Remember the Obama pledge that exports will double within five years? Heard anything about this lately? Want to know why?
It’s because U.S. exports fell during the third quarter for the first time in 3 ½ years.
The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, through the Department of Commerce, announced in October that total August exports of $181.3 billion and imports of $225.5 billion resulted in a goods and services deficit of $44.2 billion, up from a deficit of $42.5 billion in July. August exports were $1.9 billion less than July exports of $183.2 billion.
More than 38 million American jobs depend on trade. One in three manufacturing jobs depends on export markets, and one in three acres of American farmland is cultivated for hungry consumers overseas.
In addition, the Brookings Institution proposes that increased trade has a direct and positive impact on the economy overall and on job creation. Exports contributed 46 percent to the growth of the U.S. economy between 2009 and 2011. This export surge helped create 600,000 new jobs nationally in 2010, even while the rest of the economy was shedding them.
So why have exports stalled? Because small businesses, which account for more than 90 percent of our exporters, aren’t getting the support they need. Restrictive access to foreign markets because of excessive duties and taxes are preventing them from growing and hiring.
The Obama administration, supposedly the “export champions” have not introduced a single trade agreement that makes American goods more accessible and affordable in overseas markets. The three free-trade agreements the administration takes credit for — Panama, South Korea and Colombia — were all negotiated and concluded by President George W. Bush.
Now comes another major threat to our exports from an unlikely source — the United Nations. The United States is by far the biggest donor to the United Nations, bankrolling 22 percent of the U.N.’s core budget, and roughly one-quarter of its far larger and murkier systemwide spending (estimated at upward of $25 billion).
And how does the United Nations thank the United States for its funding? It stands by without protest while Richard Falk, the U.N. Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, demanded that “businesses that are profiting from the Israeli settlement enterprise should be boycotted, until they bring their operations into line with international human rights and humanitarian law and standards.”
Who are these businesses? How about major U.S. companies like Caterpillar, Motorola, Hewlett-Packard and many more.
Who are the members of the U.N. Human Rights Council? According to the U.N. Watch, a human rights organization, “The hypocrisy-ridden council already includes such systematic abusers of human rights as China, Cuba, Russia and Saudi Arabia,” as well as slavery-infested Mauritania.
And advisers to the Council, according to the New Republic, include former Swiss Socialist Party politician Jean Ziegler who “helped found the Moammar Khadaffi Human Rights Prize, shortly after Libya bombed Pan Am flight 103, killing 270 people including 189 Americans. Ziegler himself was awarded the Khadaffi prize in 2002.”
If you really want to know how dangerous this Council is to the United States, Ben Emerson, the special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights recently stated: “There is no doubt that the Romney administration would be able to claim — in the event of a Romney presidency — a democratic mandate for torture. That would put Romney as the first world leader in history to be able to claim a democratic mandate for torture.”
I’ve written before how impotent the United Nations is, but this move by the Human Rights Council should be the last straw. The United States should pull its funding and drop out of the United Nations until these kinds of anti-Semitic and bigoted members, who disdain democracy and liberty for their people, are expelled.
This is one more indication that President Barack Obama’s plan to appease our enemies has blown up in his face, and with it, has created a grave danger to our allies and the economy.
Let’s stop spending money on initiatives that hold back exports and job creation.
Instead, let’s start spending money on initiatives that support small business and turn around exports. It’s a lesson that Obama has failed to learn.
When American exports grow, it’s good for the nation — and the world.
NOV
