Political Quotes

“This is an important discussion, and I want to be clear what is really at stake here. It's the automotive industry of this country, but it's more than that. There's a basic principle involved in the Korea FTA issue, and that is whether we will replace one-way trade with two-way trade. When this was negotiated by the Bush administration, it failed to take the most important step relating to Korea. They were shipping hundreds of thousands of cars to the United States. We were shipping, at that time, less than 10,000. So this, indeed, while it mainly involved automotive--and that was 75 percent of our deficit--it was even more than that, opening up markets for our goods produced in the United States of America. This was a Make It in America issue. And there was a Korean iron curtain against our products--by the way, not only automotive, but refrigerators and others. The number one priority of the Koreans was to eliminate the 2.5 percent U.S. tariff, because if you ship 600,000 to 700,000 cars, that's a lot of money. We said to the administration, no way, we were not going to let the Korea free trade agreement be approved if it continued to embody one-way trade. {time} 1630 The Korean Ambassador met with Mr. Rangel and me often, and the Trade Minister, and they said, We aren't going to talk about it. And we said, Well, if you don't talk, there will be no agreement.…”