Political Quotes

“I rise this afternoon to speak about the impact of this week's announcement that members of China's People's Liberation Army hacked into the computer systems owned by Pennsylvania companies to steal trade secrets on our trade policy. As we all know, a grand jury in Pittsburgh indicted five individuals for hacking into several companies' computers and a labor organization, United Steelworkers, in western Pennsylvania. The companies included Westinghouse Electric, Alcoa, U.S. Steel and, as I mentioned, the United Steelworkers union. According to reports, the individuals in the indictment are accused of stealing trade secrets to benefit Chinese industry, which is heavily sponsored by the Chinese Government. This is just the latest example of the unlevel playing field to which our domestic firms are subjected. To give an example, Pennsylvania, as are many areas around the United States, is experiencing an energy renaissance--Pennsylvania natural gas--which stands to greatly benefit the Commonwealth's economy. For the steel industry, it means the opportunity to sell a lot of pipe to natural gas drilling sites. Our foreign competitors also see this opportunity and have responded by aggressively pursuing our market. This competition is expected and would be OK if--if--it was fair. Of course, in this instance it is not. In fact, our domestic steel industry is facing a new crisis.…”