Liam McGee thank you so much.  You were right on the mark.  You are right the job is the President's highest priority, and my highest priority. And you're right that small business entrepreneurs are the engine of our economy.  They create more than 75 percent of the new jobs across America.  The recent job growth package, coupled with the other tax cuts that Congress passed as a result of the president's leadership, is having a very positive effect on our economy.  We're encouraged by what we're seeing out there today.  A little-known fact about that, you mentioned small business, we reduced the highest marginal rate of taxpayers across America 23 million small business owners across America that pay through their individual tax returns, 85 percent of reduction of the top rate goes to small business owners; people responsible for other employees, workers, their families, and so I appreciate you making those remarks.   

I also had a chance to visit with Curtis Mack a bit earlier.  He is a former employee of the Department of Commerce and as we were talking about the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) which Curtis was responsible for, it reminded me of one of my favorite stories about moving into the government having spent some 28 years of my life in the private sector.  The first day on the job, it was Inauguration Day and I took my ten-year old son over to the Commerce Department, it's the third-largest federal building in the world, and I'm showing him the halls and trying to explain to him my responsibilities.  I'm going to sell American business and all around the world.  I'm going to be an ambassador for American products and goods and services around the world; open up markets, technology administrations in the Department of Commerce, and I got to NOAA, which is the weather service.   

Now, we go home at night and the weatherman comes on and he tells you what the weather is going to be the next day so you know what to wear to school.  O.K., I've got it figured out, Dad.  So he goes back to our home at the time, Midland, Texas, and tells his fifth-grade class that his father is no longer going to run a multi-billion dollar oil and gas company.  He's going to Washington, D.C. to be a weatherman.  I can tell you that the weather is different in Washington, D.C. than it is in Midland, Texas.   

But I'm honored to be serving you, and it's fun for me to be able to travel across the country and see friends like John and Joan Hotchkis and my friend Tim Ling out here.  It's one of the real treats I get as I travel across America.  It reminds me of the greatness of America that's found in the hearts and souls of people all across this land.  They care about this country deeply.  I am both privileged and honored to be here.  I'm honored to join a forum that has contributed greatly to the discussion of what America's role is in the world.  We are at a defining moment in the history of the world.   

There's one piece of paper that's on my desk and it's a newspaper article that I picked up when I was in South Africa.  On the front page of this newspaper there was a mother from Zambia who was in a desperate situation.  She had sold their livestock, she had sold household goods, she had sold most of their clothing, and she had ten starving children and was out of any reasonable options.  She had to address some unthinkable options selling two of her children so she could feed the other eight. It is a constant reminder to me of the hardships that people face around the world.   

These are really brutal forces that millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa feel, the grinding relentless poverty, chronic AIDS that they have to deal with, unstable governments.  This particular Zambian family motivates me, and should motivate all of us, to support the kind of policies that will provide hope and opportunity to those people around the world that are simply struggling to survive.  I think about it every day that no one should ever be forced to make such a horrible decision.  We have the power to prevent it.  We have the power to change this world.  Open trade and the freedom that trade spreads can transform failing societies and expand opportunities to people around the world making this world a place that our children and grandchildren would all like to call home.

There are six billion people in the world and three billion of them live on less than two dollars a day.  There is too much poverty, too much despair, and not enough hope in too many parts of the world.  There is not enough opportunity in too many parts of the world.  It's not right, it's not good and it is our responsibility to do something about it by opening markets, fighting corruption, promoting good governance, and fostering security and stability around the world to attract investment, we can place failing societies on the path to self-sufficiency and prosperity.  At this defining moment in our history we have a strong and compassionate leader, a leader who's steady, a leader who has both the courage to confront threats to America and the vision to leave the world a safer, healthier place for all mankind.   

The president and I both believe that trade is the most powerful tool that we have to boost struggling economies.  As the president has said, "Free and open trade creates new jobs and new incomes. It lifts the lives of all our people, applying the power of the markets to the needs of the poor."   

We have a clear moral responsibility to lift people from poverty by establishing the principles that have transformed our lives here in America and that can transform their lives.  That means we have an obligation to lead the drive to open up markets and foster the free exchange of goods and services on every continent.  This will mean expanded opportunities for American companies it will mean more jobs, better jobs.   

We always need to be reminded that we are a third of the global economy.  We're about an $11 trillion economy, yet we only have five percent of the world's population.  So if you're going to think about growth, if you're going to think about expansion, you ought to think beyond the borders of America to where 95 percent of the rest of the people live.   

President Bush is overriding foreign policy.  His objective is to expand freedom.  The central purpose of foreign policy in the United States is to foster security and stability around the world and promote opportunity and prosperity in every part of the world so that freedom can take hold and flourish.   

Trade lays the foundation for greater freedom in three principal ways.

