From Toshiba to Trucks, We’re Being Run Over by Foreign Lobbies
Whose country is this, anyway? That’s the question I ask myself every time foreign lobbyists in Washington jerk a string and the American government jumps.
I asked it after Toshiba sold submarine technology to the Russians for big profits and got off with a slap on the wrist, and when foreign interests watered down last year’s trade bill. And I asked it again last month when those same interests didn’t like a U.S. Customs Service ruling, so they changed it.
The Customs Service ruled that multipurpose vehicles and vans coming into this country are trucks, not cars. That means they’ll have to start paying a 25% truck tariff, which has been the law since the early 1970s, rather than the 2.5% that they’ve been paying whenever it’s been convenient for them to call these vehicles cars.
The irony is that it was an importer, Suzuki, that asked for the ruling. But when they got it, they didn’t like it. And neither did the other importers. So they put together a huge lobbying and PR effort, piously protesting, as usual, that they were interested only in the well-being of the American consumer (not their own profits, mind you).
Within two weeks these foreign manufacturers had successfully pressured the Treasury Department, to which the Customs Service reports, to suspend the ruling.
There was plenty of logic to the ruling in the first place. After all, the government regulates these vehicles as trucks for safety, emissions control and fuel economy. And they’re classified as trucks in the countries they come from.
Even the manufacturers call them trucks. Of the seven entries in this year’s Motor Trend “Truck of the Year” competition, four are Japanese-built multipurpose vehicles. (You don’t see any of them trying to win “Car of the Year,” do you?)
As they say, if it walks like a truck and quacks like a truck, it must be a truck.
It’s stupid, but the only time they’re called cars is when the U.S. customs inspector comes around. And that little detail costs American taxpayers about $300 million to $500 million a year in lost revenue. We’ve got a $60-billion auto-trade deficit in this country, and yet we nod at this cute little trick so that deficit can get even bigger.
To me, this isn’t a tariff issue, or a trade issue, or even a question of whether the vehicles are cars or trucks. The issue is the law, and who’s got the power to change the law of the United States when they don’t happen to like it. The issue is whether heavily financed foreign lobbies are running things in Washington, or the people we elect to serve our interests are running things.
Only in America, nowhere else in the world, can foreign agents so openly and successfully manipulate the policies of another sovereign government to their own ends. And--as far as I know--do it legally.
American companies have nothing in Japan or anywhere else even remotely resembling the power that foreign companies have in Washington. It’s another example of how naive we Americans are when it comes to world trade today. We open our market up wider than anybody else, then give foreign agents all the political clout they need to change the rulesif they don’t like them.
The clout, of course, comes from money. The political-action committee representing foreign-car dealers in the United States gave $2.6 million to congressional campaigns last fall. That’s about the same amount as General Motors, Ford, Chrysler and the United Auto Workers Union gave put together. And, according to CBS, last year the Japanese alone paid out more than $100 million to their lobbyists and other agents in the United States. That’s 33% more than the total amount that it cost the Republicans to elect George Bush President. You have to wonder where all that money goes.
A lot of it goes to hire away our own trade negotiators. About one-third of the senior people in the U.S. trade representative’s office in recent years have been hired away by foreign governments and companies.
One day they supposedly work for the United States, the next day for the highest bidder. If a CIA agent retires and hires out to the Russians, we throw him in jail. When our trade negotiators defect to the Japanese, nobody says a thing.
The foreign lobbies spending all that money aren’t throwing it away, you can bet on that. Just look at the record, from Toshiba to truck tariffs. Time after time, foreign interests get the American government to open its kimono when they want a little more of this market, or want to protect what they already have.
So I keep asking: Whose country is this, anyway?
