Shifting Trends Towards Fair Trade in the United States

Time for change

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Wed Dec-09-09 08:03 PM
Original message

Shifting Trends Towards Fair Trade in the United States

Edited on Wed Dec-09-09 08:08 PM by Time for change

The difference between “Fair Trade” and “Free Trade” very closely resembles the difference between liberals and so-called “conservatives”. It is primarily the difference between favoring the many vs. the wealthy few. In other words, as Deborah James describes Fair Trade:

As an oppositional ideology to free trade, its essence is an approach to trade policies that benefit workers, communities and the environment, rather than multinational corporations. This approach demands change of the existing multilateral structures and agreements.

Pro-“Free Trade” groups, such as the libertarian CATO Institute, cast “Free Trade” as the essence of freedom, that is, “the freedom of Americans to trade and invest in the global economy”. The World Trade Organization (WTO) describes its role in facilitating free trade like this:

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is the only global international organization dealing with the rules of trade between nations. At its heart are the WTO agreements, negotiated and signed by the bulk of the world’s trading nations and ratified in their parliaments. The goal is to help producers of goods and services, exporters, and importers conduct their business.

These benign definitions of “Free Trade” neglect its very considerable downsides. As George Lakoff has explained, one person’s “freedom” can be another’s death sentence. In “helping producers of goods and services, exporters, and importers conduct their business”, the rights of workers and communities often get trampled on. Specifically, so-called “Free Trade” agreements contain clauses that make it illegal for nations to ban trade that involves serious risks to worker safety or destruction of our environment, or to include requirements to ensure a decent standard of living for the workers who make trade possible.

It also needs to be said that trade agreements are often highly undemocratic, in that they often involve unelected persons making rules that conflict with the laws or constitutions of the nations that are obligated to abide by them. Notwithstanding the fact that the U.S. Congress voted to join the WTO in 1994, membership in the WTO requires our country to abide by rules established by a non-elected organization, which can and often do conflict with our laws and Constitution:

The newest modification of GATT, approved as an ordinary statute by the U.S. Congress, has resulted in the setting up of what some have termed a world government, the World Trade Organization, a bureaucratic agency which has incredible power over the signatories to the treaty. The WTO is able to set aside laws adopted by cities, counties, tribes, states or provinces, and even nations, if they serve in any manner to restrict trade.

A few words about the legality of multi-national and international treaties

I certainly do not mean to imply by the above discussion that I am against multi-national and international treaties in general. To the contrary, I strongly believe that international agreements and treaties are essential to the maintenance of peace and the preservation of our planet. The prime example is the United Nations Charter, whose express purpose is to “maintain international peace and security”.

Member nations are bound by the terms of the United Nations Charter, which contains nothing which is contrary to the Constitution of the United States. Furthermore, new conventions passed by the United Nations oblige its member nations only to the extent that they agree to the terms of the new conventions. For example, the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which the United States joined in 1994. In any event, given that the purpose of the United Nations is consistent with officially sanctioned philosophy of the United States, it seems unlikely that it would pass conventions that are contrary to our Constitution, and as far as I am aware that has never happened. Jack Forbes, in an article titled “The WTO Nullifies the Constitution”, explains the basis for the double standard:

It is very significant that the White House always holds that every agreement designed to protect the rights of ordinary citizens (such as the international agreements guaranteeing human rights) are treaties requiring a two-thirds majority vote in the U.S. Senate. Why then are trade agreements to be treated differently? Why does the Biosphere Convention await a two-thirds vote and time-consuming committee hearings? …

Fundamentally, the WTO is designed to work in the interests of the richest, more aggressive corporations. There is very little doubt but that GATT (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade – on which the WTO is based) will cause the mass dislocation of peasants, farmers, workers, and small business people…

Shifting trends in the United States regarding “Fair Trade” vs. “Free Trade”

The passage of NAFTA
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) substantially expanded free trade in North America. When it was under consideration in the United States in 1993, there was a lot of sentiment against it, but not overwhelmingly so. Though opponents claimed that its passage would be bad for the environment and would cause substantial loss of jobs in our country as corporations moved out of the country to find workers willing to work for lower wages and under dangerous conditions, there was nevertheless substantial support for it. With the support of a Democratic President, which led to a fairly even split in the Democratic Congressional vote, and the overwhelming support of Congressional Republicans, it passed by 61-38 in the Senate and 234-200 in the House.

Protests against the WTO in Seattle – 1999
In November 1999, representatives of major governments met in Seattle to discuss WTO trading rules. By that time much of the world had become aware of the detrimental consequences of so-called “Free Trade”:

Hundreds of millions continue to suffer daily the consequences of this regime. The number of people suffering from extreme poverty in poor countries has increased since the WTO was established; so has hunger, with two-thirds of developing countries now net importers of food. In the U.S. 5 million manufacturing workers have lost their jobs.

Meanwhile, US families have been flooded with unsafe imported food and products, many bearing the names of US firms that use their WTO privileges to re locate production to countries where they can exploit sweatshop labor and avoid health, safety and environmental regulation.

Consequently, massive protests were conducted:

Protesters came from all over the world, not just the developed countries. They ranged from human rights groups, students, environmental groups, religious leaders, labor rights activists etc wanting fairer trade with less exploitation…The fact that 50,000 to 100,000 people turned up in the pouring rain, through all the police crackdowns etc indicates the sheer number of people who are concerned at the current issues, as obviously not everyone could be in Seattle…

While the majority were non-violent protestors, a small group started some violence and looting that led to the Seattle police and National Guard declaring a state of emergency. This led to the issuing of curfews, arresting, tear-gassing, pepper spraying and even shooting rubber bullets at innocent, non-violent protestors.

