Most favored lobby: China gets what it wants the old-fashioned way.

• Author: Barlett, Donald L.
• Position: Trade lobbying

DORAL COOPER AND RONALD HOLLEY are from different worlds. She lives in Washington, D.C., and is a former trade official in the Reagan administration who has used the experience gained in her government job to become a high-powered lobbyist. He lives in Batesville, Miss., a community of 6,400 in the northwest corner of the nation's poorest state, where he grew up, graduated from high school, and went to work cutting cloth for Fruit of the Loom, the area's largest employer. In 1994, the worlds of Cooper and Holley collided.

At the time, she represented an alliance of bigname retailers who wanted to block efforts by a few members of Congress seeking to limit certain kinds of cheap imports. He wasn't represented by anybody. Except Congress.

She won a little, lost a little. He lost everything.

When the dust settled on Capitol Hill, Congress did what Doral Cooper, her fellow lobbyists, and the big businesses they represented wanted--at least temporarily. It kept intact--for two more years--a tradelaw provision that allowed ever more imports of clothing from low-wage countries.

That was just enough time for Holley to lose his job, when Fruit of the Loom, his employer of 20 years, closed its Batesville plant, laid off all 850 workers, and moved production offshore. Until then, Holley had earned $10.25 an hour, a little more than $21,000 a year. The bottom end of middle-class America. On this point, Holley poses a question that's on the minds of many working Americans: "How can someone who makes $10.25 an hour compete with someone making 30 cents an hour? We can't live on that. How can you call that equal?"

How indeed? After corporate executives and Washington policymakers, no group has played so large a role in eliminating jobs in America as trade lobbyists. These are the people who help to shape the government's policies on international trade. They represent U.S. multinational corporations, foreign-owned companies, foreign governments, and other special interests.

Lobbying, to be sure, is hardly new to Washington. Attempts to influence American policy are as old as the republic. What is different today are the extent of those efforts, the huge increase in the number of lobbyists, and the impact they are having on American workers.

As the number of trade lobbyists has gone up, the U.S. trade deficit has ballooned and the economic well-being of middle-class America has gone down. Take the 10 biggest foreign exporters to the United States in 1995: Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. In 1970, the United States had a trade surplus with five of them. There was no trade with China, the deficit with Taiwan was small ($22 million), and the only serious deficits were with Canada ($2 billion), Japan ($1.2 billion), and Germany ($386 million). That year, 157 foreign agents were registered to lobby the U.S. government on behalf of those 10 countries. By 1995, the number had jumped to 554--an increase of 253 percent. And the U.S. merchandise trade deficit with the 10 countries had shot from $2 billion in 1970 to $161 billion in 1995. Several million jobs were wiped out as imported products replaced American-made goods in the marketplace because of the trade deficit with just those 10 countries.

What has been bad for American workers has been very good for foreign producers and U.S. multinational companies, which have helped frame the government's free trade policies. They have profited handsomely by convincing Washington policymakers to trim or eliminate tariffs and ease or remove other trade barriers on imported goods. To gain access to the people who write the trade regulations, foreign interests buy the services of insiders who once did those jobs themselves: former government officials turned lobbyists.

The Japanese, of course, wrote the book on Washington lobbying a generation ago. When Japan began exporting to the United States in large quantities, Japanese corporations, trade associations, and government agencies retained powerful law firms and consultants to represent them before Congress and the regulatory agencies. In 1991, the most recent year for which figures are available, the Japanese spent $83.9 million in consulting, public relations and legal fees for lobbying and related activities, up 577 percent from 1980.

Today, what the Japanese perfected is being replicated by others, from the smallest country in Latin America (El Salvador) to the largest in Asia (China). Officially, the Department of Justice says a total of 1,111 foreign principals--foreign governments, corporations, trade associations, and others with foreign ties--have registered agents in the United States. More than 10,000 lobbyists are working in the nation's capital on behalf of foreign-owned corporations, foreign governments, and U.S. multinational corporations with a stake in foreign countries.

China Scales the Wall

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