washingtonpost.com — How do we assess Sweeney's tenure as president? That question was actually posed to him, prospectively, at the news conference that immediately followed his initial election. The expectations for American labor were uncommonly high at that moment: Sweeney had just run the only successful insurgent campaign for the AFL-CIO's presidency in the federation's history, based on renewing labor's commitment to organizing after decades of declining membership. No surprise, then, that Sweeney said he should be judged by his record in reversing that decline.
guardian.co.uk — On the campaign trail, Barack Obama said: "I voted against Cafta, never supported Nafta and will not support Nafta-style trade agreements in the future." The now president has released a statement saying he will unveil the administration's trade policy agenda ahead of the G20 meeting in late September. This is welcome news, given that the Obama administration has been slow to move on this pressing issue – so much so that some critics have suggested that Obama has abandoned this core campaign pledge.
Let's go back, just for a minute, to a time before screaming teabaggers, before Republicans decided to kill health insurance reform as a means to politically destroy this country's first African-American president. more »
nytimes.com — An increasingly acrimonious trade dispute between China and the United States over the past three days is officially about tires, chickens and cars, but is really much broader.
These are special trade safeguard rules called "Section 421" that the Chinese had agreed to obey to gain entrance to the World Trade Organization (WTO). They are, however, laws that had gone unenforced by the U.S. in the past.
China has announced that it will retaliate for Obama's decision to impose sanctions on Chinese tires by considering sanctions against US imports into China of chicken and auto parts. more »
President Obama has decided to enforce our trade laws and imposed a 3-year tariff on Chinese tires. I suspect the country is about to witness a corporate hissy fit that will surely rival any righteous teabagger’s demands to see the President’s birth certificate. more »
President Obama signaled a new direction in America's trade policies by deciding to enforce the ITC's recommendation to impose tariffs on Chinese tire imports.
In recent days, the Administration has made encouraging signs that it plans to enforce U.S. trade law, but is it smoke screen for advancing a free trade agenda?.
Today, it came that Senator Harry Reid and the Office of U.S. Trade Representative are in support of putting safeguards on illegal, surging Chinese tire imports.
In a letter to the President on September 2, Harry Reid said: more »
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