Robert L. Borosage: Brain Dead Trade Debate

[babylonsister]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-l-borosage/brain-dead-trade-debate_b_95786.html

Robert L. Borosage

Brain Dead Trade Debate

Posted April 9, 2008 | 09:00 AM (EST)


The economy is tanking. Gas is headed to $4.00 a gallon. One in ten homes are "under water," worth less than their mortgages. The IMF predicts up to $1 trillion in financial losses, meaning banks and securities firms that have written off abut $230 billion are still staring at the abyss. The war in Iraq consumes $12 billion a month, as well as the attention of our leaders, and the lives of too many of our soldiers.

So the president of the United States steps up to the crisis and demands a fast track vote in 90 days from the Congress on...a trade agreement with Colombia.

Immediately, the editorial pages and establishment columnists trot out their knee jerk "free trade" arguments, demanding that Congress pass the bill. Immediately, both Clinton and Obama -- in the midst of a primary in Pennsylvania wracked by the loss of manufacturing jobs -- come out against the accord. Their opposition is immediately dismissed as a pander to labor, since just as Obama was embarrassed in Ohio when his economic advisor apparently reassured the Canadian government that Obama really didn't mean his anti-NAFTA rhetoric, Hillary Clinton is forced to stage a public dispatch of chief strategist and pollster Mark Penn, who was advising the Colombian government on how to get the deal passed in his day job. (She couldn't separate herself from her husband who has profited greatly as a consistent supporter of this and all other corporate trade accords)

The arguments for the trade accord are mostly insulting. The Colombians will benefit greatly, we're told, although their goods already come into America duty free. The US will benefit greatly, although any increased trade with Colombia will be a rounding error in our trade accounts.

snip//

It is time to get serious. The president and the Congress -- as everyone from the IMF to the hapless Alan Greenspan pleads -- should be focused on getting out of the recession. The hemorrhaging in housing has to be staunched We need a serious stimulus package that aids states and localities and starts to rebuild this country. We face a big-time struggle to curb the Wall Street addiction to gambling, imposing strict limits on the banks and investment houses that are "too big to fail." We need to develop a new global strategy to get our trade in balance, ending the staggering deficits that simply can't be sustained. And we've got to find a way out of a trillion dollar war that has no end in sight.

These are fundamental issues of national and economic security that can't be ignored. The accord with Colombia is utterly irrelevant, a silly distraction. The ship of state is under fire, taking in water and headed into an iceberg, and the president and the free trade claque want to argue about how much to tip the band. That, my friends, is lunacy.

[OhioChick]

1. K&R

:kick:

[bbgrunt]

2. another k & r

[bemildred]

3. A perfect example from WaPo:

Drop Dead, Colombia

THE YEAR 2008 may enter history as the time when the Democratic Party lost its way on trade. Already, the party's presidential candidates have engaged in an unseemly contest to adopt the most protectionist posture, suggesting that, if elected, they might pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Yesterday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared her intention to change the procedural rules governing the proposed trade promotion agreement with Colombia. President Bush submitted the pact to Congress on Tuesday for a vote within the next 90 legislative days, as required by the "fast-track" authority under which the U.S. negotiated the deal with Colombia. Ms. Pelosi says she'll ask the House to undo that rule.

The likely result is no vote on the agreement this year. Ms. Pelosi denies that her intent is to kill the bill, insisting yesterday that Congress simply needs more time to consider it "in light of the economic uncertainty in our country." She claimed that she feared that, "if brought to the floor immediately, would lose. And what message would that send?" But Ms. Pelosi's decision-making process also included a fair component of pure Washington pique: She accused Mr. Bush of "usurp the discretion of the speaker of the House" to schedule legislation.

That political turf-staking, and the Democrats' decreasingly credible claims of a death-squad campaign against Colombia's trade unionists, constitutes all that's left of the case against the agreement. Economically, it should be a no-brainer -- especially at a time of rising U.S. joblessness. At the moment, Colombian exports to the United States already enjoy preferences. The trade agreement would make those permanent, but it would also give U.S. firms free access to Colombia for the first time, thus creating U.S. jobs. Politically, too, the agreement is in the American interest, as a reward to a friendly, democratic government that has made tremendous strides on human rights, despite harassment from Venezuela's Hugo Chávez.

To be sure, President Bush provoked Ms. Pelosi. But he forced the issue only after months of inconclusive dickering convinced him that Democrats were determined to avoid a vote that would force them to accept accountability for opposing an agreement that is manifestly in America's interest. It turns out his suspicions were correct.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/09/AR2008040903638.html