The Chamber of Commerce is at it again, once again misleading the public on the factual record of our flawed trade policies. In a report released today, the Chamber makes claims of massive export and job gains from our "free trade agreements" (FTAs).
But the actual data show that these pacts, currently in place with 17 countries, have been a dismal failure. On the whole, the U.S. has a $54 billion non-oil deficit with these countries, including a trade deficit with Mexico and Canada that has grown 848 percent over the period.
To repeat, this growth is not caused by oil, but by a loss of competitiveness in the U.S. manufacturing and agriculture sectors vis a vis our two most significant FTA partners. There are many ways to calculate the job loss from these trends, but any honest method comes up with a negative job impact from our FTAs in the millions of jobs.
An honest analysis of the data show that actually U.S. export growth to our FTA partners has been slower than with non-FTA counties - between 1998 and 2008, total goods exports to non-FTA partners grew 47.0 percent faster than exports to FTA partners. Translated into dollar terms, this FTA export penalty amounted to $25 billion in lost potential exports for 2008 alone. And utilizing the job multiplier assumed by the Chamber, this penalty accounted for 302,585 jobs that could have softened the blow of the Great Recession. (See after the fold for more detail.)
Our own Lori Wallach responded to these points in our official statement on the Chamber report:
The implication of the actual FTA record for President Obama's laudable goal of doubling exports in the next five years is clear: there are many ways to increase exports and support jobs, but FTAs ain't one.
I suspect that more Americans are likely to believe reports of UFO sightings than Chamber of Commerce claims about trade agreements creating millions of jobs for them, given many Americans have personally experienced the damage wrought by the job-killing trade deals pushed by the Chamber on behalf of their serial-offshoring multinational corporate members. It's high time that corporate lobbyists stopped lying to the U.S. public about job and export gains from FTAs that never materialize.
If the Chamber supports trade expansion, then instead of serving up another batch of cooked numbers trying to defend the damaging trade agenda of the past that most Americans fiercely reject and that is dead in Congress, the Chamber should help promote the TRADE Act, which rebuilds consensus for trade expansion by providing new trade terms that can benefit more people.
American public opinion polling systematically shows bipartisan opposition across numerous demographics and regions to U.S. trade agreement regime characterized by NAFTA. Already in the 2010 election cycle, opposition to the very pacts the Chamber is a prominent feature of Democratic and GOP House and Senate races. During the 2006 and 2008 election cycles, 72 representatives and senators who supported the status quo were replaced by those who campaigned on trade reform.
This is the first in a three-part series today that compares political conditions in 1993-1994 to our current environment. I argue that the current situation is much more favorable to Democrats than the one 16 years ago--Chris
Background Perot voters were an essential part of the 1994 Republican turnaround--perhaps the essential part. Forming 12% of the congressional electorate in both 1992 and 1994 (40% of Perot voters skipped the House vote in 1992), they swung from evenly split between the two major parties (see 38%-38% in the presidential and Rep 37%--32% Dem in the House) to voting 67% for Republicans in 1994.
By itself, this swing formed an overall 3-4% Republican gain in the national House vote. Given that the GOP went up a total of 5.1% from 1992 to 1994 in the national House vote (from 44.8% to 49.9%), their gains from Perot voters represented roughly two-thirds of all their gains that year.
The NAFTA Disaster The role of NAFTA in this swing difficult to overestimate. As I noted yesterday, just before NAFTA was passed in the House in late 1993, a plurality opposed it, 38%--46%. Notably, Perot voters opposed it overwhelmingly, 26%--63%. As Thomas Frank argued in What's the Matter With Kansas, Democratic support for NAFTA might have made both parties seem just as bad on economics to Perot voters. With equivalence on economic matters, Perot supporters may well have turned to Republicans because they tended to be populist, American-exceptionalist, cultural supremacists.
Granted, a much lower percentage of House Democrats voted in favor of NAFTA than House Republicans (40% for Dems, 75% for Reps). However, given that NAFTA was championed by the Clinton administration for months in the media, passed through a Democratic Congress, and climaxed with a famous CNN debate between Vice-President Al Gore and Ross Perot himself, Perot supporters would have had a justifiable sense of equivalence between the two major parties on NAFTA. Heck, given that Democrats were the public face of NAFTA, many probably blamed only Democrats for it.
