Nancy L. Johnson: “One of the things I think is not being noticed, and of course it is because most Americans do not have time to notice…”

“One of the things I think is not being noticed, and of course it is because most Americans do not have time to notice, they are busy and we are not at the table, but let me tell my colleagues what happens when we do not have fast track authority, because it is happening to us now. We do not have fast track authority, so we cannot negotiate with a lot of the South American countries that have traditionally bought American products, like to buy American products, are disposed toward doing business with us, but in the last couple of years have been making deals with other people because we are not positioned, we do not have the negotiating authority that they can trust. So, recently, Canada negotiated a very good trade agreement with Chile. It meant that there would be no Chilean tariffs on their communications equipment. That dropped an 11 percent tariff under Chilean law on Canadian communications equipment. Not long ago, we lost, an American company lost a very big deal in Chile, not because they were not the top quality producer, not because they were not the lowest cost producer, but because when we added their price of their quality product and the 11 percent tariff, they were higher cost than the Canadian company that was higher priced but did not have the 11 percent tariff. So our failure to have negotiating authority is already losing us customers in South American nations. And if that happens too much, we lose jobs. We do not just lose customers, we lose jobs.”