Fareed Zakaria

The Growing Power of the Fair Trade Uprising

David Sirota — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:32:19 -0700

LOUISVILLE, KY - I spent yesterday in Ohio's three biggest cities - Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati. With the Buckeye State among the hardest hit by lobbyist-written trade policies, it wasn't surprising that NAFTA was at the center of discussion at events for THE UPRISING in Ohio (you can listen to my Ohio NPR interview from yesterday here for a taste).

Over the last few years, polls show the public has moved to something of a consensus position on trade: full-on opposition to NAFTA-style pacts. That's for good reason as this Associated Press report shows. Tearing down tariffs and protections without regard for the consequences is not only a dangerous departure from the policies that built America's economy, but also a deliberate way to force American and foreign workers into a wage-cutting, environment-destroying, union-busting race to the bottom.

The AP story shows the destructive domino effect of NAFTA and the subsequent NAFTA-style agreements like China PNTR. When multinational corporations shift jobs to Mexico, right-wing trade fundamentalists in Washington offer up a "let them eat cake message" telling workers in Ohio that the shift at least helps impoverished workers south of the border. Then, of course, those workers in Mexico are forced to slash their own wages to compete with desperate workers in China. When the jobs inevitably shift to China, Mexico is left in shambles, and then Chinese workers are forced to slash their own wages to make sure jobs don't go to Vietnam or North Korea, where corporations are angling to employ enslaved labor.

Meanwhile, many of these trade fundamentalists like Tom Friedman and Fareed Zakaria flaunt their supposed environmentalism and humanitarianism by publicly worrying about issues like global warming and the erosion of human rights in the developing world - even though the domino effect they cheer on creates pressure on governments to reduce their pollution controls and human rights in order to retain foreign investment.

The problem, of course, is that it's hard to argue with NAFTA backers because they aren't interested in facts. It was none other than Friedman who admitted he vigorously backed a recent NAFTA-style trade deal without even bothering to read it. He, like every other reporter and commentator in Washington, calls NAFTA-style pacts "free trade" - despite the fact that they include thousands of pages of protectionist provisions for corporate profits, despite the fact that even the original architects of NAFTA have long admitted that these agreements aren't free, but instead create "managed" trade. That's the big problem - these deals are managed to enrich the elite at the expense of the rest of us.

Just like it's impossible to argue about reality with deranged religious fundamentalist terrorists, it's impossible to argue with deranged trade fundamentalists who cloak economic terrorism in the language of enlightenment. It gets to the point where Limousine Libertarians in wealthy enclaves like Boulder take to the websites of major newspapers to cite charts showing the decimation of Americans' wages as proof that NAFTA works for Americans.

Left for dead, of course, is a place like Ohio.

Wealthy pundits from New York and Washington drop into the Buckeye State every four years to berate the occasional Democratic presidential candidate who dares to question NAFTA at the quadrennial photo-op at an abandoned manufacturing plant. In the general election, those Democratic presidential candidates then inevitably hire teams of Wall Street insiders who back NAFTA as their top economic advisers, and then scurry to business publications to reassure corporate lobbyists that no, they aren't really serious about reforming our trade policy. Their Republican opponents, meanwhile, head to places like Colombia to tell the right-wing regime there that America - that purported beacon of freedom to the world's masses - will be helping murderous developing-world governments continue to brutalize workers.

But this quadrennial cycle of deception may finally be changing - and not because of the benevolence of any presidential candidate, but because the political tectonics of trade have shifted so dramatically thanks to those who are doing the unglamorous - but critical - work of leveraging real power.

Groups like Public Citizen and the Citizens Trade Campaign have ignored the Partisan War Syndrome that plagues parts of the blogosphere and the progressive left, and used this election as an instrument of the uprising - rather than seeing the election as an objective unto itself. They have, for instance, used the hard-fought Democratic primary to elicit concrete commitments on trade policy from the candidates - including nominee Barack Obama. Those efforts have been supported by a group of industrial state lawmakers, who have similarly leveraged the election as a way to force a conversation about trade into the national political debate. That conversation has been so intense it even wedged its way into the Republican presidential nomination through the candidacy of Mike Huckabee - a candidacy that won Republican primaries in some of the most conservative states based, in part, on his fair trade message.

These moves around trade suggest the emergence of true movement thinking out of the tumult of the uprising I describe in my book. This fair trade movement may continue to be ignored by the media (and, frankly, much of the blogosphere), but it represents one of the most encouraging transpartisan developments of the last few years. Out of the shadows of the crumbling factories that I have driven by here in Ohio may indeed come real change - if this movement continues to coalesce.

This is an ongoing series from the national tour for THE UPRISING. You can order The Uprising at Amazon.com or through your local independent bookstore.

