Now, all of you know, whatever your views are, that I think this is a great opportunity for America. I know there is opposition to more comprehensive trade agreements. I have listened carefully, and I believe that the opposition is rooted in two fears: first, that our trading partners will have lower environmental and labor standards, which will give them an unfair advantage in our market and do their own people no favors, even if there’s more business; and second, that if we have more trade, more of our workers will lose their jobs and have to start over.

I think we should seek to advance worker and environmental standards around the world. It should--I have made it abundantly clear that it should be a part of our trade agenda, but we cannot influence other countries’ decisions if we send them a message that we’re backing away from trade with them.

This year I will send legislation to Congress, and ask other nations to join us, to fight the most intolerable labor practice of all-abusive child labor.

We should also offer help and hope to those Americans temporarily left behind with the global marketplace or by the march of technology, which may have nothing to do with trade. That’s why we have more than doubled funding for training dislocated workers since 1993. And if my new budget is adopted, we will triple funding. That’s why we must do more, and more quickly, to help workers who lose their jobs for whatever reason.

You know, we help communities in a special way when their military base closes. We ought to help them in the same way if their factory closes. Again, I ask the Congress to continue its bipartisan work to consolidate the tangle of training programs we have today into one single GI Bill for Workers, a simple skills grant so people can, on their own, move quickly to new jobs, to higher incomes and brighter futures.

Now, we all know in every way in life change is not always easy, but we have to decide whether we’re going to try to hold it back and hide from it, or reap its benefits. And remember the big picture here: while we’ve been entering into hundreds of new trade agreements, we’ve been creating millions of new jobs. So this year we will forge new partnerships with Latin America, Asia and Europe, and we should pass the new African Trade Act. It has bipartisan support.

I will also renew my request for the fast-track negotiating authority necessary to open more new markets, created more new jobs, which every president has had for two decades.

You know, whether we like it or not, in ways that are mostly positive, the world’s economies are more and more interconnected and interdependent. Today, an economic crisis anywhere can affect economies everywhere. Recent months have brought serious financial problems to Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea and beyond.

Now why should Americans be concerned about this?

First, these countries are our customers. If they sink into recession, they won’t be able to buy the goods we’d like to sell them.