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Are we in for a repeat? I consider this possibility in the extended entry.
Celebrated stories of early American pioneers, explorers, and immigrants typically center around men of fortitude and bravery. Depictions of modern-day migrants are still very male-centric, and this cultural lens is a default in most cases. But women play a central and overlooked role in today's immigration story. Even when not directly highlighted, women often bear the weight of keeping families together and helping them grow stronger.
So far, swine flu hasn't developed into the deadly global pandemic that many feared. Was it all media hype, as Cervantes argues for AlterNet? Or did all that quarantining and hand-washing actually help? While we'll never know what might have been, perhaps we should consider the relatively mild swine flu as a cheap lesson--a dry run, if you will.
Glenn Greenwald long ago taught us why we should always look skeptically at the fact-free prognostications of the Washington Post's Steve Pearlstein. That said, this line in Pearlstein's column today caught my eye today (h/t lutton):
"The haggling now [about the automaker bailout] is over the appropriate mechanism. My guess is that the whole thing will be wrapped up shortly after Thanksgiving, perhaps in a holiday package that will include congressional approval (but delayed implementation) of the free-trade agreement with Colombia." (emphasis added)
My last newspaper column explored how the Colombia Free Trade Agreement is about nothing other than serving corporate interests; how poll after poll after poll has shown Americans intensely oppose such NAFTA expansions; how in 2006 and 2008, a total of 69 new congressional lawmakers - mostly Democrats - won on an explicit promise to stop NAFTA expansions; and how therefore, the Republican push for this trade deal is a political ploy designed to fracture Democrats much like NAFTA fractured them in 1993.
As just a quick follow up to my last few posts on trade and Obama, this story provides some great news: The Obama campaign is using Sherrod Brown as its lead spokesperson on the issue:
In an earlier campaign conference call with reporters, high-profile Obama supporters said Canada and Mexico would be forced to reopen talks on the contentious trade deal because of their dependence on exports to the United States.
"We are the largest market for Canada, by far. We are the largest market for Mexico, by far," said Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat.
"When the president of the United States says 'we are unhappy' with the way this trade agreement works . . . It is clear we are big enough, and strong enough, and important enough, that these negotiations will go forward."
...McCain "should come to Ottawa, Ohio," which lost a television tube manufacturing plant to Mexico almost five years ago because of NAFTA, Brown said. The plant's closure forced 1,100 people out of work and was a "direct outgrowth" of NAFTA, he said.
"This is one issue where John McCain hasn't tried to put distance between himself and George Bush," Brown said. "He continues the same trade policies that have already inflicted so much damage on the heartland of this country."
As readers of this site probably know, Brown is one of America's most outspoken leaders for the fair trade uprising. The fact that the Obama campaign organized a conference call and then asked Brown to use that conference call to hammer John McCain for his NAFTA support is a great sign that Obama could represent a serious departure from the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush legacy pushing lobbyist-written trade policy.
It is impossible to argue with any semblance of honesty that Hillary Clinton is telling the truth when she claims to "have been a critic of Nafta from the very beginning." Her statements over the last 10 years - including one just 3 years ago - declared her strong support for the job-killing trade pact. And no matter how many Washington insiders like David Gergen or Carl Bernstein appear on television insisting Clinton opposed NAFTA "from the beginning," we have the very clear statements from the candidate herself.
Yet, as I discuss in my new newspaper column, Clinton managed to avoid explaining the gap between her different statements in the lead up to the Ohio primary. Instead, she made the entire NAFTA debate about an uncorroborated report from the right-wing Canadian government designed to embarrass Barack Obama. It was a deliberate strategy to create what many are calling an "Archie Bunker" divide in the Democratic primary. Even more incredibly, the American media followed right along.
"One of our greatest assets we have in Afghanistan today, frankly, are our Canadian friends," he said. "It's very controversial in Canada, their commitment and the suffering and the losses they have faced. And we need, we need our Canadian friends and we need their continued support in Afghanistan.
