One hundred years ago Democrats and Progressives were strongly behind Free Trade. America produced more goods and foodstuffs than it consumed and the economy was strengthened by being able to sell goods to overseas markets with few restrictions. Conversely consumers benefited when goods not made here were imported and did not face high protective tariffs so that retail prices could be relatively cheap. Big Business which controlled the Republican party and had long championed high protective tariffs so it would not have to compete with foreign goods began to see the benefit of expansion of manufacturing and selling overseas - that also meant increased hiring. So there became a bipartisan consensus to lower tariffs and seek access to overseas trade.
After WWII this became the ingrained American policy and led to the US sponsoring GATT (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) a UN affiliated operation that sought to reduce tariffs imposed by countries on imported goods and relax non-tariff trade barriers, such as regulations that restricted employment and raised manufacturing costs. Eventually the US persuaded the west to replace GATT with the World Trade Organization that would not only provide a forum for negotiating freer trade among nations but would regulate it and enforce the regulations.
By the time of the Clinton administration free trade had become gospel among both US political parties - Democrats for reasons of historic positioning(the basis of which most had forgotten) and Republicans because Big Business liked a global economy. So the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was passed which essentially sought to make US-Canada-Mexico one continental economy.
But at the same time in the 1990's it became evident that companies were moving their factories out of the US into not only Mexico and Canada but into third world nations. The labor was cheaper, there were few environmental or worker safety regulations and cheaper health care costs if any associated with employment. As America began to produce less and used fewer workers to do so it began to dawn on liberals that free trade, unless it was fair trade, was not a good thing for our country.
The Bush-Cheney crowd in order to further the need of big business and the military industrial complex to invest overseas decided to tie trade agreements with national security. So they negotiated agreements with “allies”. The most significant being South Korea which is a nation tied to the United States since the 1949 war. They also negotiated with Columbia, claiming it would help that government in its struggle with the narco-rebels and Panama which is adjacent to Columbia and now includes the former Canal Zone. The Obama administration in its misguided attempt to reform rather than replace the Bush foreign policy renegotiated the agreements getting some cosmetic changes that appeared to acknowledge American concerns about workers rights and wages and safety and assuring that goods not be produced using environmentally deficient methods.
Like all else in the federal government trade agreements are political. The Republicans now favor all of them because their business masters do and the Democrats now oppose them because they are inherently anti-organized labor and anti- environment. So Obama endorses his version of the agreements and since the Republicans want them badly he makes a deal with the Republicans in Congress - he’ll submit the trade agreements for approval, which only the President can do, and the Republicans in Congress will block his jobs proposal. Not exactly an LBJ type deal. It’s what we used to call simply a dumb move. The Republicans get their business pals their trade agreements and the Democrats get the workers and the middle class nothing.
The 99% Movement, aka the Occupy Movement, has sprung up due to the frustration of the middle class with the corporate mogul’s control of all facets of our system economic and political. With big money in control of the Republican party and with the Democratic President paying only lip service to liberal pro middle class programs where do the unemployed, the poor, the middle class young people strangled with debt, the homeowners with mortgages larger than their properties are now worth, and the seniors facing rising health care costs look for leadership, help and hope.
Whenever our nation has faced a social division - a split among our people based on race or geography that threatened to dissolve the ties that bind this union their arose leaders to whom all elements of our society could look to. Not at first, because initially except for George Washington these leaders were seen as polarizing political figures. But after their election Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Eisenhower and Reagan struck a chord that unified rather than divided. Let us hope and pray that out of the 2012 election such a unifying force emerges and the vast majority of Americans, the 99% (not the1% with all the wealth), reject racial, religious and radical extremism and get this country back on the right track to progress.
As for free trade agreements which the President should withdraw and Congress should reject our countries policy should be to seek trade agreements with trading partners that life the life style of our partners workers and improve their economy not deals that lower the lifestyles of our people and hurt our economy. In 1911 I would have supported Wilson and Roosevelt and Free Trade but now in 2011 we must insist on Fair Trade.
12 Oct. 2011
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