The corporate news media did all that they could to misrepresent the protests, concentrating on and misrepresenting the violence of the protesters, while utterly failing to cover the reasons for the protests or the disproportional violence of the police:

Once more, the mainstream media coverage in the US about such a major event was very much lacking. It was pretty much corporate led and therefore concentrating on the sensationalism of the violent aspects of the protests, without really looking at the real issues (such as the corporate domination with lack of accountability)… often portraying all the protestors as “loony leftists” or violent groups with no clue…

Many believe that these protests represented a turning point in the battle against “Free Trade” with regard to the momentum for “Free Trade” and to public opinion:

The results were that the WTO was unable to meet as planned… In an allusion to the beginning battles of the Revolutionary War, Michael Moore has stated that the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle were the Lexington and Concord of our times of a movement that cannot be stopped.

The passage of CAFTA
By the time that the Central American Free Trade Agreement came up for passage in the United States in 2005, attitudes towards free trade had changed quite a bit. This time the vote was much closer, though it passed – 54-45 in the Senate and only 217-215 in the House:

The House's vote was held open for more than one hour to ensure passage… The midnight arm-twisting capped a frenzied lobbying push by the Bush administration and House Republican leaders to secure support for the measure, which engendered strong opposition… Unlike in previous trade agreements, the overwhelming majority of Democrats opposed the Central American pact, arguing that the Central American Free Trade Agreement would cost American jobs. The agreement's failure to include adequate workforce and environmental standards warrant its rejection, said House minority leader Nancy Pelosi.

2006 and 2008 elections see massive shift towards Fair Trade sentiment
In the 2006 mid-term elections, Fair Traders won 25 seats against anti-fair trader incumbents – 19 in the House and 6 in the Senate. They also won 12 open seats that were previously occupied by anti-fair traders – 11 in the House and one in the Senate – for a total gain of 37 seats – 30 in the House and 7 in the Senate. In marked contrast, there was not a single Fair Trader seat that was lost to an anti-fair trader congressperson. Lori Wallach, Director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch division, commented on the significance of this:

This election evaporated whatever doubts remained that trade was a politically powerful issue. Given the national sweep of fair trade winners and the key races in which trade played a big role, trade and globalization issues will have major saliency in the 2008 presidential election and beyond.

Some would claim that the pickup in the Senate was attributable more generally to the Democratic resurgence in Congress, rather than specifically to Fair Trade. But the total Democratic pickup was 31 House seats and 7 Senate seats (including Bernie Sanders) in 2006, almost identical to the gain in Fair Trade seats. So at the very least it could be said that not just Democrats, but liberal Democrats made a big resurgence in 2006. That is a very important message for those who advocate that the Democratic Party should play it safe by putting up moderate to conservative candidates for Congress.

That progress was virtually repeated in 2008. In that year, Fair Traders picked up a net gain of 28 seats in the House and 7 in the Senate – in a year that saw a Democratic net pickup of 29 seats in the House and 8 seats in the Senate. In that year 18 Republican Congresspersons ran for office as Free Traders.

Also of note is the fact that the 2008 Democratic Presidential candidate ran on a Fair Trade platform:

Obama distanced himself not just from Bush Republicans but from Clinton Democrats when he condemned “a Washington where decades of trade deals like NAFTA and China have been signed with plenty of protections for corporations and their profits, but none for our environment or our workers, who’ve seen factories shut their doors and millions of jobs disappear.”

Current status

One might have thought that such massive net gains in Fair Traders would have substantially changed things around since CAFTA barely squeaked by in 2005. But such has not yet been the case. In an article titled “Obama’s Choice”, Lori Wallach explains the current international status of free trade:

Contrary to press reports that the global economic crisis has ended the era of market fundamentalism, 153 member countries remain bound to a full complement of neoliberal policies required by the existing WTO rules, established in 1995. And even though numerous governments have been replaced with ones that better represent their citizens’ interests, the WTO stands as a barrier against change.

One problem is that President Obama appears to have changed his attitude on this issue:

Unfortunately, by the time he secured the nomination, Obama was backtracking, telling Fortune that his anti-NAFTA rhetoric had been “overheated and amplified.” Once elected, Obama, always more of a cautious centrist on economics than his supporters hoped or his critics feared, took counsel from free-trade fabulists like Austan Goolsbee and Rahm Emanuel. With his appointments of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Trade Representative Ron Kirk, the new president quickly signaled that there would be no immediate change in Washington’s approach to trade or to the raft of issues associated with it.

Nevertheless, as John Nichols describes in an article titled “The Spirit of Seattle Lives on”, several Congresspersons, including Sherrod Brown, are determined, especially given the double-digit unemployment situation in our country today, to change things. They have:

led efforts to move supporters of fair trade from the defensive position of opposing bad deals to the offensive one of promoting legislation like the Trade Reform, Accountability, Development, and Employment (TRADE) Act. That bill proposes a review of existing agreements and renegotiation of those that fail to establish a “floor of decency” strong enough to support fair treatment of workers, basic environmental standards, food safety protections and financial regulations that prevent dangerous speculation. So far, 128 House members have signed on, including a significant number of conservative Blue Dogs and centrist New Democrats.

Lori Wallach concludes “Obama’s Choice” with this:

As Americans committed to global justice, we must present the choice facing Obama in the stark terms it represents. Will he stand with the majority of Americans and implement his campaign commitments to change the rules of the global economy so they no longer “favor the few rather than the many”? Or will he side with the banksters and other global elites and fall back into the failed status quo? To repeat a popular refrain from the streets of Seattle: the whole world is watching.