By Arun Kumar
Washington, Aug 5 (IANS): US President Barack Obama has vowed to give tough competition to India and China for millions of potential jobs in the American clean energy industry, once again raising the bugaboo of outsourcing.
"For generations, manufacturing was the ticket to a better life for the American worker," he said at a meeting here Wednesday of the AFL-CIO Executive Council, America's union movement.
"But as the world became smaller, outsourcing, an easier way to increase profits, a lot of those jobs shifted to low-wage nations."
Millions of Americans were swept up in the disaster wrought by the Wall Street bubble burst, Obama said. "But I'm here to tell you, we are not giving up and we are not giving in. We are going to keep fighting for an economy that works for everybody, not just for a privileged few."
As part of the economic plan put in place by his administration to battle recession, the president said, "We're jumpstarting a new American clean energy industry - an industry with the potential to generate perhaps millions of jobs building wind turbines and solar panels, and manufacturing the batteries for the cars of the future, building nuclear plants, developing clean coal technology."
"There are other countries that are fighting for those jobs, in China and India and in Germany and other parts of Europe," Obama said. "But the United States doesn't play for second place.
"As long as I'm President, I'm going to keep fighting night and day to make sure that we win those jobs, that those are jobs that are created right here in the United States of America.
"So the message I want to deliver to our competitors-and to those in Washington who've tried to block our progress at every step of the way-is that we are going to rebuild this economy stronger than before, and at the heart of it are going to be three powerful words: Made in America. Made in America," he said amid applause.
That's why the US was finally enforcing its trade laws, he said. "That's why we're fighting for tax breaks for companies that invest here in the United States as opposed to companies that are investing overseas or that keep their profits offshore."