The Ohio Debate Primer on Trade

David Sirota — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 17:04:06 -0800

On Tuesday night, 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).

NATIONAL POLL NUMBERS: Americans now strongly oppose the NAFTA trade model — the model that includes all sorts of protections for corporate profits (intellectual property, patents, copyrights, etc.) but no similar protections for other priorities (wages, jobs, the environment, human rights, etc.). In October, a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll found the vast majority of Americans believe our current trade policies are bad for the U.S. economy. That included Republicans by a two-to-one margin. In January, Fortune magazine's poll showed 68 percent of Americans say our trading partners are benefiting the most from our trade policy. A December 2005 Gallup Poll shows that these numbers are part of a trend: The number of Americans who say our current trade policies are a threat have climbed back to 1992 levels. Finally, a post-election poll in 2006 found that unfair trade deals was listed as the number one concern among Republicans voters who considered supporting a Democratic candidate for Congress.

OHIO POLL NUMBERS: For the two Democratic candidates, the issue could not be more politically significant in Ohio. Back in 2004, exit polls from Ohio's Democratic primary found seven in 10 Democratic voters blamed foreign trade for taking away jobs. Two years later, Sherrod Brown crushed his Republican opponent in Ohio's 2006 U.S. Senate race on a campaign promising to fight lobbyist-written trade policies. A Rasmussen Poll just out today finds "just 16% of Likely Democratic Primary Voters believe the North American Free Trade Agreement—NAFTA—is good for America." Fifty-five percent "say the trade agreement negotiated by the Clinton Administration is bad for the nation." Additionally, "By a 53% to 14% margin, voters believe that Obama opposes NAFTA while there are mixed perceptions on where Clinton stands." In all, "35% believe she favors NAFTA, 31% believe she opposes it and 34% are not sure. This issue is critical in a state that has lost thousands of manufacturing jobs."

CANDIDATES' PUBLIC STATEMENTS: Both Clinton and Obama have pledged to amend NAFTA-style trade deals, add tougher labor and environmental standards, and better enforce trade laws on the books. On the specific issue of NAFTA, over the last week, Clinton has been denying she ever supported that 1993 trade agreement. Here is a look at her public statements about NAFTA in the past. Obama, meanwhile, has been attacking Clinton for publicly supporting NAFTA up until 2004. And though Obama has never endorsed or bragged about NAFTA as Clinton did, he has made statements suggesting he at one point supported the NAFTA model. You can see some of those statements here, courtesy of a Clinton mailer.

CANDIDATES' VOTING RECORD: Both Clinton and Obama voted against the Central American Free Trade Agreement — a bill that expanded the NAFTA model. Both also supported the Peru Free Trade Agreement, whose labor and environmental standards were mildly stronger than NAFTA's, but whose overall structure was still the destructive NAFTA model.

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

David Sirota — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:31:25 -0800

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, the Panamanian government has made its country a corporate tax haven, 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.

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" 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 at a corrupt trade policy that continues to sell us out.

cafta

The Ohio Debate Primer on Trade

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