He is giving the nation a new bureau.
The new department will add to job growth for some bureaucrats, and the avowed purpose of the agency is to inspect unfair trade practices, including those perpetrated by China. Which means there may be foreign tours for a few more officials on taxpayer’s money, and the dissonance and hurt in the country stemming from Chinese currency manipulation may safely get buried deep within the mazes of official files.
A White House statement however suggested, “The President believes that we can’t wait to crack down on unfair trade violations and ensure a level playing field for American workers.” The President is creating an Interagency Trade Enforcement Center, which “will institute a more aggressive ‘whole-of-government’ approach to getting tough on trade enforcement by monitoring and enforcing U.S. rights under international and domestic trade rules and countering unfair subsidies that tilt the global market against U.S. firms.”
Who asked to wait for so long? And go so soft?
These seem to be just political reactions to pacify claims of the opposition about the President overlooking the backstabbing role of China in the downfall of the U.S. economy.
Frontrunner for the White House, Mitt Romney has already vowed to declare Beijing a currency manipulator and promised of U.S. retaliatory measures.
U.S. legislators have time and again shown how China was artificially undervaluing its yuan to boost its exports handicapping economic recovery in U.S. and hurting U.S. manufacturers.
During this month’s visit, the Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, who hopes to be president in 2013, went to the length of expressing that he hoped U.S. election-year politics would not have a “regrettable impact” on ties between China and U.S.A.
Sitting side by side with Xi, President Obama had said then, “We want to work with China to make sure that everybody is working by the same rules of the road when it comes to the world economic system ….That includes insuring that there is a balanced trading flow not only between the United States and China but around the world.”
But Romney had blasted the attitude as being too soft, and too lenient towards a country that had been manipulating its currency and causing crashes of U.S. economy.
So, we’ve got a bureau. A new one.