The Return of the NAFTA Election Cycle?

(Disclaimer: Public Citizen has no preference among the candidates.)

As we throw out the old calendar and enter an election year, Democratic and Republican party leaders are busy figuring out their electoral strategies.  Various Democratic strategists, for their part, are running through the familiar arguments about appealing to independent voters versus rallying the base.  Arguing for a rally-the-base approach, Democratic strategist Steve Rosenthal reminds us that voters punished the members of Congress who pushed though a bad trade pact one fateful election cycle:

In 1994, the year Republicans swept to power in the House and Senate, union members were demoralized and stayed home because the Clinton administration had fought vigorously to pass NAFTA and backed down on health care reform.

Economist Paul Krugman also argues this NAFTA point while discussing the Republican strategy: “The idea that NAFTA was a big plus for Clinton, coming from Rahm Emanuel of all people, is just too bone-headed for words.”

Fortunately for everyone involved, the choice between fair trade and NAFTA-style agreements is not a choice among appealing to liberal, conservative, or moderate voters.  Polls have demonstrated that voters of all stripes are fed up with the NAFTA model, particularly in swing states.  Fair trade candidates elected in 2008 now have the seats in Congress to prove it, which makes clear that support of the NAFTA model is a losing strategy, while supporting the TRADE Act might be a way to win.

Pokemon Gets Offshored

As if further evidence were needed that offshoring is no longer a pure blue collar phenomenon, the WSJ reports on the latest occupation to get hit:

Anime, Japan's stylized animation that has become hugely popular around the world, helped reshape the country's image as a cultural trend-setter. But behind the scenes, things aren't so rosy.

Japan's animation industry is struggling. Anime workers are unhappy, toiling long hours at low pay. Sales have been declining. On top of that, there is fast-growing competition from across Asia ....

The Japanese government says it is trying to support the industry, with plans to increase spending on education and training young animators and allocating more funds toward film marketing. But nurturing home-grown talent has become more difficult as Japanese companies increasingly outsource anime drawing to studios in China, South Korea and Vietnam, where labor costs are lower.

Protesters Counter Government of Colombia’s PR Campaign

On Tuesday, Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch division joined with other organizations to host a successful protest of Colombia’s current PR campaign at Union Station. GTW staff worked with several other public interest groups, including Witness for Peace, TransAfrica Forum, International Labor Rights Forum, the Latin American Working Group, and the Colombia Human Rights Committee. The Teamsters also came out in force.

The backstory here is that the government of Colombia has spent almost a million dollars on a PR campaign in Washington, D.C., supposedly to try to change perceptions about the country and boost tourism. A sprawling, elaborate display has been set up at Union Station, with representatives handing out free flowers and coffee. The location is suspicious – Union Station is where congressional staffers flock every day before and after work, staffers whose bosses may have to vote on the pending Colombia FTA. The campaign’s media work is being coordinated by a former Bush administration trade official, and business representatives connect the effort to the Colombian government’s desire to promote the U.S.-Colombia FTA. The agreement would basically expand NAFTA to the country with the highest level of unionist murders in the world.

We came together with other public interest organizations to illustrate how Colombia has earned the reputation it is trying to reverse, through mass discrimination against indigenous peoples, forced displacement, and ongoing violence against union organizers, workers, and human rights defenders. In order to counter the rosy picture being painted inside, protesters used street theater to show how the proposed Colombia FTA would protect Colombian and American business interests while allowing for continued abuse of Colombia’s workers and indigenous population. Protesters marched outside Union Station for several hours, and constructed a memorial to honor the growing list of victims of violence and impunity in Colombia. The protest disrupted foot traffic going in and out of the station, and garnered coverage from several media outlets, including local ABC, FOX, and NBC channels. Stories were also published in Roll Call and the Washington City Paper.

For more information and to learn how you can help to counter the government of Colombia’s campaign, go to http://www.nomorebrokenhearts.net/. Check out more photos from yesterday's protests after the jump.

GAO Finds that FTAs Include “Limited Efforts to Promote Progress” on Environmental and Labor Rights

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report this month examining American “free trade” agreements (FTAs) with Morocco, Singapore, Chile, and Jordan, to see if the agreements were advancing U.S. commercial interests and strengthening trading partners’ labor and environmental laws.  While the GAO analysis found positive commercial results, the report faulted U.S. agencies for uneven progress on environmental and labor goals and insufficient American involvement in promoting these goals.  The report lamented the “significant and sometimes worsening systematic deficiencies in certain partner nations” and was conducted at the behest of Senator Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT). 

GAO concludes that, “Notably, USTR’s lack of compliance plans and sporadic monitoring, State’s lax management of environmental projects, and U.S. agencies’ inaction to translate environmental commitments into reliable funding all limited efforts to promote progress.” 