First, it creates the acceptance of democratic institutions and promotes peaceful and friendly ties between countries.  Simply, free trade is the exercise of human freedom, the ability to innovate and interact and exchange goods and services without government interference.  It is the freedom to buy the best product that's available to you at the most attractive price.  As people experience increased choice, they begin to pressure their governments to recognize the inherent liberty of those decisions.  Countries grow more stable and their governments shift toward democratic principles.

Second.  Trade is a catalyst.  As countries begin to compete in the global economy they build institutional infrastructures, the domestic framework, needed to support democracy and good governance and attract foreign investment.  Once countries begin trading they work to establish the rule of law, an independent judiciary, even-handed regulations, dependable law enforcement, and a central government that promotes stable economic conditions all those conditions that we're so blessed to have here in America.  And this does lead to greater transparency, fiscal responsibility, low inflations, privatization, property rights which people need to be granted all around the world, more competition which is healthy for this global economy, and improvements in education and health care for all.  These changes support lower corruption and expanded opportunity in developing countries. 

Finally, trade promotes economic development and unleashes the potential of emerging economies that open their markets.  As I travel the world and talk about entrepreneurship here in America as strong and vibrant, the entrepreneurs are just waiting; they're ready to go.  They're just waiting for the structure and the governance and the capital.  Believe me, they're ready.  Eliminating trade barriers around the world would bring global economic growth equal to two Chinas.  If we were able to eliminate all the trade barriers, we would lift 300 million people out of poverty by the year 2015.   

International aid is important, but it cannot bring sustainable prosperity.  It takes private investment to create the businesses to form a stable economy.  I always like to remind people that businesses are the strategic center of any successful civil society because business is where somebody goes for a job, and a job is what everybody aspires to.  A job so they can earn a paycheck, so they can put a roof over their family's head, feed their children, educate their children, provide them with good health that's not the American dream, that's a universal dream.  That's what everybody wants, all around the world.  So businesses are the strategic center of providing that, and if businesses don't honor their responsibilities, including their moral responsibilities, who will in society? 

Capital has common sense.  Investment in business is naturally going to flow to the stable and friendly and certain market places where capital can earn a favorable rate of return.  Unstable markets will always have trouble with access to capital.   Once a developing country can attract foreign investment, benefits begin flowing quickly.  Living standards increase as consumers gain additional choices.  Poverty falls as jobs are created and wages rise, to illustrate this point, we don't need to look very far, just south of here a couple of hundred miles, and examine what has happened to Mexico since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993.  From 1994 to the year 2000, foreign direct investment in Mexico tripled the three-year average prior to NAFTA.  This investment built a robust Mexican manufacturing sector with jobs paying 40 percent higher wages.  In 2001, Mexico exported some $139 billion of products and goods to the United States and Canada.  That was a 223 percent increase over 1993.  Those increased exports provided more than half the growth in Mexico during this same period.  NAFTA's great lesson also is that the benefits to developing countries don't come at the expense of the American economy.  Trade is a win-win proposition.  Trade is about nobody winning unless we all win, and when you open up your markets everybody begins to win.  As the global economy struggles there's no doubt that the North American common market that we've had these last several years has been bolstering our economic growth here in America.   

In spite of these facts, in spite of the evidence, some observers can't grasp the lesson, despite the historic shift from central planning to free markets in the '70s, '80s and '90s, the critics are still trying to resist the powerful momentum of globalization.  They mistakenly contend that free trade weakens the U.S. economy and exploits the developing world.  This is a dangerous fallacy for two basic fundamental reasons.  First, if the U.S. pulled back from the world it would cost millions of Americans their jobs and it would slash our standard of living.  The two major trade agreements of the 1990s, NAFTA and the Uruguay Round, have meant that the average family in America has benefited to the tune of $1200 to $2000 per year and one out of every 12 American jobs depends on trade.  Second, trade doesn't cause poverty in the developing world, as critics claim.  U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan explained the point well: "markets offer the only realistic hope of pulling billions of people out of abject poverty, while sustaining prosperity in the industrialized world."  World Bank studies of developing countries show that per person income in globalizing developing countries rose three and one-half times faster than developing countries that kept up protectionist barriers. 

My friends, globalization is happening.  The world is connecting in ways that nobody even imagined 25 years ago even five years ago.  The whole world is becoming connected by the Internet and computers.  China, India, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan opened their markets and unleashed their economies.  Asia offers the starkest example to measure the impact of openness against closed markets.   On the Korean peninsula, an authoritarian regime divides a single nation between poverty and prosperity with an arbitrary line.  On one side, free South Koreans built the world's 12^th-largest economy by opening its markets, but on the north side of the line, above the DMZ, the ashes of a failed ideology have been smothering economic life for more than 50 years.

