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Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) appeared on Fox & Friends this morning to discuss balancing trade with China, and multinational corporations that put their profits ahead of American national security.
 
A rough transcript of Rubio’s remarks is below:
 
RUBIO: I think this president is the only president that has been willing to confront China for what it is. For too long around here, both Republicans and Democrats haven’t wanted to do it. And I think this is our last chance to get it right. We have to have a proper balance with them. What they are trying to do is they are trying to have a high-tech world that they dominate, and the way they are going to get there is by stealing our stuff or basically by buying up these small American companies in key sectors. We can’t allow that to continue. We’ve got to confront that now. If we don’t do it now, it’s going to be too late in five years, and then we are all going to live in a world in which the Chinese dominate the technology that we need to defend ourselves and to fuel an economy. We cannot let that happen. So I hope the Wall Street Journal report is not true, and the president comes out with those regulations. I already filed a bill that does what the president is going to do by regulation. That’s what we need to do, and I really hope he’s not backing down. I hope he does it.
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With all the fighting going on in America, the one thing that I think has bipartisan support is the fact that we have to confront China. You know who our biggest opponents are? These CEOs of multinational corporations who don’t really care, in many cases, about American national security or where America is going to be in ten years. They just want access to 1.3 billion customers in China, and they are in favor of anything that allows them access to those customers over the next few years so they can show strong profits and get their bonus. And they come back to D.C. and they lobby against us and in favor of China.

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Well you know who they are. It’s all the big companies. Apple goes around the world talking about privacy. Apple turned the Cloud in China over to the Chinese government. But in America, they won’t even help the FBI or law enforcement get into the phone of a criminal to see who that criminal was conspiring with. So these are the kind of things that we need to be talking about, this sort of hypocrisy.