GAO’s study confirms that even the minimal provisions promoting labor and environmental rights in FTAs are not being enforced and further illustrates that all current FTAs need to be reassessed, as proposed in the TRADE Act. 

Offshoring Rubbers, Destroying Lives

I have long threatened to start a new Public Citizen division dedicated to the safety of adult products, because, well, no one is bothering to regulate them, as last year's melamine edible underwear scare showed.

Now, this is happening:

In a move expected to cost 300 American jobs, the government is switching to cheaper off-shore condoms, including some made in China...

“Of course, we considered how many U.S. jobs would be affected by this move,” said a USAID official who spoke on the condition that he would not be named. But he said the reasons for the change included lower prices (2 cents versus more than 5 cents for U.S.-made condoms) and the fact that Congress dropped “buy American language” in a recent appropriations bill...

Fannie Thomas, who has been making AIDS-preventing condoms in southeastern Alabama for nearly 40 years in the small town of Eufaula[, says].

“We pay taxes down here, too, and with all this stimulus money going to save jobs, it seems to me like they (the U.S. government) should share this contract so they can save jobs here in America,” Thomas said.

Thomas and others at the Alatech plant said there aren’t many alternatives for them if it closes down, which is a likely result of the contracting switch.

In fact, the government is close to accepting condoms from two offshore companies: Unidus Corp., which makes condoms in South Korea, and Qingdao Double Butterfly Group, which makes them in China.

There's a number of issues here: first, Buy America, last I checked is still intact. But as we pointed out during the debate on the stimulus bill, this can be waived for a lot of reasons, including NAFTA-WTO-style trade agreements. And I believe that the Chinese bid would have to be only 6% cheaper to choose that over the American bid.

Second, given the rampant problems with product safety in China, there are some serious issues about quality control. As the Kansas City Star reports:

Bill Howe, president of PolyTech Synergies in Ohio, a consultant to the condom industry, said China is “learning” to produce better condoms, but their products are still “notoriously suspect.”

Howe, who has consulted for Alatech, acknowledges that the company got a “sweet deal” for years as the only supplier to the U.S. government for international condom distribution. Nonetheless, “they have a high level of integrity, and you don’t get that in China,” he said.

Even Chinese condom makers admit that some of their customers did not care for their products. Chinese buyers have complained their country’s condoms were “too thick, low quality and don’t feel comfortable.”

Problems persisted for some Chinese condom makers as late as 2007. Free Chinese-made condoms passed out by AIDS groups in Washington, D.C., were the subject of numerous complaints about unreadable expiration dates. Sometimes, just opening the packages damaged the condoms, some groups alleged.

Of course, NAFTA-style trade agreements and the WTO put sharp limits on the kinds of product standards and inspections we can apply to imports, while the WTO procurement agreement places limitations on the kinds of product standards or environmental or human-rights qualifications we can put on suppliers to the U.S .government. Read more here, on our section on product safety.

Congress Passes Buy America in Stimulus

On votes of 246-183 in the House and 60-38 in the Senate, Congress passed the biggest economic stimulus package of all time, which included Buy America provisions. The Washington Post has a truly touching story about how fair-trade champion Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) flew from his mother's memorial service to cast the deciding vote. Our hearts and prayers go out to Sen. Brown and his family.

Here's the final version of the language:

    Sec. 1605. Use of American Iron, Steel, and Manufactured Goods. (a) None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used for a project for the construction, alteration, maintenance, or repair of a public building or public work unless all of the iron, steel, and manufactured goods used in the project are produced in the United States.

    (b) Subsection (a) shall not apply in any case or category of cases in which the head of the Federal department or agency involved finds that--

    (1) applying subsection (a) would be inconsistent with the public interest;

    (2) iron, steel, and the relevant manufactured goods are not produced in the United States in sufficient and reasonably available quantities and of a satisfactory quality; or

    (3) inclusion of iron, steel, and manufactured goods produced in the United States will increase the cost of the overall project by more than 25 percent.

    (c) If the head of a Federal department or agency determines that it is necessary to waive the application of subsection (a) based on a finding under subsection (b), the head of the department or agency shall publish in the Federal Register a detailed written justification as to why the provision is being waived.

    (d) This section shall be applied in a manner consistent with United States obligations under international agreements.

The conferees' report made the following note regarding Buy America provisions:

Section 1605 provides for the use of American iron, steel and manufactured goods, except in certain instances. Section 1605(d) is not intended to repeal by implication the President's authority under Title III of the Trade Agreements Act of 1979. The conferees anticipate that the Administration will rely on the authority under 19 U.S.C. 2511(b) to the extent necessary to comply with U.S. obligations under the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement and under U.S. free trade agreements and so that section 1605 will not apply to least developed countries to the same extent that it does not apply to the parties to those international agreements. The conferees also note that waiver authority under section 2511(b)(2) has not been used.

