Ford Chairman Blasts Japanese on Trade Again : Commerce: Harold A. Poling says nothing has changed in bilateral automobile dealings since President Bush’s trip to Asia in January.

In an open display of anger and frustration over U.S.-Japanese relations, the chairman of Ford Motor Co. has charged that what he calls Japan’s adversarial trade policies remain virtually unchanged three months after President Bush’s controversial mission to Tokyo.

Harold (Red) Poling also complained that the Japanese have mounted a sophisticated public relations campaign to blunt American criticism of their trade practices and to prevent Washington from taking serious action.

“They have a very good plan of disinformation that they feed to various people, that gets reported generously,” Poling said in an interview Friday.

The head of America’s second largest auto maker also contended that the Bush Administration remains weak in the face of Japanese intransigence on trade issues.

Poling said the United States needs an industrial policy to counter what he called Japan’s predatory trade practices.

“I think we should have a strategic plan,” he said. “If you call it a national industrial policy, it would fail before it even started, but a strategic plan sounds a lot better and should accomplish the same thing.”

Poling said the White House, blinded by the ideal of global free trade--an ideal that doesn’t exist in the real world, he said--has appointed trade negotiators who have failed to protect American industries and jobs.

“You have a lot of free traders in the Administration” who don’t agree that Japan’s chronic trade imbalance with the United States “is a serious issue to this country and jeopardizes the global trading system,” he said.

Poling, who accompanied President Bush on his January trip to Japan, said a senior Administration official has told him that, even if Japan refuses to open its markets, the United States should keep its markets open.

“That is the road to devastation,” Poling said.

An example of the Administration’s refusal to take trade with Japan seriously, he said, was Special Trade Representative Carla Anderson Hills’ response to the Justice Department’s announcement that it will seek to extend U.S. antitrust laws to Japanese and other foreign corporations that follow predatory pricing practices.

“What was the first statement that came out from our trade negotiator?” Poling asked. “She said: ‘We have got to be concerned about the foreign implications of this.’ That’s our trade negotiator, who is supposed to be concerned about issues affecting industry and service activities in this country.”

He added that there have been “specific instances where actions have been taken that are inconsistent on the part of this government to the detriment of the auto industry.”

He complained that Secretary of State James A. Baker III has exerted pressure on behalf of the Japanese auto industry to persuade the French to classify Honda station wagons produced in Ohio as American-made products--and thus exempt from France’s tough import restrictions on Japanese cars. In fact, many Japanese auto makers are seeking to use their American manufacturing plants to skirt European restrictions on Japanese imports, some critics contend.

Poling said Baker’s involvement “upset me sufficiently that I wrote a letter to the President on it. I haven’t heard back.”

Poling also expressed frustration over the way the Japanese have made a political issue out of the huge salaries and bonuses paid to Detroit’s auto executives.

During the Bush trip to Japan, Japanese politicians and executives argued that U.S. auto executives are paid much more than their counterparts in Japan and as a result had become isolated and out of touch with the problems facing their companies. The Japanese cited the pay issue as a reason for not granting greater concessions to the United States on automobile trade.

“They (the Japanese) have focused a lot of attention on compensation issues, but nobody investigated the total compensation package of the Japanese executives,” Poling said.

“It isn’t just what’s reported” as salary, he continued. “It’s the expense accounts they have that they do not have to account for, and it’s not reported as income for them. It’s memberships in very expensive country clubs. It’s housing provided. “Take a look at the residence (Nissan’s president) has in Tokyo. They have guest houses throughout Japan. You take their total compensation package, and I think it would rival some of the most generous packages you have in the states.”

Poling added that most of the American executives working in the U.S. operations of Japanese auto companies came from the Big Three domestic makers, and were lured away by big pay raises.

The Japanese have used the pay issue, he said, in a “disinformation” campaign.

Pay “is a red herring, but it gets a lot of attention and a lot of support from all the people around the country,” he said. “But they have a whole list of items, and as soon as one starts dying down in the press, they throw another one out there to confuse the situation.

“But if you deal with the basic issue, the trade imbalance continues to be there, and it continues to worsen.”