Fareed Zakaria's "Expertise" and Elite Propaganda's Insulting Dishonesty

David Sirota — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 09:00:19 -0800

Fareed Zakaria, as his Newsweek biography is happy to tell you, is a Very Important Person looked to as an "expert" on international issues. Somehow, he retains this billing despite advocating for the worst foreign policy disaster in a generation, hiding his dual role as simultaneous "journalist" and Bush administration adviser, insisting that the Iraq War is "over," and publishing fact-free columns like this week's on international trade.

Zakaria is alarmed that presidential candidates like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are actually giving voice to the concerns of the vast majority of Americans who polls show are unhappy with our current lobbyist-written trade policies - policies that pundits like him have jammed down the country's throat. Really, Zakaria says, how dare presidential candidates have the nerve to actually represent the people and not the Punditburo.

This is disdain for the majority is standard fare for a magazine bloviator typing out columns from the comfortable confines of a Manhattan office. But what's striking is Zakaria's attempt to wrap elitism in altruism.

To review: Our trade policy includes no labor, environmental or human rights protections, but includes restrictive protections for corporate profits - patent protections that keep drug prices high in the developing world, intellectual property protections that hurt innovation in the developing world, etc. Our trade policy also includes massive agricultural subsidies rigged to reward multinational corporate agribusiness over family farmers both here and abroad. None of this is news - and you might think such basic facts would be well known to "experts" like Zakaria.

But think again. In his column, he cites a mythical "struggling farmer" in the developing world who he says believes "access to world markets is far more important than foreign aid or U.N. programs." Apparently, Zakaria hasn't noticed that many of those farmers that he supposedly cares so much about are right now in the process of revolting against the final implementation of NAFTA and the Peru Free Trade Agreement. He apparently also never saw the acclaimed documentary "Life and Debt" which charts how developing-world farmers are thrown into poverty when their markets are opened up to taxpayer-subsidized agribusiness - and how that poverty then breeds insurrections that requires violent military interventions to crush. Then again, that's how elitists like Zakaria like their policies implemented - they believe "freedom" in the Mideast should be ushered in at gunpoint, and "free" trade brought about at the tip of a bayonet. Ah, the joys of neoconservative "freedom."

Zakaria goes on to lament that in pushing for labor and environmental standards, Democratic presidential candidates "are pandering to the worst instincts of Americans, encouraging a form of xenophobia and chauvinism and validating the utterly self-defeating idea of protectionism." He says this hurts America's image because "what is said in Ohio is heard in Ghana and Bangladesh and Colombia as well." Yet, Newsweek's "expert" apparently didn't have 5 minutes to actually research the topic at hand. Because had he spent that small amount of time actually "reporting" (I know, an outdated endeavor for today's pundits), he would have quickly found this recent worldwide public opinion study from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs showing majorities all over the globe "think trade harms the environment and threatens jobs and want to mitigate these effects with environmental and labor standards." Yet according to Zakaria, presidential candidates expressing those exact feelings run the risk of engendering an anti-American "backlash." In truth, the only "backlash" they are creating is one from elitists like Newsweek's economic "expert."

The rest of the column whines on much like this, with Zakaria firing out most of the tired fallacies of the right - my favorite of which is the one where he channels John McCain - the man who recently said "NAFTA has created jobs, and I think it's been good for our economy, I think it's been good for the Canadian economy, and I think it's been good for the Mexican economy." Zakaria one-ups McCain, saying "NAFTA has been pivotal in transforming Mexico into a stable democracy with a growing economy." Yes, folks - forget about the Mexican election that just took place under a shroud of controversy, forget about the Chiapas unrest, forget that a million Americans have been put out of work because of NAFTA and forget that 19 million more Mexicans now live in poverty than the pre-NAFTA era. McCain and Zakaria say NAFTA has been terrific for Mexico - and so we should just accept that as fact.

Back in November, Time magazine's Joe Klein was humiliated for passing off patent lies as facts, and responded by saying "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right." One journalism observer called it a low-point in the profession's history. But I would say Zakaria takes that distinction. In this column about trade, he actually comes right out and declares that when it comes to "the facts about trade," he has no interest in "go[ing] into them in any great detail."

Like the rest of his well-paid cronies in the media Establishment who rail on populism, he expects us to believe - without a shred of actual factual proof or "reporting" - that the poor farmer in the developing world is eager to be thrown off his land by subsidized multinational agribusiness companies; thrilled that the protectionist provisions in America's trade policy make medicine prices unaffordable for him and his family; upset that any American political leaders would talk about protecting his labor and human rights so as to prevent ongoing exploitation; and in awe of that supposedly great economic and political utopia known as Mexico - a place where economic inequality, poverty and political unrest runs rampant.

This is the "expertise" of Fareed Zakaria - the Very Important Person who helps dictate the terms of debate on international economic issues. And this is why that debate is so divorced from reality.