It seems that this last sentence refers to the president's ability to waive Buy America requirements for countries that aren't parties to procurement agreements with the U.S. (i.e. Brazil, India, China, for starters.) It's actually fairly troubling that the president has so much discretion in these matters in the first place. The history of this power is that Congress, in 1979 on a fast-tracked vote, decided to waive much of its authority over procurement, handing it to the president, who could then waive the requirements to comply with flawed trade deals. Clearly, this whole system - born as it was of a kind of double delegation of legislative powers - needs a major rethink.

In other news, our colleagues Terry Stewart and Elizabeth Drake put out a useful paper debunking some of the myths surrounding Buy America perpetrated by corporate-backed think-tanks. It's chock full of useful material. Here is something I did not know:

Myth #5: Insisting on the use of domestic goods will reduce the effectiveness of the recovery plan by imposing unreasonable requirements where U.S. goods are unavailable or prohibitively expensive.33

The Facts: This assertion ignores the language of the recovery bills and U.S. experience applying similar provisions in the past. First, both the House and Senate versions of the Act allow domestic sourcing requirements to be waived where the relevant goods “are not produced in the United States in sufficient and reasonably available quantities and of a satisfactory quality.”34 This waiver provision is also included in the Buy American Act,35 and data relied upon by Hufbauer and Schott indicate that such non-availability waivers were necessary to permit foreign sourcing for only 0.29 percent of all federal contract dollars spent in 2007.36

Moreover, the House and Senate bills permit domestic sourcing requirements to be waived where their application would increase the cost of the overall project by more than 25 percent.37 The 25 percent threshold reflects cost competitiveness standards that currently apply in Buy America requirements attached to federal highway and mass transit funds.38 Similar cost waivers are available for direct federal contracting under the Buy American Act, though they have been set at different levels administratively.39 Such cost waivers were needed to justify 0.20 percent of the federal government’s spending on foreign manufactures for domestic use in 2007 – a mere 0.01 percent of all federal contracting dollars spent.40

Clearly, unavailability and cost differences present obstacles to domestic purchasing in only a tiny portion of contracts, and, where such issues do arise, procurement officials are able to use their waiver authority to address them. The same will be true under the economic recovery plan.

Buying America; Playing in Peoria

Do you remember this campaign graphic from the Obama campaign in Pennsylvania? Obama promoted Buy American policy in television and radio ads and even committed to renegotiating existing trade agreements to remove their limits on Buy American procurement. We thought you'd be interested in what President Obama had to say about "Buy America" policies on the campaign trail, especially given this Thursday he will be in Peoria visiting a plant operated by Caterpillar, the corporation leading the attack against Buy America provisions in the Stimulus Plan:

When asked in writing: "Do you support renegotiating trade agreements so they will allow us to use "Buy America" and "Buy Local" procurement policies? Obama answered "Yes" in a May 2008 Candidate Questionnaire (PDF) from the Oregon Fair Trade Campaign.

Obama ran paid TV attack ads in North Carolina against John McCain's opposition to Buy American provisions.

Obama also ran a radio ad attacking John McCain's opposition to Buy America after McCain slammed Obama's European trip at a biker rally. At the rally, McCain said he would rather listen to the "roar of 50,000 Harleys" than the cheering of 200,000 Berliners. An Obama ad retorted that McCain was a phony for opposing a requirement that the government buy American-made motorbikes. "But when it comes to his record," the announcer says, "American-made motorcycles like Harleys don't matter to John McCain. Back in Washington, McCain opposed the requirement that the government buy American-made motorcycles."

Finally, check out David Sirota's piece for lots of great details of Obama's commitments to voters to support Buy America policies.

According to a recent poll (PDF), an overwhelming 86 percent of Americans support the Buy America provisions in the stimulus. (See the video embedded below for more on this poll.)

Buy America policies seem to play pretty well in Peoria.

Canadian Businesses Support "Buy Canada"

We've reported on the disappointing efforts of offshore-happy corporations like Caterpillar to invoke the "Shock Doctrine" and roll back "Buy America" rules already on the books and consistent with our trade obligations. We've reported on the hypocritical campaign by the Canadian government to accomplish the same, even though they committed even fewer types of procurement contracts to the WTO than we did.

But one question has been nagging me: what kinds of "Buy Canada" policies are actually on the books? Turns out there are a few major examples

• In Ontario, mass transit vehicles are given preference if they have 25% Canadian content. (This is a compromise from the 50% demanded by the New Democratic Party and the Canadian unions, and the 60% by some others.)
• In Quebec, mass transit vehicles are given an increasing scale of preference the more Canadian content that they have.

