My name is Jim, and I’m an Economic Officer in the Foreign Service.
I remember, that early on during the first year I was here, I was actually put in charge
of negotiating a staffing agreement for the new terrorist threat integration center, which
was a new center that integrates all of the terrorist threats that come in from all the
different agencies.
It was very interesting work.
And then, a year later, I was in San Paolo, Brazil and I was taking the Chairman of the
Senate Finance Committee to a sugar plantation to see how ethanol was made.
Then, a year later, I was in a classroom in Arlington, Virginia and I was learning Mandarin
Chinese, which had always been a dream of mine.
A year later I was Shanghai, China and I was speaking Spanish to a group of Puerto Rican
counterfeiters who had been selling, um, trying to pass off fake dollars.
And I was talking to them in Spanish and trying to talk to the jailers in Chinese.
A year later I was in Southern China and I was working with a World War II veteran who
had been arrested for public nudity, and um, trying to convince the local authorities to
let him go home where he needed to get medical attention.
A year later, I was five floors beneath Manhattan deep in the bedrock.
I was in the Federal Reserve’s gold vault.
And I was doing a briefing and receiving a briefing from the Federal Reserve where they
were talking to us about sovereign debt and paying off different debts using the gold
bars that are down there.
I’m the only college graduate in a family of firefighters.
And, uh, you know I was really inspired by my father’s heroic public service, and I
knew that when I grew up I wanted to do a job or have a career that involved public
service.
But also involved adventure, you know, and you know growing up in Las Vegas I'd see all
of these foreign tourists coming in and visiting my city.
And I remember as a small kid looking at them and wondering, why are they coming to my town
and what is like where they’re from, and I always wanted to know what it would be like
to really see like where they were from.
I frequently have to explain to my friends and family from back home what it is I do
and why it’s important.
And as an Economic Officer what we do is we formulate, and then implement U.S. economic
foreign policy.
When we work in the embassies overseas, right, or in the consulates abroad, we're really
implementing the foreign policy that's been made here in Washington.
We’re the people that are taking it to the foreign government telling and what is they
do good, what it is they need to change and how they can, how we can help them improve.
I met my wife in law school.
My wife is also a Foreign Service Officer; we're a tandem couple.
That’s what they call it when two Foreign Service Officers are married; they call us
a tandem couple, they move us around together, we're stationed together we're able to kind
of have our own careers in the same place.
And we move around together.
And uh, we decided in law school we didn’t want to be practicing attorneys.
We liked each other too much.
We wanted to be able to have a life.
And, um, so much of what international law is and what law students think of as being
international law is what Foreign Service Officers do.
Especially Economic Officers.
Because we're the people who, in many cases, are actually are actually doing the treaty
negotiation.
We work with the U.S .Trade Representative’s office.We’re frequently sitting in on the
negotiations and the meetings and the working groups that are leading up to the two figureheads
who sign that treaty or sign that agreement.
We’re the ones that are hammering out all the details.
We represent U.S. foreign economic policy to the world to foreign governments and to
foreign audiences, and that has an impact.
To me, the impact there is actually U.S. jobs.
I think of the livelihoods of the people who work back in America, the people that I grew
up with, the people that I serve as a public servant.
And what I do overseas makes it so that they have a better economic future and their children
and my children have better economic future.
Not only are we talking about having a more prosperous America, but having a more prosperous
world.
It's something that the people back at home in America, they need that voice, they need
someone to tell the world that, that the U.S. stands for prosperity; and not just American
prosperity, but world prosperity.
And that's my job.