"So what do we do? The two Democrat candidates for president say that they're going to unilaterally, they're going to unilaterally abrogate the North American Free Trade Agreement. Our biggest trading partner, they're going -- who we made a solemn agreement with -- they're gonna unilaterally abrogate that. Now, how do you think the Canadian people are going to react to that -- who we are having now their enormous and invaluable assistance in Afghanistan and we're going to abrogate a free trade agreement?"
I mocked McCain for making such a bizarre statement, but I am starting to think that, like with Bush's seemingly strange Dred Scott comment, there is a hidden meaning to it. Consider McCain's statement in the context of conservative Canadian Prime Minster Stephen Harper responding to allegations from New Democratic leader Jack Layton that Harper is interfering the Democratic primary against Barack Obama:
Here is Harper's response to the allegations (transcript mine):
The Canadian embassy in Washington has issued a statement indicating its regret at the fact that information has come out that would imply that Mr.--Senator Obama has been saying different things in public than in private.
So, the Canadian conservative prime minister is calling Barack Obama two-faced on NAFTA at the exact same moment that John McCain is indicating that Canada might pull out its troops on Afghanistan if we make too much a stink about NAFTA? That strikes me as more than a little suspicious. In fact, it strikes me as a directly coordinated attack by McCain and Harper to neutralize McCain on trade during the general election. It wouldn't be the first time Harper and Republican leaders have coordinated, given that Harper uses Republican pollsters and the conservative movements in both countries are deeply intertwined. Further, in addition to making Obama look like a two-face panderer who will anger key international allies, this attack serves a triple purpose of weakening Obama by extending the Democratic primary, which might (I emphasize might) further weaken Obama in the general election. Other conservatives, such as Rush Limbaugh, are already pushing supporters to vote for Clinton for exactly this same reason.
I generally agree with Josh Marshall on this one: the whole thing stinks of cross-border conservative coordination on the presidential campaign. The plus side is that not only is what Harper doing probably unpopular in Canada, but that in the general election Obama can probably appear with opposition leaders like Layton or Stephanie Dion to reinforce his position on the issue. That way, not only does Obama's position gain credibility, but his victory might even bring down the Canadian conservative government.
"One of our greatest assets we have in Afghanistan today, frankly, are our Canadian friends," he said. "It's very controversial in Canada, their commitment and the suffering and the losses they have faced. And we need, we need our Canadian friends and we need their continued support in Afghanistan.
"So what do we do? The two Democrat candidates for president say that they're going to unilaterally, they're going to unilaterally abrogate the North American Free Trade Agreement. Our biggest trading partner, they're going -- who we made a solemn agreement with -- they're gonna unilaterally abrogate that. Now, how do you think the Canadian people are going to react to that -- who we are having now their enormous and invaluable assistance in Afghanistan and we're going to abrogate a free trade agreement?"
"I want to tell you right now I believe in free trade," McCain added.
This is hilariously bad attack from McCain. It is the sort of thing that makes me eager for the general election.
First, he ties every single issue into foreign policy, demonstrating a complete lack of concern for domestic affairs. It reminds me of a Saturday Night Live joke from late 1991. On Weekend Update, Kevin Neelin said something like 'Today, Pat Buchanan unveiled his 'America First' Campaign for the Republican nomination. In response, President Bush unveiled his 'America: When I Have The Time' campaign." NAFTA is somehow about maintaining troops levels in Afghanistan? McCain's one track mind and distaste for domestic affairs strikes me as a huge opening to exploit.
Second, talk about a tin ear on trade. Even talking about reforming NAFTA is somehow bad? While a plurality of Americans think NAFTA has been, on the whole, a good thing, less than a quarter think that it should not be reformed. But hey, if McCain wants to pin himself in an unpopular corner on trade, by all means, go for it.
Third, is McCain seriously raising the threat of pissing off Canada? I'm pretty sure that Canadians have pretty much the exactly same opinion of NAFTA as do Americans, and thus talking about reforming NAFTA won't anger them at all. Also, I know it isn't very progressive to say this, but even if this talk did anger Canada, most Americans probably don't care. The threat of Canada picking up its ball and going home because they don't like the tone of our voice is not going to resonate with many people here.