Another major difference between here and there is that the business and exporters' associations actually support Buy Canadian policies (including the Manufacturers and Exporters of Canada, where my friend Birgit works!)

And a recent USTR report shows that the Europeans are making good use of their flexibilities under the WTO:

In 2004, the EU adopted a revised Utilities Directive (2004/17), covering purchases in the water, transportation, energy, and postal services sectors. Member States were mandated to implement the new Utilities Directive by the end of January 2006, but some EU Member States still have not implemented it. This Directive requires open, objective bidding procedures, but discriminates against bids with less than 50 percent EU content that are not covered by an international or reciprocal bilateral agreement. The EU content requirement applies to U.S suppliers of goods and services in the following sectors: water (production, transport, and distribution of drinking water), energy (gas and heat), urban transport (urban railway, automated systems, tramway, bus, trolley bus, and cable), and postal services.

Congrats EU and Canada!  Nice to see we're all doing what we can to support a local industrial base!

(Please let me know if you know of other local content requirements - especially in transportation infrastructure funding - that we should highlight.)

Buy America survives Collins-Nelson Fleet Streeting

Paul Krugman points out in today's column that Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) have effectively gutted much of the stimulative impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Luckily, the Buy America provisions survived the Collins-Nelson Fleet Streeting of the Stimulus, as did the Sanders-Grassley amendment, which was passed unanimously by voice vote. For companies receiving TARP funds, it restricts their ability to cite labor shortages in their hiring of H-1B workers from abroad. The idea is that Microsoft shouldn't be able to layoff thousands of workers and then come to Congress citing engineer labor shortages in their quest to import foreign workers that are covered by weaker labor rights. (Text below).

Sec. 1610. Hiring American workers in companies receiving TARP funding.

(a) Short Title- This section may be cited as the `Employ American Workers Act'.

(b) Prohibition-

(1) IN GENERAL- Notwithstanding any other provision of law, it shall be unlawful for any recipient of funding under title I of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (Public Law 110-343) or section 13 of the Federal Reserve Act (12 U.S.C. 342 et seq.) to hire any nonimmigrant described in section 101(a)(15)(h)(i)(b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(15)(h)(i)(b)) unless the recipient is in compliance with the requirements for an H-1B dependent employer (as defined in section 212(n)(3) of such Act (8 U.S.C. 1182(n)(3))), except that the second sentence of section 212(n)(1)(E)(ii) of such Act shall not apply.

(2) DEFINED TERM- In this subsection, the term `hire' means to permit a new employee to commence a period of employment.

(c) Sunset Provision- This section shall be effective during the 2-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act.

Pretending there's a problem

Canada's Globe and Mail had a must read editorial from a few days ago on Buy America. Here's a preview:

This week's horror and hysteria over a U.S. move to “protectionism” like the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of the 1930s, leading to global “trade war” and disaster – was sheer myth. The Buy American clause and the ensuing “backdown” by Congress meant nothing. Those policies have been in place for decades; they still are...

So what's up? Whence the frenzy? Good question, different answers. Stockwell Day and Stephen Harper get to look vigilant and militant, standing on guard for us, while nothing is really at stake. Barack Obama gets to look presidential. He says sternly that he's against bad things, knowing no vetoes or actions will follow. John McCain wants to repeal the offending clause so the world won't think the U.S. has “gone back” to protectionism, which it never left, but maybe the world won't think so now...

Derek Burney, Canadian corporate mouthpiece, calls for even less regulation and protection than we now have, on the grounds, as they say in the Obama White House, that you never let a serious crisis (or a fake one) go to waste. ...

I especially like Michael Ignatieff's demand that Stephen Harper phone Barack Obama on this. I'd like to overhear that one. Uh, I'm calling to pretend there's a problem. … Fine, I'm taking the call to pretend the same thing. [Silence. Silence. Silence.] We agree, then. … Yes, good talking to you...

It's like the murder on the Orient Express: It turned out everyone participated, but they all did it for their own reasons.

The American People is Ready for a Change with Buy America

I was on Washington Journal this morning opposite Birgit Matthiesen of the Manufacturers and Exporters of Canada. The subject? Buy America, and how it is consistent with existing domestic and international law. And a few digs at the WTO's procurement agreement while we're at it.

Here's the video; let me know what you think.

McCain Amendment to Prohibit Buy America Crashes and Burns

Back in the general election, Obama bashed McCain for his comment that Buy America provisions were "disgraceful," as in this paid television ad below:

(See this ad and over a hundred others in our online database of paid election trade ads.)

If there was any doubt that McCain was fo' real, an amendment he introduced yesterday to the stimulus bill cleared that up. Senate Amendment 279 to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (H.R. 1) listed as its purpose: "To prohibit the applicability of Buy American requirements in the Act to the utilization of funds provided by the Act."

