Trade Fight Would Put Nw On Front Line Don’t Impose Sanctions, Clinton Urged

With the U.S. poised to levy a 100 percent tariff on Japanese luxury cars, business and political leaders urged President Clinton Tuesday not to impose any trade sanctions.

“I know he has to take a strong position on international trade with Japan,” said Gov. Mike Lowry. “But we need to work this out through negotiation.

“If this becomes a trade war, we have more jobs involved as a center of international trade than any other state in the country, and our trade is growing tremendously.”

Lowry was one of dozens of leaders who gathered with the president, vice president and Cabinet members for a regional economic and trade conference here.

One in five jobs in Washington state is linked to trade, and the state has built a solid reputation as a reliable supplier of manufactured goods and agricultural products, Lowry said.

Phil Condit, president of The Boeing Co., said sanctions would hurt.

“It’s to the economic benefit of the world to find ways to resolve this. Sanctions are like nuclear deterrence. Nuclear weapons are good to keep negotiations going, but not if you use them.”

Open markets are crucial to Boeing, which exports 70 percent of its airplanes and aerospace products, Condit said.

Japan is Washington state’s biggest trading partner, buying wheat, apples, computers, software, and more.

When it comes to cars, however, it’s another story.

“The fact is, Japan has closed its market,” said Bob Randolph, the state’s trade representative. “We’ve got 1 percent of their market and they have 22 percent of ours.”

But sanctions aren’t the answer, Randolph said. “It sets up a reverberating, vicious cycle of retaliation, and we don’t want to get into that kind of situation with our number one trading partner.”

Clinton opened the daylong economic summit by telling business and political leaders from around the Pacific Rim he would use sanctions only reluctantly.

He praised Washington’s robust trade saying, “This is the future I want. But you have to understand we have a huge trade deficit, and more than half of it is with Japan. We have to have fair trade.”

The conference was the second in a series of forums Clinton is holding around the country to shape his economic policies.

“A lot of the best ideas aren’t in Washington, and won’t get there any other way,” Clinton said.

The president urged panelists to be frank, and tell him and members of his Cabinet the problems they face and how government can help.

Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and Cabinet members got an earful from more than three dozen industry bigwigs, tribal leaders, and farmers from around the Pacific Rim states of California, Alaska, Washington, Oregon and Hawaii.

But some participants clearly weren’t quite sure why they were there.

Quincy Jones, the Hollywood entertainment mogul, was bemused when Gore asked for his thoughts during a panel discussion on high technology and trade.

“Forgive me if I change the subject,” Jones said, and proceeded to tell a joke.

“Is that it?” Gore asked. It was.

Indeed, the conference, held in a stifling auditorium at Portland State University, with guests shifting about on orange plastic chairs, was as much a place to see and be seen as a trade conference.

The made-for-TV event was carefully scripted, with guests urged to refrain from fanning themselves - it doesn’t look good on camera.

There was little spontaneous interaction between panel participants and none at all from the audience.

But outside the conference room doors, protesters keep up a steady rant, with environmentalists and labor activists taking Clinton to task for not doing enough to save trees, as promised during his Forest Summit, also held in Portland in 1993.

Charlotte MacDonald, 30, decked herself out with a top hat studded with tree stumps.

Richard Lewis, 48, staked out a spot by the stage, sunlight burnishing his waist-length braids. He spat out a rap he wrote criticizing Clinton for his environmental policies and concluded: “All our problems could be solved by one open-ended Richter scale quake.”

Clinton topped the day with what could only be described as a campaign speech.

Standing on the bunting-draped podium beneath a leafy canopy in a Portland park, Clinton looked every inch the candidate as he waved to Cub Scouts and told the audience to have faith in the future, and fight for his budget proposal before Congress.

“There are those who believe there is no role for government other than cutting the budget and cutting taxes … and there are those of us who believe it’s government’s duty to form a partnership with people to help them do what they can’t do on their own.”

That way, he said, “Young people can have the kind of future my generation took for granted.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo