LaTourette voted on CAFTA before getting tariff report

Yes, he urged Rep. Steve LaTourette to support the controversial Central American Free Trade Agreement. And LaTourette in the end did, voting with colleagues in the middle of the night and surprising scores of people who had believed him when he said he intended to vote no.

But U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman apparently is touchy about how people see his role in a matter that has blown up in LaTourette's face. And as the week ended, he let people know it.

A Plain Dealer examination last week showed that the Lake County Republican's explanation for his July 28 vote was built upon a set of phony reasons.

LaTourette had said he voted for CAFTA in order to eliminate plywood tariffs that were squeezing KraftMaid, the Middlefield- based kitchen cabinet maker. Without some relief, LaTourette said, KraftMaid might have to move jobs out of the United States.

LaTourette's office said the congressman based this belief not only on a conversation with KraftMaid president Tom Chieffe the afternoon before the vote, but also on a document listing base tariffs, provided by Portman's office after the Chieffe conversation.

That document made it appear as if KraftMaid and others are indeed paying 8 percent tariffs on the plywood they import from Central America.

But The Plain Dealer documented that due to other trade regulations, Central American plywood already is exempt from tariffs due; that no company is getting dinged, let along squeezed, by such purported tariffs, and that those who relied on lists of base tariffs from Port man's office would be mistaken.

And so Portman, who lives in Cincinnati when not in Washington or traveling, on Friday called into "The Whistleblower," a widely read Cincinnati-based Web log, according to Jim Schifrin, the blog publisher.

Portman apparently wanted it known that he had not "arm- twisted" LaTourette, as the blog suggested Thursday when mentioning The Plain Dealer story. The blog is widely disseminated by e-mail.

In fact, according to Schifrin, Portman told him that it was not until well after the CAFTA vote that Portman's office sent LaTourette the document that listed base tariffs.

Portman's press secretary, Neena Moorjani, confirmed the same to The Plain Dealer, and said the document wasn't sent until Aug. 5 - eight days after the CAFTA vote.

That's a far cry from LaTourette's staff-written statement that said LaTourette asked Portman about the issue before the vote and that Portman's office "provided the congressman with a document . . ." The statement failed to mention that LaTourette's office asked for the document more than a week after the fact.

LaTourette's district director, Dino DiSanto, late Friday acknowledged that LaTourette did not have the document from Portman at the time of the vote. But he said LaTourette had basically the same information because his office had looked it up on the trade representative's Web site.

"I think getting information from the Web site is what we did," DiSanto said. He acknowledged the office only sought the hard document from Portman's office after The Plain Dealer started asking about the tariff issue.

This all might appear nit-picky - whether a Web site or a hard document, it's all data - but it apparently matters to Portman. The Whistleblower, after all, is read by a lot of people in his hometown.

Portman's point, says Schifrin, was that if the information on tariffs was sent after the vote, "how could it have been made to influence the vote"

That doesn't mean, however, that Portman didn't try to twist LaTourette's arm some other way. LaTourette said in an interview after the CAFTA vote that Portman's office had called to ask if LaTourette wanted anything, implying that perhaps a bridge or construction project might be available for his district. LaTourette insisted his vote was not for sale.

Whether he ultimately will get something - or whether he gave away his vote - is one of the many questions surrounding the matter. So far LaTourette has avoided making a personal comment, having been in Alaska on a congressional trip and then going on vacation last week. KraftMaid's Chieffe, for two weeks, has declined through a spokeswoman a request for an interview or comment. Chieffe's boss at parent company Masco Corp., Richard Manoogian, a major Republican Party donor, also will not comment.

Told the tale of the document, Chris Slevin, a critic of the LaTourette vote, maintained that Portman and his office still were not absolved for LaTourette's faulty information, because "it's clear the information they provided was misleading," even if it was provided later.

"But," added Slevin, deputy director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, "I think the responsibility still lies with the congressman to research the facts before casting a vote."

The reason our steel industry went out of business is because labor was too expensive.

This pretty much proves that you don't know what you are talking about. Any chance to blame the unions.

The truth is that the major steel companies invited the Japanese, the Swiss and the Germans in to look at the new process of making steel called "continous casting". While we were using the original design and building more based on that design those countries built the next generation of design. They became more efficient. Instead of building and innovating that design the companies in this country continued using the old, more labor intensive design.

While the unions contributed to the decline of steel it was the companies themselves who both gave away the idea and refused to make improvements.

We must allow American big business to operate as efficiently as possible while we are in the transition stage of entering a world economy.

You are assuming they want to. To change the way a company operates costs money and that affects the bottom line so they keep the old equipment and continue to blame labor costs.

You should get your head out of the theory books and look at reality once in awhile.