Fourth, McCain is just wrong on the face of it. He even had to sort of retract, and when he did he gave this garbled response:
"Maybe they're not saying they'd, quote, abrogate. They are saying radically restructure," he said. "The point is not whether I want to renegotiate any terms. The point is whether you want to renegotiate or unilaterally announce that you are going to take certain action whether the Canadians happen to agree with it or not."
Huh? I'd say that this was inaccurate, but I'm not even entirely sure what distinction McCain is drawing here. Democrats are bad for unilaterally announcing that they want to radically restructure the deal, when the right approach is to say that you want to renegotiate? What does that even mean? And how does a group of people unilaterally announce anything?
Wow--it is moments like these that make me pretty happy McCain is the nominee. There are a ton of holes to drive through here, and I guess it is simply a matter of Democrats choosing which hole at which they should aim the truck.
Tonight, the Democratic candidates for president will debate in Cleveland just one week before Ohio's pivotal primary. Most analysts expect America's lobbyist-written trade policies to take center stage in the Buckeye State -- a place hit hard by trade-related job losses and wage cuts.
In the lead-up to this debate, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been sparring over the North American Free Trade Agreement -- a proxy battle over the larger issue of trade. Undoubtedly, this NAFTA argument will bleed into the Tuesday night debate, and so here's an objective look at the issue of trade and the records of both candidates that you might want to keep next to you as the rhetoric starts to fly (note: Neither the Campaign for America's Future or me personally have endorsed either candidate -- this is a strictly nonpartisan, non-candidate-endorsing review).
Barack Obama is today criticizing Hillary Clinton on her efforts to pretend she never supported NAFTA. Just as a follow-up to my post on Friday, I want to remind folks who claim Hillary Clinton never praised NAFTA that, in fact, she did praise NAFTA - repeatedly.
According to NBC's Meet the Press, in 2004, Clinton said, "I think, on balance, NAFTA has been good for New York and America."
In her memoir, Clinton trumpeted her husband's "successes on the budget, the Brady bill and NAFTA."
And in 1998, Bloomberg News reports that she praised corporations for mounting "a very effective business effort in the U.S. on behalf of NAFTA." Another direct quote.
I went over two of these three quotes - and some more - in my recent syndicated column, which you can read here. And, as predicted, this issue has now become the central focus in the Ohio primary - the primary that could decide the Democratic nomination.
However you feel about NAFTA - and if you are a typical American, polls show you likely do not like it - Clinton now trying to lie and say she never really supported NAFTA is an absolute insult. It further suggests that on really important economic issues, she's more than happy to lie about provable facts when it suits her political needs.
UPDATE: Here's another direct quote from Hillary Clinton on NAFTA. The Associated Press reported on 3/6/96 that she said, "NAFTA is proving its worth" and later praising NAFTA as "a free and fair trade agreement."
"We all know the record of the DLC, the Progressive Policy Institute and, of course, the Clinton-Gore Administration. The economic recovery plan stands first and foremost as a testament to both good ideas and political courage. National service. The Brady Bill. Family Leave. NAFTA. Investment in science and technology. New markets. Charter schools. The Earned Income Tax Credit. The welfare to work partnership. The COPS program. The SAFER program. All of these came out of some very fundamental ideas about what would work. The results speak for themselves. Those ideas were converted into policies programs that literally changed millions of lives and, I argue, changed America."
Yes, that's right. NAFTA is cited by Clinton as a shining example of successful "ideas [that] were converted into policies programs that literally changed millions of lives and, I argue, changed America."
None of us likes being lied to by politicians, and not just because being lied to is insulting, but because when a lie comes from a politician, it suggests that none of their promises should be believed. As my new nationally syndicated newspaper column shows, this is precisely what is going on in the presidential race when it comes to trade and globalization policy - key policies as the race heads into the working-class bastions of Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
It would be one thing if Hillary Clinton was admitting that yes, she vigorously supported NAFTA, but that support was misguided. But no, as the column shows, Clinton is now trying to convince voters she never supported the North American Free Trade Agreement - the trade model whose lack of labor, human rights and environmental standards made it a tool for Big Business to ship jobs abroad. Not only is she claiming to be a longtime opponent of the deal, but she's actually trotting out former Clinton administration officials-turned-corporate-lawyers like Mickey Kantor - the very architects of the deal - to tell us that behind closed doors she really wasn't for NAFTA. Shocker - these are the same hacks who have lashed their careers to Clinton's campaign in hopes of getting back their White House jobs.