This would have gone considerably farther than our current law and WTO commitments, since we have always been allowed to do most if not all of what is in the stimulus package. In essence, had it passed, it would have put the Senate on the record as opposing even the WTO-legal parts of Buy America. It would have also announced to America that, even when domestic policy proposals do NOT violate WTO obligations, we will not pass them if someone might THINK that they do. I'm not a total sovereignty hawk, but, wow...

Luckily, the amendment crashed and burned at around 8:30 pm last night, with only 31 senators (all GOP + Lieberman) supporting. All the Dems plus 9 GOP opposed. Find out how your senator voted! And then let them know what you think about it!

Harper Gets Hypocritical about Hypotheticals

The hysteria-fest coming out of Ottawa and Brussels over the Buy America/n provisions in the stimulus plan continues. But if Canadian PM Stephen Harper and the EU are getting so bent out of shape over our tiny domestic preferences, what's the state of theirs? As it turns out, we (at least according to the WTO exceptions if not actual practice) our products can't get the contracts benefits in their countries that they claim we will be denying them theirs here.

First, some background. As we keep pointing out, the U.S. excluded Buy America (i.e. requiring U.S.-made iron and steel in transit projects administered by the states but with federal funding) from its WTO commitments. What does this mean? Put simply, the way trade agreements are generally structured is to presume total "free trade" and "free markets," but then allow countries to say "except for" in a certain sensitive sectors. Governments with lots of trade lawyers will typically put in lots of so-called "exceptions," or "carve outs," from our trade-pact obligations to generally pursue totally "free markets." Poor nations with few trade lawyers may put in relatively few "exceptions" or "carve outs." (Often, however, the trade agreements are so complicated that the simple dichotomy doesn't hold: a few years back, the U.S. lost a WTO case brought by the Caribbean island of Antigua against our Internet gambling ban because the U.S. didn't realize it had failed to "exclude" or "carve out" gambling from our WTO commitments.)

So, translated out of trade law language, the iron and steel provisions of the Buy America Act, in effect since 1982, are perfectly compliant with the WTO. The WTO knows that we have these policies on the books, and is not complaining. (Okay, not too loudly.) More importantly, they're nothing new. I'll say it again: the stimulus package is not a change from current U.S. practice, and is perfectly consistent with our WTO commitments.

But as we show in a forthcoming memo, the EU and Canada do not take their own medicine. They wisely excluded considerably broader swaths of their procurement activity from WTO rules (and in the case of Canada, also from NAFTA) than did the United States, and thus have no obligation to provide U.S. firms products with access to preferential treatment under a wide array of their government contracts.

While the United States (only) safeguards its preferences for domestic iron and steel used in federally funded state transportation projects, Canada simply carves out steel, motor vehicles and coal altogether (for all provinces, for all sectors), and also carves out all construction contracts issued by the Department of Transport. The EU carved out of its WTO procurement obligations all EU members’ country contracts awarded by federal governments and subfederal governments in connection with activities in the fields of drinking water, energy, transport or telecommunications. (On the links, just click on Appendix I, Annexes I-II, and the general notes. Some bits will be easy to read, other bits less so.)

Translated out of trade lingo, under their WTO obligations, both Canada and EU reserve the right to give their nations' companies products much more generous preferences than Congress is even considering giving ours. While current U.S. laws (merely extended in the stimulus bill) give U.S. iron and steel a leg up over the foreign competition for transit projects, Canada and the EU 's WTO commitments allow them to give their firms products a leg up over American companies and products on EVERY aspect of transit funding, and many other government purchases besides.

And, we’re not criticizing them for it: why SHOULD decisions by democratically elected parliaments about how to best spend tax dollars on domestic infrastructure be subject to constraints imposed by international trade agreements? There is no “protectionism” at issue here. But, it is certainly hypocrisy -- and perhaps a bit of opportunism -- on the part of Ottawa and Brussels.

[UPDATE: In my effort to speak English rather than trade-law-ese, I got a bit sloppy with some terminology. The Buy America/n preferences refer to the products, not the companies. So, if a Canadian firm wants to make steel in the U.S., that steel could get preferential treatment. Yet another way these rules are not protectionist, but instead about job creation.]

Gap Between Dems and Corporate "Dem" Think-tanks Grows

The folks over at Third Way - a corporate-backed "think"-tank that claims to be aligned with the Democrats - have put out an anti-Buy America "memo."

Besides raising the tired bogeyman of foreign retaliation and the misleading claims about WTO compatibility, they propose providing "a bonus R&D tax credit that significantly rewards companies based on the percentage of their manufacturing and production that occurs in the United States. This would entice companies to conduct research here and produce here. It would not violate international laws."

Not a bad idea, but unfortunately the Bush administration has pushed to expand the WTO coverage of U.S. R&D measures, which could limit our policy space in this area and something that the Obama administration must act on to reverse.

