Are Democrats now opposed to free trade? The vast majority of Democrats believe in trade but they are concerned about something that has been expressed here in Davos, which is what’s happening to the middle class of our countries or not happening, as the case may be. Trade for the sake of trade without benefit to your population is not a smart policy. There are standards that ought to be put in place. For instance, what sense is there in having a trade arrangement but where you are willfully contributing to global warming and global climate change because your country doesn’t have development standards to prevent the building of coal-fired plants without water treatment facilities? That’s absurd. That’s a stupid policy. Are you talking about China? I am talking about a lot of countries, not just China. We need to make, as part of those trade agreements, measurable benchmarks: environmental standards, people standards, worthy standards. We are not asking people to adopt our standards overnight. We know there is a transition period. But if we are not going upwards in the quality of life and standard of living, then you cannot make an argument that this all absurd. So we are going to lose the consensus for trade. That’s what is going to happen. Our population has been willing to support on the notion that people will do better. The productivity of the workers in the United States has gone up 30 percent. Their wages have gone down, their cost of living has gone up 80 percent, education up 50 percent, transportation up 70 percent. Wages were down 1.8 percent last year and 1.5 percent the year before. Meanwhile profits of corporations have been overwhelmingly up and CEO pay has gone overwhelmingly up. When I graduated from college, the average pay of a CEO was 40 times the average; today it is 400. You can’t do that and say to the workers, this is good for you. How concerned are you that America may be opening a wider war in the Middle East? We are very concerned about it. I spoke on the Senate floor last week. I made it very clear that the president does not have the right to unilaterally - in the absence of emergency or in the absence of direct threat to our troops - he does not have the right to engage broadly. I think this will be a very big debate in the Congress over the next months. Climate change has dominated the agenda at Davos. What is going to be the position of the Democrats when it comes to introducing an emissions cap-and-trade policy? I am introducing a bill next week with Senator [John] Snow and it has a vigorous cap-and-trade program and I believe in it very strongly. We have to reduce the level of emissions, we have to cap levels. Even if India and China are not part of it? We have to take our first steps. They are going to have to do it, too. But there is no way to get them to do it unless we are willing and serious in practice. Do you think Americans will accept some output loss? I don’t think there will be an output loss. I think that the United States - and I have just written a book on this - I think the opportunities for us are enormous. We can make three great gains from all this. One is efficiency and efficiency brings better quality of life and more jobs. Two, it is about alternative fuels and, three, it is about clean technology. Would you like to see India and China enter the game? Well, they have to start too. They have to start now. This is a way into the ten-year window and all the scientists are in agreement on the ten-year window. If you are serious and responsible about this, we have to all engage in this now. China cannot be allowed to build one coal plant a day. It’s just crazy, it’s insane and it’s an attack, in a sense, on everybody. But the only way we are going to have legitimacy about it is to take steps ourselves and then you can go into the marketplace with a clean hand, so to speak.

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