The strategy assumes that the media will simply report this revisionist history as fact, and worse, that Americans who have been crushed by this unfair trade policy are a bunch of idiots. We are simply supposed to ignore the speeches she made telling us what a great success NAFTA was, including the one where she traveled to Davos, Switzerland to give a speech in which she thanked corporate interests for mounting "a very effective business effort in the U.S. on behalf of NAFTA" (that's a direct quote from her mouth). And the lying is about the best indicator that all her rhetoric promising a new trade policy under a Hillary Clinton presidency would be tossed out the window when she got to the White House - much like Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign promises to oppose NAFTA and China PNTR were tossed out the window when he was inaugurated president.
Obama is surging to victory in New Hampshire, currently holding a 7.6% lead across a remarkable eleven polls taken since Iowa. That makes his post-Iowa bounce anywhere from 10.6%--16.2%, depending on how one calculates polling averages. At this rate, he should be able to surge into a national lead by Friday, at the latest. While there is no guarantee that such a lead will last, and no guarantee that Obama will go on to win the nomination, clearly he is the frontrunner right now. An Obama nomination appears to be the most likely outcome of the Democratic primaries right now.
In some ways, an Obama victory would be a very, very good thing. The truth is that, as a nation, we failed from 1994 to 2007. We failed to expand health care coverage. We failed to stop the increasing corporatization of our lives and vicious exploitation of the Third World. We failed to close the income gap, either nationally or internationally. We failed to stop global warming. We have failed to respond to the threat of peak oil. We failed to stop a Presidential election from being stolen. We failed to stop the war in Iraq. The end result of these failures is that the Apollo Program of this era in American history is the war in Iraq. That's right--instead of doing something like, say, going to the Moon or stopping global warming, we invaded Iraq. In every political aspect, America has failed its generational role as a world leader in the post-Cold War era. While I refer to this as a generational failure, it is not limited to Americans of any age group. It isn't a failure of Boomers or Gen X or the Silent generation, or any of that. It is a generational failure in the lifespan of our country where we failed to live up to the promise of our nation. All adult Americans alive during that time period share a role in our failure.
In These Times has a great piece by Adam Doster called 'Hounding the Bush Dogs', and David Sirota wrote his latest syndicated column on corrupt Democrats who use their conservative districts as a mask.
There are more primaries to come, both on foreign policy issues and on domestic corporate nonsense.
And if you need a reminder that these conservative Democrats aren't voting their districts, check out this article from Inside Indiana Business, a state suffering from NAFTA where Bush Dog Democrats picked up three seats in 2006 running on Fair Trade.
Unfortunately, Indiana Rep. Brad Ellsworth, who campaigned on a fair trade platform, flipped his position when it came time to vote. During the 2006 campaign, paid television ads for Ellsworth criticized his opponent, John Hostettler, for voting to "expand NAFTA." (watch the ad at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKoF3SdOnak). However, Ellsworth sided with Republicans and voted to support Bush's Peru NAFTA expansion.
Ellsworth is aggressively going after undocumented workers as the source of economic instability in the region, which is sort of a racist safety valve for corporate servants that want to exploit fear instead of doing their job. Still, despite the local media crisis and lack of coverage, we are making progress. Paul Rosenberg is beginning to outline a strategy for local organizing around getting members to vote their districts, and hopefully he'll continue to work through it to make it manageable.
We are making progress on Bush Dogs, slowly but surely.
Now that Mr. Reid will be making a critical decision on the FISA legislation and we need so desperately our Representaitives to be vocal about their opposition to immunity, let's be clear about where Kucinich stands:
"I object to any immunity for telecommunications companies and demand a full accounting of these companies' involvement to Congress and to the American public. When corporations cooperate with the government to strip people of their Constitutional rights, that is a text book description of fascism. There must not be any place in America for this type of conduct." -Dennis Kucinich
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