Blogs: An Economy for All

Bloomberg News' headline today reads, "Bush to Meet With CEOs to Stump for Trade Pacts as Vote Nears." The story refers to the upcoming House vote on the Peru Free Trade Agreement - the deal that begins the expansion of the NAFTA trade model into South America.

Here's the excerpt:

"President George W. Bush plans to meet tomorrow with 50 business leaders, including the chief executive officers of Caterpillar Inc. and Harley-Davidson Inc., as he seeks help in lobbying Congress to pass pending trade deals."

How sad, really. A president so utterly isolated that he can't find regular, working Americans to campaign with. Instead, he is running around with superwealthy CEOs trying to tell America that we should embrace NAFTA-style trade policies. Even more sad is that Bush is expected to receive support from a number of Democrats in Congress.

Tomorrow, I should have the audio of my interview with Rep. Phil Hare (D-IL) posted. Hare has Caterpillar workers in his district, and is leading the fight against the NAFTA expansion that Bush is trumpeting with the company's CEO.

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Every Friday in our Weekend Watchdog feature, we post suggested questions for scheduled Sunday guests. You can add your own questions in the comment thread. We'll also include contact information for the shows, so we can let them know what their viewers want asked.

And on Sunday at 4 PM ET, tune in to Air America Radio's "Seder on Sundays" program, where I'll offer the Weekend Watchdog Wrap-Up.

Guest watchdog Rick Perlstein here, with a confession: I'm a politically junky of an unconventional sort. Specifically: I can't stand the Sunday political talk shows. I don't mean that, like many liberals, I watch them and shout angrily at the screen. I mean I don't watch them at all. The last episode of Meet the Press I saw was from 1966, three years before I was born. If you know that I'm a historian that sentence makes more sense. I saw it at the Museum of Broadcast Communications as part of the research for my next book, and the episode was a roundtable featuring Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King, and the NAACP's Roy Wilkins. more »

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My new nationally syndicated newspaper column is out today, and it focuses on the Toxic Trade report the Campaign put out this week. Read the column here or go listen to the replay of my regular Friday morning interview about the column with 760AM Denver radio host Jay Marvin (I do this interview about my column every Friday morning with Jay, who is really one of the best progressive radio hosts in the country).

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Readers of this blog first met Nancy Nord in this post from two and a half months ago. I had woken up to NPR's "Morning Edition," and heard a toy industry spokesman spinning the recent massive recall of Mattel toys for lead contamination—was admiring her skill at obfuscation, throwing sand in the face of the facts, serenely and sweetly muddying the waters to deny there was really much of a problem at all, but that good folks had the problem entirely under control.

I listened on, and soon learned that this was no toy industry spokesman. She was the chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. She just talked like a toy industry spokesman—which, I soon learned, was no surprise: a typical revolving-door conservative crony, her relevant experience in protecting consumers was as a corporate lobbyist fighting to keep the government from protecting consumers.

That, in itself, is not a firing offense. It's just disgusting, and an all-too-typical example of the ideology of E. coli conservatism at work.

Now this. more »

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There's more proof of the political potency of the "toxic trade" theme among voters in a poll just completed by Democracy Corps.

Asked to choose from a list of concerns about China, 52 percent of poll participants agreed with the statement that a "lack of safety regulations make Chinese products cheap but also unsafe for American consumers."

Another 32 percent agreed with the statement that "China has turned into an economic power whose goods flood our markets and undermine American industries and jobs," while 30 percent agreed with the comment that "China's explosive, unregulated industrial expansion is contributing to pollution and global warming."

Poll participants could choose two statements from a list of six. The other three statements were chosen by fewer than 25 percent of poll participants.

Voters sense what we are saying in our "Toxic Trade" report: We are importing too many goods from a country that has for the most part shown little regard for the health, safety, labor and environmental standards Americans have come to expect-while crippling the government's ability to uphold those standards.

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As a follow-up to my earlier post from today, check out United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard explaining to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette how passing free trade deals at the same time we are deregulating our domestic marketplace endangers Americans:

The problem, Mr. Gerard said, is that when trade opens up, companies find the cheapest source for manufacturing, often going to countries that do not have the same regulations as the United States.