The Euros, united against us in currency, produced 166 million tons of steel in 2005 while their own demand only grew %2.
In 2005, 95 million tons (down 3 million tons since '98) of steel came out of the U.S.A. while our consumption
grew %9.
My family in Ohio and PA are fine, but the steel industry and its prospects to receive foreign investment isn't as high as the Euros. The Unions have crippled the steels industry and almost every other industry so that we can't rely on foreign investment to make things as efficient as possible so that we can continue to build other markets more efficiently.
The fact is, all it takes is motions to work in a steel mill and we could have done the process more efficiently without unions and trade regulations getting in the way. These trade regulations are basically government subsidies which interfere with competition and make the cost of doing business in this country more.

If we allowed competetion and guest workers (2 million of the 6 million steel workers of this country would be Mexican) American steel would still be a hub for investment for many years to come.

If we allowed competetion and guest workers (2 million of the 6 million steel workers of this country would be Mexican) American steel would still be a hub for investment for many years to come.

We do allow competition. Hence all the US Steel companies which went under in Chapter 11 (and your negative growth of 3 million tons to over an 8-year stretch...take a look though at what we made in WW-II), and some managed to reorganize and shed their pensions and recapitalize, came out stronger than even the Spanish mills.

According to the phoney free traders who spew out disinformation here...the US has been becoming richer, and richer, and richer and richer still from all of this outsourcing. Do you believe that? So we should have LOTs of capital for reinvestment in our steel capacity. BTW, you DO know that our minimills are the predominant source of steel production in the US today...and are almost all sans-union?

And under GATT,WTO, NAFTA, CAFTA now we preferentially tax ONLY US-only production, and let foreign production in free of charge. THAT's a sure-fire formula for success!

LOL! As Ronald Reagan always pointed out, anything you tax you're going to get less of, and what you don't tax, you're going to get more. The discriminatory tax advantage of the importers has to be addressed.

Phoney Free traders are so lame. We are in a war of societies. The importer-special interests are attempting to pit global third world impoverished classes against our blue collar class, and they aren't stopping there, they are trying to pit it against the American middle class as well. Adam Smith, Hume and Ricardo always said that labor was every where of equal value...and the relative wealth of societies and the frictional impediment of distance made for a differing value in that base labor. The internet and super-cheap bulk freight transport have made distance of almost no consequence to many items of labor. Hence, the American worker and Middle class is now in an un-asked for WAR. A war that was very predictable. A war for our very economic future.

And you're on the wrong side. You claim: My family in Ohio and PA are fine

They surely won't be for long if we were to totally blow off our immigration laws as you appear to be panting after with this line...If we allowed competetion and guest workers (2 million of the 6 million steel workers of this country would be Mexican)

The whole basis for that is to lower America's wages. Wage deflation is never pretty, and it won't stop at the Mexican's. Look at Northwest Airlines today demanding their mechanics take a 30% pay cut. How would you like a 30% pay cut? Or 50%? Or 90%? Where does it end? You must know that the Chinese communist government has so tilted the playing field to artificially make their labor the cheapest on the entire planet by severals orders of magnitude. And they only play at allowing capitalism, as Deng Xiaoping always said to his fellow hardliners: "What does it matter whether you call the cat black or white, so long as it catches mice."

That is the global "base" now. They are sucking in capitalist mice's investment of capital, technology, and know-how, at a torrential clip into their black hole. The money goes in, it doesn't come back out. No one dares repatriate the major industrial FDI capital (ever wonder why?)...so where are all the great profits? They are still an unreconstructed communist regime, and the major investors know that repatriation won't be allowed. These FDI-hostages make noises about paying capital gains taxes back here (and that is truly a tax to get rid of). But that isn't the sole or even major reason. There is a whole host of reasons. Not the least of which is the continuing disparity...on paper...in the marginal utility of the investment. But that paper calculation must be called into question by the fact that the PRC would likely nationalize and put a halt to any significant repatriation of FDI...they have deliberately made it easy to do so requiring all FDI to be partnered "50%" with a chinese company. This immediately represented a watering down, a dilution by almost 50% of any FDI into China.

China's rise is Only because we allowed it, and let them into the "game," forcing everyone to have to go Chinese in order to stay competitive. This competition is all by Chinese Governmental design. It is not an unseen hand. They have 400,000-to-600,000 people in the U.S. at anyone time...constantly preaching that WE practice the phoney free trade...while they get to have huge tariffs and subsidies...as if they needed them with their communist government dictating what gets imported. Their government almost universally controls the purse-strings. Read their Constitution.

Who is the sucker here? The U.S. populace is for letting themselves be lied to without doing a reality-check...and not stringing up the liars. We used to tar and feather rascals in the U.S. Looks like we lost a valuable social "brake" on the predations of fast-talking varmints "con-men" and traitors here when we got too "civilized" for our own good...and ceased practicing such colonial justice.

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