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Travis McArthur

By Travis McArthur
Public Citizen Trade and Finance Researcher

In Rep. Brady’s announcement of last week’s hearing on the Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA), he said, “According to the President’s own statements, [the pending trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea] have the ability to create over 250,000 American jobs.” Speaker Boehner’s blog has also been claiming this 250,000 jobs gain figure.

But did the President ever say that the three FTAs will create 250,000 jobs? No. Rep. Brady here makes at least three errors. If you correct for one, the “jobs created” number goes down to 78,000. If you correct for two, the jobs number goes down to 39,333. If you correct for three, the job gain turns into a job loss of 3,200 jobs.

Back in November 2009, Obama gave an interview to Reuters on the eve of his trip to Asia in which he stated, “And right now we have about 9 percent of — a 9 percent share of Asia’s — not just China, but Asia’s trade overall, and it’s estimated that for every 1 percent of increased share that we get, that could mean 250,000, 300,000 jobs.” (more…)

Roger Hickey

By Roger Hickey
Co-Director of the Campaign for America’s Future

The terrible shootings in Arizona should make us all get beyond the sound-bite wars. Will the media let us?

As soon as the story leaked that President Obama was about to appoint former aides to President Clinton, Bill Daley and Gene Sperling, to key positions (Chief of Staff and head of the National Economic Council, respectively), reporters from major media started calling me, seeking quotes to substantiate the story they were already writing: “Progressives Outraged, New Democrats Delighted.”

Now I know enough about Daley and Sperling that my initial instinct was to join other progressive colleagues in criticizing the appointments. Daley joined the Clinton Administration to help pass NAFTA, which has since devastated US manufacturing jobs and pissed off blue collar workers (and voters in the heartland in general) who should be solidly voting Democratic, but aren’t. And I remembered that, just as we began the successful fight against the Bush plan to privatize Social Security, Sperling was actively promoting his plan for private investment accounts which could have led to a Democratic version of privatization. Luckily, the movement ignored him back then, and virtually all Democratic lawmakers joined to stop the dangerous Bush plan for Social Security in its tracks. And, of course, recent news reports made it hard to ignore the strong connections both have with big Wall Street firms that helped engineer the deregulation of banking and the speculative orgy that followed, leading to the massive collapse of the economy. (more…)

James P. Hoffa

James P. Hoffa
General President, International Brotherhood of Teamsters

America has been in plenty of tough spots and each time emerged as a stronger nation. We overcame British tyranny, reconciled after the Civil War, vanquished Hitler and rebuilt our economy after the Great Depression.

These are hard times for many Americans, with underemployment at 17 percent and 43 million people on food stamps. But I am convinced that we will once again restore our economic greatness.

Something to think about if you’re out shopping on Black Friday is that many of the products sold at retail stores were made in China. And that many China-made children’s products in stores like Toys R Us contain toxic materials like polyvinyl chloride.

If you decide to buy electronics on Cyber Monday, you might want to remind yourself that the U.S. makes exactly zero cell phones and fewer personal computers than it did in 1975, when the first PC was sold. (more…)

Leo Hindery Jr.

By Leo Hindery Jr.
Chairman, U.S. Economy/Smart Globalization Initiative at the New America Foundation

“The Presidents of the U.S. and South Korea were unable to overcome disputes over cars, cattle and domestic politics, potentially killing the biggest bilateral trade deal the U.S. has taken up in more than a decade,” so said the first sentence in the Wall Street Journal article on November 12 entitled “U.S. Hit by Trade Setback.”

In the ‘piling on’ way that the national and business press is sadly so good at, the Journal and virtually every other major paper and television commentator in the country excoriated President Obama for “failing” to get the South Korea Free Trade Agreement (or FTA) signed.

And, for the workers of our country, thank God he ‘failed’, for this proposed FTA is just about the sorriest one since NAFTA, which failed to deliver on the benefits to the U.S. that were promised and cost us millions of high-quality jobs.

Hats off to the majority of House Democrats — and those few(er) Republicans – who have consistently opposed the three trade pacts negotiated by the Bush administration with South Korea, Panama and Colombia. And hats off especially, as I said, to President Obama whom labor leaders and powerful politicians from both parties have praised for not going ahead with the Korea FTA. Richard Trumka, President of the AFL-CIO, was spot on when he said that, “President Obama [was] exactly right in holding out for a deal that puts working people’s interests first”, a sentiment shared vocally by Leo Gerard of the Steelworkers and Tom Buffenbarger of the Machinists. (Incidentally, there has never been a trio like Trumka, Gerard and Buffenbarger in working to protect American jobs.) (more…)

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Real men, real human beings, with feelings and families, fought and died at Gettysburg to preserve the Union, to ensure, as their president, Abraham Lincoln, would say later, that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Perversely, afterwards, non-humans commandeered the constitutional amendment intended to protect the rights of former slaves. Corporations wrested from the U.S. Supreme Court a decision based on the 14^th Amendment asserting that corporations are people with rights to be upheld by the government – but with no counterbalancing human responsibilities to the republic. No duty to fight or die in war, for example.  Earlier this year, the Supreme Court expanded those rights – ruling that corporations have a First Amendment free speech right to surreptitiously spend unlimited money on political campaigns.