Let me talk about the president’s leadership in the world when it comes to trade.  In his commitment to free trade, the president, when he entered office, understood that he had to have the authority to negotiate free trade agreements or he couldn't lead.  The president had not had the ability to negotiate free trade agreements for the previous eight years.  We fought very hard our first year and a half in Washington, D.C., to deliver that to the president, we delivered it to him in the summer of 2001 in the form of Trade Promotion Authority, and with that what we're doing is pursuing trade agreements. The Doha Development Agenda is the latest round of multilateral trade.  The U.S. is offering leadership through proposals to liberalize trade in three key sectors of the international economy industrial and consumer goods, agriculture and services.  The next benchmark in the process is the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference, which begins on September 10 in Cancun, Mexico.  At Cancun we will work through differences on how to open up agriculture and reduce or eliminate trade-distorting subsidies.  Progress in this area is the key to unlocking the broad and balanced agenda that the WTO members have agreed to pursue, and we're optimistic.

Another U.S. goal in these negotiations is to achieve greater transparency in government procurement and new rules to facilitate trade measures at the border.  Progress in these areas promises to increase the transparency and due process in international trade, and will reduce costs for businesses and ultimately consumers.  These talks offer an extraordinary opportunity to advance global economic reforms and expand growth and we hope that our fellow WTO partners are equally serious and we believe that they are.

The Free Trade Area of the Americas is central to the president's vision for a fully democratic Western Hemisphere bound together by goodwill and free trade.  The FTAA will create the world's largest free market.  It will create a market of 800 million people, $13 trillion in 34 countries.  We're seeking an agreement that creates an open and rules-based trading system.  And here, again, we hope to complete this by January 2005.  At this point in time, most countries have submitted and exchanged offers on this agreement.  The request for improvement process has begun and there's progress at the negotiating level.  So, we're optimistic that we're making good headway on this front.

Engagement can also lift up millions of Africans from hardship.  Sub-Saharan Africa has 11 percent of the world's population, but produces less than two percent of the world's trade.  The U.S. is committed to strengthening trade relationships with peaceful African countries.  The African Growth and Opportunity Act is bringing hundreds of millions of investment dollars to Africa and creating thousands of jobs for people in that country.  We're also working in South Africa with the South African Customs Union.  These five countries create the most dynamic economies in Africa with open markets, and their economic leadership deserves our support and, indeed, our encouragement.

The president is also helping developing countries accelerate progress by tying U.S. development aid to results.  The Millennium Challenge Account doubles development assistance but conditions it on results.  To qualify, the countries must rule justly, they must invest in the health and education of their people, and they must follow policies that encourage economic freedom.  In a number of African countries, AIDS is decimating working age adults, leaving behind millions of orphans and undermining the ability to farm.  To help these children, the president is also committing $15 billion over the next five years to turn the tide against AIDS in Africa.

The tragic situation of the Zambian mother I mentioned earlier illustrates a larger point.  Trade disputes can be devastating for people struggling at the margins.  Forty million people in Africa are at risk of starvation.  For five years, the European Union has raised an unscientific barrier against genetically modified crops.  Last year, while millions faced starvation, Zambia ordered aid agencies to take back thousands of tons of biotech food.  But millions of Americans have been eating breakfast cereal made with this biotech crop for years.  African farmers could greatly lower the risk and consequences of famine by planting biotech crop, but they are unlikely to do so until Europe stops barring these products on the basis of unscientific superstitions and thinly veiled self-interest.

Few regions are more economically isolated in this world than the Middle East.  President Bush announced that the progress of peace and freedom in the Middle East is a national goal. He pledged American influence and idealism to replace old hatreds with hope.  Greater trade can expand opportunity and lower tensions in the region.  The president's Middle East Free Trade Initiative puts the power of freedom to work in the Middle East.  This strategy will raise standards of living by helping the nations build dynamic free market economies and stable societies.

We will focus on countries that are ready to take the necessary steps to stability, to respect the rule of law, participating in the global economy and support human rights.  We will replace confrontation with commerce.  The initiative begins with our commitment to support WTO membership for peaceful countries in the region.  We will also expand trade linkages with the Middle East by allowing selected goods to enter our markets duty-free.  And, through an escalating series of qualified agreements and treaties, we seek to ultimately achieve a comprehensive free trade area covering the entire region.   

Jordan's experience is compelling.  Jordan and the U.S. are now united by a comprehensive free trade agreement.  Jordan invested in health and education and supported property rights, reduced bureaucratic red tape on its businesses and pursued sound monetary policies.  Now, Jordan's economy is growing faster than any other country in the region and Jordanian exports to the U.S. grew by 72 percent last year. Other countries in the region can follow the same path and the U.S. is encouraging that journey. 

In closing, let me say this: as the president said last week in Africa, the answer to poverty and oppression is freedom: "this belief in the natural rights of man, this conviction that justice should reach everywhere the sun passes leads America into the world.  With the power and resources given to us, the United States seeks to bring peace where there is conflict, hope where there is suffering, and liberty where there is tyranny."   

In a world divided by struggle and hardship, freedom offers a ladder to economic stability.  Our trade agenda is expanding opportunities for American workers and businesses as we help developing nations climb from poverty to prosperity. 

Thank you very much.