Source: WBUR Boston and NPR's "The Connection" on 9/8/2003, starting from approximately minute 28:15 through minute 32:00, available at:
http://www.theconnection.org/shows/2003/09/20030908_b_main.aspDTH
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NPR: General Clark, I want to ask you for a sort of point-by-point idea of positions on domestic issues but I can imagine people listening and thinking, gosh he sure knows his Balkans, and he knows Iraq, and he knows the military and these are all really important, but what the heck does he know about somebody who doesn't have a job?
GWC: Well first of all, I've got two brothers-in-law and a nephew who are unemployed, and we've never had any unemployment in my family. So I know it personally, and I know it conceptually. I studied economics of course at the graduate level at Oxford, I taught economics at West Point, I am in business, so I understand theory of the firm from being on a number of boards of directors and in this economy struggling, I was an investment banker, I passed my Series 62 exam last year to do M&A activities with an investment bank in Arkansas, which I subsequently left. So I've got some practical hands-on experience in the economy as well as having some academic background on it and look, I mean, this economy is in trouble right now. You're in a structural situation that we've not been in before, which is the export of jobs. And every business that I know of is busy outsourcing, and they're not outsourcing from the east coast to Arkansas, they're outsourcing to other countries. Poland, Bulgaria -- not Mexico, they're going beyond Mexico -- it's India and China. They're looking for the lowest cost, not only manufacturing, but in many cases I.T. services. And this is a problem that we're going to have to face. This is not going to be cured by the business cycle alone, so what we're going to have to do is we're going to have to have more programs, too, things like employment tax credits, we're going to have to do things that will help small firms, where the bulk of the employment is created in this country, we're going to have help small firms raise equity, because the collapse of the IPO markets and venture capital over the last three years have just knocked the legs out from under small start-up firms that are trying to raise the money they need to survive. So there are a number of measures here.
NPR: We talk a fair amount about this on the program, we in fact did a series on it last week and listened to a lot of people raising serious questions about free trade, people who are perhaps in the textile industry in North Carolina saying, "Free trade has decimated our town, our county." I mean are you willing to wind things back far enough to say, "If free trade's not working, maybe we should take a second look at it?"
GWC: Well I think you've got to have FAIR trade, not free trade. So I think the first thing you've got to have is you've got to make sure that when you're willing to open up your markets that you're helping workers in other countries achieve the kind of labor and environmental benefits that people in this country achieve. You've got to have a program to do it and you've got to move systematically. We knew with NAFTA that there would be adjustments required, but in my experience we haven't funded and operated those adjustment mechanisms in the right way to protect textile workers on the East Coast and the Carolinas, or the garment workers that are manufacturing clothing let's say in Mississippi, and I've talked to a lot of people whose parents, whose mothers were there as seamstresses, in places, and lost their jobs and there is no other job. So we've got to really pay attention to the transformation of the economy when we -- free trade is not "free" in terms of its benefit to the economy. There's always the assumption that well, you're going to get comparative advantage, you're going to lower the cost, that's in everybody's net benefit. It is, in the long-term, but you've got to have the right kind of support structure in place for the individual human beings who are affected by the transformation so they can find other meaningful work. You know, this country has a law in place, it's called the Full Employment Act of 1946: it's the DUTY of the country to maintain full employment in this country. It's not a luxury, it's a duty.
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