Political Quotes

“this is one heck of a corrosive proposal, and I rise in steely opposition to it. The notion that we are victims of predatory and illegal dumping is a corrosive idea. We are told that the only way that this practice is going to cease is if we limit or ban imports to some kind of an arbitrary level set in 1994, and that is very rusty logic for a number of reasons. So let me focus on a couple of facts. Fact one: U.S. law provides clear trade remedies for industries that are harmed by dumping. In fact, the steel industry has already filed and won anti-dumping cases against Japan and Brazil, and it has negotiated a voluntary restraint agreement with Russia. The results of that are dramatically shown in this chart which shows imports from those three countries subject to investigations have dropped for hot rolled steel products. This drop over the last three months has been 98 percent, 97 percent in the case of Brazil and about 60 percent in the case of Japan, or more than that. So it has been almost cut to nothing. Even as we debate, there are antidumping cases proceeding against France, India, Indonesia, Italy, Korea, Macedonia. More than a third of the 300 antidumping and countervailing duty orders address steel. So here we can see in three months' time the reduction of hot-rolled steel products from all countries, from a total of 1.4 million tons per month in November of 1998 to 437,000 tons today.”