Political Quotes

“I was on the phone earlier this week with a friend in Delaware. We were talking about these free-trade agreements negotiated by the Bush administration and fine-tuned by the Obama administration. My friend said: Why do we have free-trade agreements anyway? I said: Let's go back a little bit in time. At the end of World War II, when the baby boomers and my sister and I came along, the United States was on top of the world. Our industrial infrastructure was strong. We were a vibrant economy. We had come out of the Great Depression with all guns blazing, while a lot of the rest of the world lay in ruin. Some of the nations that would go on to become our greatest competitors, including China, Korea, and some others as well, were in the midst of wars of their own, and eventually they would be governed--at least in part in Korea--by a Communist form of government. So the competition wasn't that great. Then things started to change. The competition got a whole lot stronger. I remember when I was a kid growing up, at Christmas time we were opening presents around the Christmas tree. I grew up in Danville, VA. We received a knickknack or something from friends of our family, and my father turned it over and it said ``Made in Japan.'' He and my mom kind of sneered at that, as if it were unworthy of us--anything being made in Japan. Things have changed--in some ways for the better and in other ways maybe not. For a long time, we were the 800-pound gorilla in the room.…”