Third Way also proposes decreasing the taxes that multinationals have to pay on their profits earned overseas. While the group claims that this would entice the big boys to generate U.S. jobs, a comprehensive Congressional Research Service analysis found that the opposite occurred when the same policy was enacted for a year in 2005-06. According to the Washington Post:

A more recent analysis in January by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service looked at 12 companies that returned significant sums to the United States. Of those companies, at least eight had cut jobs by 2006. Pfizer, for example, received a significant tax break on $37 billion returned to the United States -- more than double the amount returned by any other company -- but cut 10,000 jobs in 2005, according to the CRS report.

"Empirical analyses of the stimulative effects of the repatriation provisions . . . suggests a limited stimulative impact from the provisions," the report says. "They conclude that much of the repatriated earnings were used for cash-flow purposes and little evidence exists that new investment was spurred."

Meanwhile, the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the tax holiday produced an initial flood of cash in 2005, increasing tax collections by $2.8 billion. But because some of that money would have been returned to the United States anyway -- and at a much higher tax rate -- congressional tax analysts predict that the 2004 holiday will cost the government $3.3 billion in lost revenue by 2014.

"Uncle Sam missed out on billions in needed tax revenues," Levin said yesterday. "Such tax holidays not only reduce U.S. tax revenue in the long run, but create new incentives for U.S. multinationals to send more jobs, funds and facilities offshore."

I got a chance to look at the report, and here's what the CRS said about the 2005-06 program, citing IRS statistics:

The benefits of the repatriation provision are not evenly spread across industries. The pharmaceutical and medicine industry accounted for $99 billion in repatriations or 32% of the total. The computer and electronic equipment industry accounted for $58 billion or 18% of the total. Thus these two industries accounted for half of the repatriations. Most of the dividends were repatriated from low tax countries or tax havens.

The benefits were also highly concentrated in a few firms. According to a recent study, five firms (Pfizer, Merck, Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson, and IBM) are responsible for $88 billion, over a quarter (28%) of total repatriations. The top 10 firms (adding Schering-Plough, Du Pont, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, and PepsiCo) accounted for 42%. The top 15 (adding Procter and Gamble, Intel, Coca-Cola, Altria, and Motorola) accounted for over half (52%).

At least Third Way proposes putting some conditions on the multinational tax cut. But their overall take on Buy America is out of step with the party. As Inside U.S. Trade reported today,

House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman James Oberstar (D-MN) warned today (Feb. 4) in a House Steel Caucus meeting that he would actively work against the passage of the stimulus package if the “Buy America” provisions are removed.

“If it's not in, I'm against this package. Can I be any clearer than that? If it's not in, I'm not supporting it and I'm bringing a lot of votes with me,” he said. “We can't have any of this fluff about being nicey-nicey on foreign trade at time when we're trying to create jobs at home and to have foreign steel come in here and undercut U.S. jobs? No way, not with my help.”

In short, while Dems are running government thanks to a fair-trade platform, the Corporate "Dem" think-tanks are spouting the same old snake oil that got us into this economic mess.

Double Standards for Banks and Builders

In 2008, Congress passed sweeping bailout legislation for the white-collar financial sector, but failed to take comparable action for the blue-collar manufacturing sector.

As Steelworkers President Leo Gerard said, "The message here could not be more clear: Washington will bailout out those who shower before work but not those who shower afterwards."

Fast forward to 2009. Scare stories on Buy America are being ginned up by a perverse alliance of corporations (who want to deflect attention from the fact that they offshore U.S. jobs) and pro-corporate foreign governments (who want to deflect attention from the fact that they do not allow U.S.-made iron and steel in THEIR countries' transit and procurement projects, as we show in a forthcoming memo.)

That's right: a Buy America provision that affects a tiny fraction of stimulus spending and national income is being used as a pretext to make all sorts of threats: that it violates U.S. trade commitments (it doesn't), that it's some sort of radically new policy (it isn't); and that this offends other nations (news flash: Canadians want job programs just as much as we do).

But where was this perverse alliance when the U.S. financial bailout was going through? As a new document from the WTO shows, the Bush administration's approach to the financial crisis was much more nationalistic than many of our top trading partners. While most nations opened up their financial sector reforms to subsidiaries of foreign companies, the U.S. TARP and other programs are (in practice) geared almost exclusively to domestically owned banks.* (Not to mention that the Bush administration jacked up tariffs on French Roquefort cheese to 300%.)

Where were the cries of trade war then? I think Scott Sinclair, the Canadian writer, had it right when he said:

"As far as I can tell," he says, "the provision included in the stimulus package will not violate U.S. international treaty obligations." ,,,"I think they want to knock Obama off balance and gain influence over his trade policy from the outset," said Sinclair.

