CNN Lou Dobbs Tonight - Transcript

CNN

SHOW: LOU DOBBS TONIGHT 18:00

HEADLINE: Rice Will Not Give Public Testimony to 9/11 Commission; Battle to Stop Exportation of Call Center Jobs

GUESTS: Ernest Hollings, Jerry Jasinowski

BYLINE: Kitty Pilgrim, John King, Bill Schneider, Bob Franken, Jaime McIntyre, Richard Roth, Casey Wian, Bill Tucker, Ron Brownstein, Mary Snow, Jeffrey Toobin, Christine Romans, Lisa Sylvester

HIGHLIGHT:
The White House stands firm. Condoleezza Rice says she will not give public testimony to the 9/11 Commission. But officials search for a compromise. Then, a look at the battle to stop the exportation of call center jobs overseas.

BODY:
PILGRIM: All right. Thanks very much, Bill Tucker.

Well, a new CNN/"USA Today"/Gallup poll finds that the exporting of American jobs is playing a big role in the presidential campaign. More than 80 percent of Americans surveyed say keeping U.S. jobs from going to other countries will be important in deciding their vote for president.

My next guest has introduced a bill in Congress that would keep American jobs in this country. Senator Fritz Hollings knows firsthand the impact of the exporting of America. His home state of South Carolina has lost more than 60,000 textile jobs since the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. And Senator Hollings joins me now from Capitol Hill.

And thanks very much for joining me.

SEN. FRITZ HOLLINGS (D-SC), COMMERCE COMMITTEE, BUDGET COMMITTEE: Thank you, Kitty.

PILGRIM: You know, it's-you have likened GATT and NAFTA to foreign aid. You basically said no free trade agreements should be in effect. This seems fairly intense. Why do you say that? Nothing at all?

HOLLINGS: No. What we're trying to do is not have a half-free trade agreement. You see, our competitors, they have restrictions. We give them free access. And what I'm trying to do is, like I said about world peace, you don't get that by just waving the white flag of surrender, you've got to fight for it. And the same with free trade. You've got to be able to compete. You've got to raise a barrier to remove a barrier. So I'm not against free trade, I'm trying to obtain free trade, to tell you the truth. And that isn't what we've had.

PILGRIM: You're calling for a level playing field. But you say, in effect, some of these agreements just lower America's standard of living. What would you like to see done to make it more of a level playing field?

HOLLINGS: Well, in order to do this, you've got to go about and understand how important that manufacture is to our economy. In other words, the economy of the United States is like a three-legged stool. You've got the one leg of our values unquestioned, the second leg of our military power, which is unquestioned, but the economic leg has been fractured in the cold war, whereby we were trying to spread capitalism to defeat communism with the Marshall plan. It's worked. But we more or less gave away the store. Now we've got to compete, and as you indicate, try to protect our standard of living.

So the first order of business is to organize in a comprehensive way, reorganize, for example, the Department of Commerce into the Department of Trade and Commerce and stop sponsoring the export of jobs, like the secretary did in January. They were up there in New York with the Chinese, trying to export the jobs. What we've got to do is change that Department of Commerce into trying to create the jobs and maintain the jobs that we have in this country.

Second, we need to get about enforcement. We need an attorney general in charge of enforcement over in the Justice Department. Then we've got to go to the financing. Stop the financing of the exportation of jobs, the production overseas. On the contrary, let's, by gosh, finance domestic production, give them a tax break. Otherwise, you need about 1,000 custom agents to stop these transshipments of unregulated products coming into the country.

And most of all, we've got to start with the Department of Commerce making up a list of those things important to our national security. We couldn't go to war in Desert Storm until we got the flat panel displays from Japan, and that shouldn't ever happen again. We don't have to wait up two months. We've got to have the necessary military equipment necessary to our national security.

PILGRIM: In your mind, we're risking our national security by exporting so much of this production overseas.

HOLLINGS: Oh, there isn't any question about it. Akio Morita said years ago, the head of Sony-he said that world power that loses its manufacturing capacity will cease to be a world power.

PILGRIM: In effect, though, the argument against keeping some of these jobs here is that they're such low-level jobs. Your argument seems to negate that because you're saying let's keep high-tech and important jobs in the country.

HOLLINGS: Not only high-tech, important jobs, what you call a textile job. Look, we never made an automobile in our lives in South Carolina, but we got BMW there. And after training with our technical training centers, we produce a better automobile than they do in Munich. But is that a high-tech or a low-tech job? Is textiles high- tech or low-tech? We need all of these jobs fundamental to our national security.

I had a hearing under President Kennedy that found, next to steel, textiles was second most important to our national security. At that time, 40 years ago, we couldn't send them to war in a Japanese uniform.

PILGRIM: Very interesting point. Thank you very much for joining us. Wish we had more time. Senator Fritz Hollings, thank you.

HOLLINGS: Yes. Thank you.