Lead has been found in not only toys, but also in imported construction products.

"We found red lead in tubes and pipes brought in from China," he said. He said red lead is particularly dangerous because it leeches into water very easily.

Dr. Needleman said lead often is used in paint for children's toys because it makes colors brighter. Mr. Gerard said the paint also was 30 percent to 40 percent cheaper than lead-free paint.

You can see what the Steelworkers are doing on this issue at www.stoptoxicimports.org

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We're thrilled to announce that David Sirota, a nationally syndicated weekly newspaper columnist and New York Times bestselling author, debuts today as a senior fellow and blogger for the Campaign for America's Future.

Sirota is known for his no-nonsense writing about economics and populist politics. In this space, he will be covering the ongoing debate over trade, globalization and economic inequality. Each week, he will publish a report analyzing and investigating the economic and political news on these issues. He will also be blogging on the issues throughout the week as news breaks.

His first post examines the Campaign for America's Future's report, "Toxic Trade: Globalization and the Safety of the American Consumer," and the effort by the head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Nancy Nord, to continue the gutting of the agency under the Bush administration.

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Just in time for Campaign for America's Future's new report on "Toxic Trade: Globalization and the Safety of the American Consumer," documenting how the budget and staff of the Consumer Protection Agency has been cut in half during the same period imports from nations with lax safety standards have exploded, the good folks at Consumer Union remind us of an unpleasant fact: the biggest danger for consumers comes not from toxic products that are recalled. The biggest danger comes from toxic products that aren't recalled.

"Our lab tests detected lead at widely varying levels in samples of dishware, jewelry, glue stick caps, vinyl backpacks, children's ceramic tea sets and other toys and items not on any federal recall list," they report after screening products from stores and consumers' homes in the New York metropolitan area using home lead testing kits and an X-ray fluorescence analyzer. (Worried? You can order your own lead-screning kit at the United Steelworkers' outstanding resource StopToxicImports.org.) For connoisseurs of irony, it turns out tots who are budding doctors are among those most at risk: one of the non-recalled lead-laden items Consumers Union found was a Fisher-Price blood pressure cuff from a toy medical kit.

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This New York Times' story could not be more fitting, really. It details how the Bush administration is aggressively fighting a proposal by Arkansas Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor to strengthen the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC).

The story comes on the very day that the Campaign for America's Future is releasing a new report showing the frightening results of our government's decision to underfund the CPSC at precisely the same time both parties have helped pass more and more NAFTA-style trade deals that have encouraged a glut of imports. We are, in short, reducing our ability to protect ourselves right when we need to protect ourselves more.

Pryor's bill is in response to a spate of headlines about the danger toxic imports now pose to American families. His legislation is expected to be voted on this week, is similar to a bill being pushed by Reps. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and Diana DeGette, D-Colo., in the House. And it is pretty gutsy when you consider that Pryor represents the state housing the headquarters of Wal-Mart — the company that has most benefited from simultaneously deregulating the CPSC and passing lobbyist-written trade deals.

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For the first time in October, the Watchdog got a question asked by the Sunday shows.

Face The Nation host Bob Schieffer asked former Gov. Mitt Romney about being endorsed by anti-Mormon Bob Jones III:

SCHIEFFER: Bob Jones, who heads Bob Jones University down in South Carolina, recently endorsed you. And he said this week that he is completely opposed to the doctrines of Mormonism, but he said he preferred your "erroneous" faith to Hillary Rodham Clinton's "lack of religion."

ROMNEY: Isn't that a great line?

SCHIEFFER: Do you accept that endorsement?

ROMNEY: Oh, I'm happy to receive endorsements from individuals, and, of course, we have different faiths. I'm not expecting him to endorse my faith. I'm not asking anyone to do that. I'm asking him to look at me as an American and judge my values, learn about me and my family, my character, and decide whether I could help America at a critical time.

So Romney is happy to receive the endorsement of someone who calls his own religion a "cult," as well as attacking other Christians who disagree with him politically as having no religion at all.

When it came to other Watchdog questions that dealt with policy issues, Fox News Sunday was nowhere to be found.

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