SOTU Shows How Bush's Trade Policy Is All About K Street

President Bush's State of the Union speech is chock full of demands that Congress ignore the fact that the Colombian government actively colludes with paramilitary gangs to murder union organizers [1], the Panamanian government has made its country a corporate tax haven [2], and simply ram through "free" trade deals with these countries at the behest of corporate lobbyists. How do you know that Bush is thinking only of Big Money interests on trade? Because even the bone he tried to throw to workers crushed by unfair trade was a factually dishonest lie.

Bush, still pretending he's a "compassionate" conservative rather than a country-club Royalist Republican, said he wants "Congress to reauthorize and reform trade adjustment assistance, so we can help these displaced workers learn new skills and find new jobs." How nice — except for the fact that after the U.S. House did just that on a bipartisan basis, the Wall Street Journal reported back in October that Bush threatened to veto the bill [3].

Here's a report on what happened from a newspaper in Michigan — a state destroyed by the Bush-Clinton free trade fundamentalism that has dominated our government for the last 16 years:

"The Democrats who control Congress want not only to renew the [trade adjustment] program, but also to significantly expand its reach and spending. They want to increase the program's benefits and make those benefits available to broader categories of workers, including people in service industries. The House recently passed legislation that would achieve those objectives. But most Republicans opposed it, and the Bush administration threatened to veto it, calling the bill too broad and too generous."
— Grand Rapids Press, December 25, 2007

The bill ultimately died under threat of a veto.

Incredible, right? Yes, the same "compassionate" conservative who supposedly cares a lot about workers killed the bill he's calling for because he said was "too generous" to American workers thrown out on the street thanks to his K Street-written trade policies. And you can bet this brazen dishonesty insulting American workers will go almost completely unreported by the media tonight.

This kind of behavior truly could come only from a man who happily tells a country at war and in a recession that "life’s pretty comfortable inside the bubble" [4] of the White House. Thankfully, he'll be out of that bubble soon. The problem is, we don't really know if the next person entering that bubble — Democrat or Republican — will actually reflect America's deep anger [5] at a corrupt trade policy that continues to sell us out.