Today, Lincoln would have to say America’s got a government of the people by the corporations, for the corporations.

The proposed trade agreement with South Korea illustrates corporate control of government for profit. It’s the same with efforts to revive the moribund trade schemes former President George W. Bush also negotiated with Panama and Colombia, the world’s most dangerous country by far for trade unionists, with 2,700 assassinated with impunity in the past two decades, 38 slain so far this year.

Nobody likes these trade deals – except corporations. They’re all modeled on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), both of which killed American jobs while giving corporations new authority to sue governments (read: taxpayers) for regulations – like environmental standards – that corporations contend interfere with their right to make money.

The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the South Korea so-called Free Trade Agreement (FTA) would cost America 159,000 jobs and enlarge its trade deficit by $16.7 billion in its first seven years.

Americans, now suffering though corporate-caused 9.6 percent unemployment, know a deal when they see one – and the South Korea FTA is not one. In a September poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, 53 percent of Americans said so-called free trade agreements have injured the country. Only 17 percent said those trade schemes benefited the United States. Disgust with these deals spans party lines, including Tea Partiers, 61 percent of whom said they’re bad for America.

Many politicians, particularly Democrats, abhor the schemes as well. In July, just after President Obama announced that he would try to get the South Korea pact passed, 110 House Democrats described their disdain for the deal:

“We oppose specific provisions of the agreement in the financial services, investment, and labor chapters, because they benefit multi-national corporations at the expense of small businesses and workers.”

In addition, during this fall’s midterm election campaign, 205 candidates, Republican and Democrat, ran on platforms condemning job off-shoring and unfair trade, and house Democrats who ran on fair trade were three times as likely to survive the GOP “shellacking” as Democrats who supported so-called free trade schemes.

Significantly, the South Korean public and some South Korean politicians also oppose the trade proposal. In the week leading up to the G-20 meetings in Seoul, trade unionists, farmers, peasants and students filled the streets in marches and candle light vigils to express outrage with the proposed agreement, including its provisions giving U.S. corporations the right to challenge South Korean laws in private tribunals.

In October, 35 South Korean lawmakers joined 20 U.S. Representatives in writing President Obama and Korean President Lee Myunk-bak to protest the proposal.

Despite all that opposition, when Obama and Lee emerged from talks without an agreement, the American press, pundits and “analysts on both sides of the aisle,” described the situation as a major diplomacy failure, “a serious setback for the president.”

They were wrong. It wasn’t a setback for Obama. It was the president refusing to sign a bad deal for American workers.

It was, however, a humiliation for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which just spent at least $50 million from secret corporate donors to elect Republicans who will do its bidding. The South Korea deal is a priority for the Chamber. Here’s what Chamber senior vice president for international affairs Myron Brilliant told the New York Times after the South Korean negotiations broke down and Obama pledged to attempt to complete the deal over the following six weeks:

“This will be an early test for this president with the new Congress, particularly the House leadership.”

The “Brilliant” test is whether the president of the United States will comply with Chamber demands to complete trade deals that kill jobs and that Americans despise.

When Obama went to Seoul, Chamber President Thomas J. Donohue was there to, as he put it, help win the trade deal. He also was among 120 executives given exclusive access to international leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Dmitri A. Medvedev in a conference before the G-20 meeting.

The international organizers didn’t invite to the trade talks or the conference the students,  farmers, environmental groups, organized labor and untold millions of individuals who oppose the so-called free trade deals. The human beings who will be hurt most by the trade deals didn’t get a seat at the table. The corporate-people who stand to gain everything did.

Brilliant’s comments express the corporate sense of entitlement. They spent tens of millions to get what they wanted from politicians to increase profits. Now they expect it to be delivered.  It’s their recompense, their corporate reward.

If fatter profits mean fewer American jobs and wider trade deficits, that’s simply not a problem for corporations. That’s among the perks corporations got when the Supreme Court awarded them the privileges of personhood in America but none of the pesky personal and patriotic responsibilities of actual people in American society.

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Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute.  He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union.

Robert Roth

By Robert Roth
Retired public interest lawyer

Family-wage jobs in manufacturing have been “exported” until there are no longer enough to sustain the economy.  They’ve been replaced, if at all, by lower-paying service jobs without comparable benefits.  The social safety net is shredded, the health care system a mess, and basic services like education and public safety threatened.  Inequality between super-rich and increasingly-impoverished Americans has reached levels not seen since 1928.

The World Trade Organization  and “free trade agreements” (FTAs) have made things worse.  These include NAFTA and CAFTA (the North American and Central American FTAs).  They have facilitated the loss of millions of jobs.  And the proposed Korea FTA would do to us what NAFTA and CAFTA have done to other countries, empowering multinational corporations operating here to attack consumer, food safety, environmental, labor, and other laws as interference with profits.