The Senate now faces tremendous corporate pressure to weaken the Buy America provisions of the stimulus bill. As I told the Dayton Daily News,  "We need to use all the tools that are available to help put people back to work... This is one of those tools."

Use this link to contact your senators today, and let them know you support Buy America!

(*If you know different, please let me know!)

Broken Promises from Buy America Opponents

Back in 1992, economist Gary Hufbauer of the Peterson Institute for International Economics famously predicted that NAFTA would create 170,000 new jobs, because the U.S. would be running a $9 billion trade surplus with Mexico.

But, as we know, our Mexican trade surplus instead turned into a raging deficit, now at $91 billion, accounting for an estimated 1 million lost manufacturing jobs.

By 1995, when we were already running a $23 billion deficit with Mexico, Hufbauer famously told Bob Davis at the Wall Street Journal that, "The lesson to me is that I should stay away from job forecasting." (Bob Davis, "Free Trade is Headed for More Debate," WSJ, 4/17/95.)

Unfortunately, Hufbauer has broken his occupational promises like they were so many NAFTA job-creation promises. And while economists like to preach that blue collar workers should lose their jobs when they screw up, there is no such accountability for the neoclassicals.

In a new paper for Peterson, Hufbauer and colleague Jeffrey Schott estimate that the Buy America provisions of the stimulus package would create 1,000 to 1,900 jobs, but destroy 6,500 to 65,000 jobs due to foreign retaliation. While the job creation estimates are based on something approaching a sound methodology, the job destruction estimates are pulled out of a hat, and retaliation is simply assumed.

But as we pointed out this morning, the rumors of retaliation are part of a joint scare campaign by right-wing governments and corporations that have offshored U.S. jobs. For the right-wing Canadian administration in particular, this is a continuation of their attacks on Obama that began in the Ohio primaries.

But the allegations of trade-law violations are misleading, as Hufbauer and Schott at least have the decency to point out:

While US commitments under the [World Trade Organization's Government Procurement Agreement] cover many federal government entities and 37 states, the proponents of Buy American provisions argue that a large portion of the projects funded by the stimulus bills are not covered in the GPA. For example, there is a general exclusion for federal funds destined for mass transit and highway projects. Moreover, many of the 37 states that acceded to the GPA also reserved sensitive procurement areas, such as motor vehicles, construction-grade steel, and construction services... [emphasis added]

Existing laws already provide Buy American preferences for much of the public procurement authorized in the stimulus bill...

Of course the bigger question continues to be why political leaders signed up government procurement rules – a quintessential, non-trade domestic issue – to comply with so-called “trade” agreements in the first place. It's clear that, going forward, these rules need to be changed. But the immediate task is to put America back to work.

Roquefort trade war, Stimulus Buy America Brouhaha Shows WTO Model Broken

By Lori Wallach and Todd Tucker*

Two developments this week provided further illustration that the current NAFTA-WTO model of trade and globalization is fundamentally flawed.

Exhibit A: One of the most contentious issues surrounding the congressional debate on the massive stimulus bill designed to jump start the sinking U.S. economy was… a provision on “Buy America” rules for iron and steel in public works projects?! Opponents of the measure – which include some of the nation’s leading offshorers of U.S. jobs, such as GE and Caterpillar – decried the plan to invest our tax dollars in the U.S.economy as a declaration of war against “free trade,” and claimed that the measure was WTO-illegal. (As it turns out, on the WTO-legal business, the corporates are lying, as we show here in a detailed memo.)

Exhibit B: The Bush administration, in its final week in office, imposed tariffs of up to 300 percent on French Roquefort cheese, and extended punitive tariffs on truffles, Irish oatmeal, Italian sparkling water and foie gras. The reason? In the 1990s, the Europe Union (EU) had banned the use of artificial hormones for raising beef in response to health concerns. The Clinton administration, at the urging of giant agribusiness companies, challenged this measure at the WTO because it not only banned the chemicals’ use by European farmers, but banned imports of artificial-hormone-raised beef. A WTO tribunal ordered the EU to allow in the U.S. beef, and when EU officials, under threat of a massive consumer revolt, refused, the WTO authorized the U.S. to impose retaliatory sanctions. (Canada also sought and received similar authorization.)

When a country’s state, local or national policy is ruled against at the WTO, federal authorities are required to take all available steps to force a change in the law – otherwise, they risk facing perpetual trade sanctions. It’s a fairly powerful system: in the nearly 15-year history of the WTO, countries have always watered down or eliminated the challenged laws, including in the cases brought against U.S. laws (which we’ve lost nearly 90 percent of, by the way). There’s only been one exception, and that’s the beef-hormone case. The Europeans – in an admirable display of moxie – decided that ensuring consumer safety was their top priority. Although they’ve been paying out their pound of flesh for a decade – at a rate of over $120 million per year since 1999 – the Europeans apparently weren’t suffering enough, and Bush upped the cross-sanctions on his way out the door.

