been so beneficial for them. are we out of this? a measure of the answer to that but at least in terms of why we are where we are and if our trade partners feel comfortable, i think that's how we ended up there. >> thank you very much. >> just two points. whether or not farmers are hurt is really a policy choice. we export about $12 billion for the soybeans. year to china. the u.s. has programs they could buy soybeans and put them in warehouses and release someone there later needed. this is a manageable problem. >> thank you very much. that reminds me a little bit of things that we've seen in the press where folks on wall street, their hair is really on fire about these tariffs. it's terrible, it's the worst thing in the world, to start the trade war and to me part of what they are saying is we

have a lot of benefits from u.s. trade policy and other people have been hurt and we kind of like it that way. we want to keep getting the benefits we get in the people who have been getting hurt keep getting hurt and it really doesn't seem to be a very thoughtful policy around how do we say if trade does benefit everybody, how do we write the rules so that trade really does benefit them. that's not a talking point but that's a reality. it means we have to change the rules and the status quo has to change. i'd like to go back to one of the themes we visited are ready about this idea of tariffs being a tactic and not a complete strategy and this idea of coordination and coordinating comprehensive trade reform with others but also how are we making sure that are treated domestic policies work together. like to ask everyone on the panel, what else would you like to see this administration do. we've heard you agree with the steel and aluminum tariff. what else do they need to do

that as part of a more comprehensive trade strategy or individual tactic. whatever you want to talk about that needs to happen next. it needs to happen to make sure we're moving in the wreck direction. anybody can start. >> a couple things i would mention would be coordination. the coordination with korea, the steps canada is taking, those are good signs but i hope the tariffs are just the beginning, the little match to light the fire that gets all of these countries to wake up. in terms of domestic policy it will be interesting to see how actual spending updates our infrastructure and that would help the domestic industry and help workers action on currency has rob mentioned is something that would be great,

and as you are saying, just a broader revisit of our trade agreements and trade policy both bilaterally, regionally, globally and whose interest is it serving and are changes needed. you see some inklings of that and that it's the wall street people really mad and they were saying were supposed to dictate what the terms of this is and you can have all these other people at the table. it's too early to say where that might end up, but i think it needs to be a piece of it as well. >> thank you. >> just to add to that, i think sometimes is trade people, we forget that trade is just a subset of our larger economic policy and i haven't seen much discussion of the fact that the international trade commission when they did are retrospective of all our bilateral and regional trade agreements found that these other agreements only contribute point to percent each year toward gdp. we get so consumed with nafta and tpp that we forget that we have this giant economy.

are we really thinking about how we intend to serve our own economy. what are we doing for workers? why don't we have a competitiveness policy. we haven't had one since 1988. peterson who has unassailable free-trade actually thought we needed a commission of business, labor and the government to have an economic strategy for the country. i don't think competitiveness is about tax cuts that get turned into share buybacks. that's not going to get us back to producing what we need to be producing. >> try to keep it like 452nd. >> i'll just make one quick point which is that trade deals have been negotiated for basically the interest of u.s. investors. they transferred tremendous amounts of income from working people to investors. i think we need to stop negotiating trade deals until we get our trade outcomes right and we get rebalanced trade and more jobs in manufacturing this way all of this is discussed and a lot of

folks think some things help level the playing field. these are the kinds of things that would improve the welfare for everybody. >> you get the last word. >> administrative wise, i just think it shouldn't be a decision made on administration. it should be a trigger. rbc we have exemptions for reason meaning that china knows they're doing something wrong so they're sending the steel through other countries to get its route to the u.s. i just think it shouldn't be an administration about these investigations. it should be a trigger, someone or some type of department that they come up with to monitor the tariffs and know whence to much and when is not too much and when they should back off or bring it in. >> so we get more authenticity

in our enforcement. >> i think that really helps from the perspective of working people because we know when we are trying to fight and wall street is lobbying for one thing and working people are lobbying for another, we know which side has more money and more political influence and so that's a great recommendation. i want to thank all the panelists for being here, rob scott, elizabeth, i know i've learned a lot and i hope you have, thank you very much for coming. let's give our panel around of applause. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

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[inaudible conversations] >> as a follow-up to the recent hearings with facebook ceo mark zuckerberg, the communicators looks at the privacy issues raised by the spread of personal data by facebook with the president and ceo of the center for democracy and technology and lee goodman, attorney and former chair of the federal election commission. : : >> this is for good and salutary reasons. >> really the meta issue for me is how data is collected, used, secured and processed by the companies with which we engage with on the online world in a

very comprehensive and pervasive way. >> watch "the communicators" tonight at eight eastern on c-span2. >> tonight on "landmark cases," brandenburg v. ohio. ku klux klan leader clarence brandenburg was convicted of hate speech you should an ohio -- under an ohio law, but the supreme court unanimously ruled the state law violated his rights. to discuss, the former head of the civil liberties union and a senior attorney at columbia university's knight first amendment institute. watch "landmark cases" tonight, and join the conversation. our hashtag is landmark cases, and follow us @c-span. and we have resources on our web site for background on each case, the "landmark cases" companion book, a link to the national constitution center's

interactive constitution at c-span.org/landmarkcases. >> well, congress returns at 5 p.m. eastern today. they'll be spending most of the week debating bills recognizing tax day. tomorrow, april 17th. the bills are intended to protect taxpayers and insure the irs and other government agencies are more responsive. floor speeches are also expected on the recent air strikes in syria. live house coverage on our companion network, c-span. and the senate is back to work on a wart rights bill, and -- water rights bill. live senate coverage begins many about an hour, 3 p.m. eastern, here on c-span2. and here's more about the week ahead from today's "washington journal." >> host: on mondays on the "washington journal" we like to take a look at the week ahead in washington, and to do that this morning wre