Category: Politics

Ohio’s Democratic U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown spent much of today (March 20, 2017) in Cleveland, for events touching, in part on infrastructure investment, and job creation.

ideastream’s Tony Ganzer spoke with Brown about a number of issues, including proposed cuts to the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, renegotiating trade deals like NAFTA, his thoughts on job and career-creation, and his thoughts on President Trump, among others.

[iframe width=”640″ height=”360″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/Qhr9tZIQCHM” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen]

Listen to a radio report and find a partial transcript from WCPN: 

TV excerpt aired March 20, 2017 on WVIZ’s Ideas program. A radio excerpt aired the same day on WCPN’s All Things Considered.

BROWN: “A trade war is unacceptable, and I would hope the President doesn’t want to see a trade war. I certainly have never, my position on trade has never gone to that. But I think the whole idea of renegotiation suggests that both sides come to the table, and you renegotiate issues like the rules of origin for auto, which would matter for our auto industry, not just Ford, and GM, and Chrysler, and Honda in Ohio, but the whole supply chain. You also talk about investor-state dispute settlement, where corporations have the power to sue other countries on trade that really does ultimately undermine consumer protections, environmental rules, and all that. So those are the ones we need renegotiation. Two days after the election, literally, I called the President’s, I called the leader of his transition team on trade, and talked to him at length about my offer to help him renegotiate NAFTA, to pull out of Trans-Pacific Partnership, and to be aggressive about trade enforcement rules. That sometimes makes other countries unhappy. They enforce their rules aggressively, we should, too. That doesn’t mean trade war, it means a leveler playing field, and it means you follow the rule of law. We haven’t done that as well as we should. I’m hopeful, and I will stand with this president to do that. I’ve not seen anything come out of that yet, I hopeful it does.”