We have to restructure the economy to serve working people and to produce what we really need.  We can create permanent jobs in regionalized manufacturing, energy conservation, truly green energy production like solar power and mass transit.  We can have a food system that produces living-wage jobs, improves soil quality and uses less petroleum.  We can have a functioning and affordable health care system, repair the safety net and restore basic services.  Redirected military spending and fair taxation can pay for much of this.

The example of Germany shows how public services support a competitive economy.  Germany’s unemployment rate is lower than ours, and in recent years, Germany (population 82 million) has often led the United States (population 307 million) in exports.  Poverty rates for children and the elderly are less than half of ours.  Germany’s health care system takes only 11 percent of GDP, while corporate-run health care here takes over 17 percent.  Yet with six weeks of vacation time, Germans work less.  The average German isn’t perpetually in debt because unions maintain fair wages and basic “public goods” (healthcare, education, childcare, public transit) are paid for by the state.  Thomas Geoghegan explores all this and more in his book, Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life (The New Press, 2010). (more…)

Lori Wallach

By Lori Wallach
Director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch

For a guy who loves “free trade” and is supposed to represent U.S. workers and businesses, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk seems way too comfy with tariffs being slapped on American exports. Instead of renegotiating a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) requirement that Mexico-domiciled tractor-trailers have full access to U.S. roads, Kirk is allowing a second year of sanctions against $2.5 billion in U.S. exports to Mexico.

Mexico was authorized to impose such tariffs, which it renewed this week, after a NAFTA tribunal ruled that the U.S. was violating NAFTA truck access rules. Speculation is that USTR thinks Congress will do a U-turn on this issue if enough economic pain is imposed via sanctions. (The sanctions seem to be having the opposite effect on Congress.) But isn’t that supposed to be Mexico’s line, while U.S. trade officials fight for U.S. interests not NAFTA uber alles?

Anyway, with concerns over the prospect of interlocking highway and political carnage, Congress is not going to prioritize NAFTA compliance over public safety. Congress explicitly blocked attempts by George W. Bush to do so. (more…)

Stan Sorscher

By Stan Sorscher
Labor Representative, Society for Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA)

One popular position on trade is to “level the playing field.”

I’m not always sure what that means, but I’m in favor of it.

Any intention to level the playing field starts with a simple realization — that rules of trade can favor one outcome over another. For instance, our current free trade policies tip the playing field steeply in favor of more imports, and movement of production to low-wage countries. This is good for multinational businesses and investors, but bad for workers and communities. Trade agreements spell out investor rights in fine detail, while pushing aside environmental conditions, labor rights, human rights and public health.

 
Fig. 1 Our trade policies are tipped in favor of imports and against domestic industry.

One central outcome of globalization is to make capital mobile in new ways with greater ease. Free trade rules encourage GE to invest billions in China, Microsoft to invest billions in India and Boeing to invest billions in Russia. Our current policy makes low-wage countries attractive, and makes new investment in our domestic economy unattractive. Andy Grove made this point quite clearly in his July 1 commentary in BusinessWeek. (more…)

The political pendulum of time was swinging more to the right when we ended up with George W. Bush as President. After that we got a person that was supposed to be for workers and came as a Democrat but a moderate (Blue Dog Democrat). He was none other than William Jefferson Clinton. He changed the face of the Democratic Party, which was a party that represented the working class. He made such statements as “The era of big government was over.”  That’s when I knew things were really going to the radical right wing.

I always felt government was good as long as they counteracted the power of the corporate interests in favor of the consumers and workers. Clinton brought us NAFTA and other free trade deals, and we really started losing our manufacturing base. They opened the door for those countries to flood us with foreign products, thus creating a huge trade imbalance.

Incidentally, most of the countries to which American corporations moved were paying less than subsistence wages, had no unions, no consumer rights, etc. So free trade did not lift those people out of their desperate economic and social conditions.

One good thing about Clinton, though, was he did leave a surplus on the books. After his administration, we had ended up with the most Radical Right Wing Government ever under George Bush#2. They created a policy of deregulating all business. After eight years of Bush and Carl Rove, the country was bankrupt with a huge deficit! We all know the economic collapse that Bush left – a near worldwide depression which we still are suffering from.

Michael Cmero Sr.
Carmel, N.Y.
Retired Railroad Worker

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This is a quote from Franklin Roosevelt. When confronted with the wishes of his progressive voters, his reply was, “I agree with you, Now go make me do it!” In the coming elections this year, that is what Labor and Progressives are going to do.

The incumbents in Arkansas and Pennsylvania have opposed the Employee Free Choice Act and, in Arkansas, National Health Care. Luckily, there are real progressives willing to take their jobs.  By placing real Democrats in Congress we are attempting to place pressure on the President (you remember, the guy who promised us he would pass the Employee free Choice Act) to do the right thing.

But it appears there are forces amassed against us that don’t want to do the right thing. Offering Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter’s opponent a position in the administration if he would not run, and sending former President Bill Clinton to Arkansas to rage against us to “not be manipulated!” tells me they just don’t get it.

Clinton, we have not forgotten the North American Free Trade Agreement. We know whose side you are on. But we still have some hope for the present administration, and we stand ready to “make them do it!”

Kris Dye
President
USW Local 4959
Spokane, Wash.