Obama outlines plan to strengthen U.S. exports, jobs

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama on Thursday laid out plans to help U.S. businesses double their export sales and add what he said would be 2 million more jobs at home during the next 5 years.

“In a time when millions of Americans are out of work, boosting our exports is a short-term imperative,” Obama said in unveiling his National Export Initiative.

“When other markets are growing and other nations are competing, we’ve got to get even better,” he told the annual conference of the Export-Import Bank. “We need to secure our companies a level playing field. We need to guarantee American workers a fair shake. In other words, we need to up our game.”

Obama’s plan would boost government efforts to help U.S. businesses, create new partnerships with shipping firms such as FedEx, and ease controls over the export of technology such as cell phones, which currently have to go through lengthy reviews to ensure that they don’t compromise national security secrets.

Obama also strived anew to reassure Americans who are anxious about losing jobs to overseas competitors that pay lower wages and lure away U.S. factories, and he acknowledged some downsides to trade.

“If you ask the average American what trade has offered them, they won’t say that their televisions are cheaper, or productivity is higher. They’d say they’ve seen the plant across town shut down, jobs dry up, communities deteriorate. And you can’t blame them for feeling that way,” he said.

“The fact is, other countries haven’t always played by the same set of rules. America hasn’t always enforced our trade rights, or made sure that the benefits of trade are broadly shared. And we haven’t always done enough to help our workers adapt to a changing world.”

Still, he insisted, “we’ve got to compete in the global marketplace.”

He said his administration will enforce existing trade agreements to assure fair trade. He also said that his administration continues to negotiate with Columbia, Panama, and South Korea on trade agreements stalled by opposition from U.S. labor unions and their Democratic allies in Congress, but aides didn’t point to any pending breakthroughs.