++

The larger question raised by these two conflagrations is why political leaders signed up food-safety and government procurement rules – both quintessential, non-trade domestic issues – to comply with so-called “trade” agreements in the first place. A big part of the answer is that they were pushed by companies like GE and Caterpillar and large agribusiness multinationals, who enjoy wild privileges under these pacts that encourage the offshoring of U.S. jobs. Since then, corporations have used the overreaching “trade” agreement rules to attack an array of important non-trade, public-interest policies. The latest installment is the current scare campaign to water down Congress’ response to the economic crisis, and gin up the attack on important food-safety measures abroad.

Nations – not just the U.S., but all nations – should have a right to invest in themselves, spend their tax dollars in the manner deemed best by their democratically elected officials, and pursue other public-interest policies. President Obama and the last two classes of freshmen members of Congress came to office on pledges to overhaul the failed globalization policies of the past, and pursue global integration and cooperation on fairer terms. Let’s hope that they stand their ground: our future prosperity and security depends on it.

*The writers are director and research director, respectively, of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch division. They blog at EyesOnTrade.Org. This was originally posted on Huffington Post.

Sirota on sociopaths and neocolonialists

It was only a matter of time. Anyone who did antisweatshop work in the 1990s knows that there is a mighty resevoir of pro-sweatshop sentiment lurking just beneath the edifice of the anti-Bush Democratic Party. Back when we could all make fun of Bush's word slop, it was pretty easy to forget that these sociopaths exist, and that they walk amongst us. David Sirota dishes the dirt:

Nicholas Kristof's latest New York Times column makes the case that corporate colonialism and human exploitation aren't just not bad, but actually a great virtue that will save the developing world - and that those working to stop such colonialism and exploitation are the root cause of global poverty. I kid you not:

Mr. Obama and the Democrats who favor labor standards in trade agreements mean well, for they intend to fight back at oppressive sweatshops abroad. But while it shocks Americans to hear it, the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don't exploit enough...

I'm glad that many Americans are repulsed by the idea of importing products made by barely paid, barely legal workers in dangerous factories. Yet sweatshops are only a symptom of poverty, not a cause, and banning them closes off one route out of poverty...

When I defend sweatshops, people always ask me: But would you want to work in a sweatshop? No, of course not. But I would want even less to pull a rickshaw. In the hierarchy of jobs in poor countries, sweltering at a sewing machine isn't the bottom.

This is quite literally the argument of a sociopath - and the problem is that sociopathy is so prevalent in discussions about trade and globalization that we barely even notice it anymore.

Offshoring of Child Care Reaches New Heights

The Onion gives satirical coverage to the offshoring of health care debate. (HT to Ben Muse.)

Rep. Michael Capuano Co-Sponsors T.R.A.D.E. Bill

I wanted to share this note that came from some union members in Massachusetts after an in-district meeting they had with Rep. Michael Capuano (D-Mass.) about the T.R.A.D.E Act. Rep. Capuano's co-sponsorship of the bill brings us to 71 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives!

A hearty thanks to Rep. Capuano for standing with working people and to Rand Wilson, Joe Powers and the others who helped to make this meeting happen. Here's their note:

Rep. Michael Capuano co-sponsors T.R.A.D.E. bill

A small delegation of union members recently met with Rep. Mike Capuano to discuss the merits of the "Trade Reform, Accountability, Development and Employment Act" (T.R.A.D.E.) / House Bill 6180, and the impact of trade and investment treaties on our congressional district.  Picture of the group is attached.

The U.S. trade deficit is greater than ever and hundreds of thousands of family-supporting jobs have been destroyed (many right here in the 8th District of Massachusetts), yet President Bush and many in Congress want more trade as usual. 

It is time for the United States to bring its trade policy in-line with economic reality and our values; the TRADE Act provides just such an opportunity.  For more info and action steps, visit http://www.citizenstrade.org/tradeact.php

Representative Capuano agreed that we need a new model for U.S. trade policy and he will now be a co-sponsor of the bill.

Hats off to Joe Power of Carpenters Local 40 for arranging the meeting with Rep. Capuano!

Corporate America Wins with Trade!

This is quite the impressive jam by the Oregon Fair Trade Campaign (ORFTC)...

They do a great job of cutting straight to the heart of the the Consumer Electronics Association's silly-ness. US exports grow faster on average with countries when we have no NAFTA-style trade pact. The Colombia FTA can do nothing but wreak more havoc on the US economy and job market. We've already lost more than 3 million good manufacturing jobs since NAFTA, with the electronics industry itself having dealt its fair share of pink-slips. Now they go around highlighting the few jobs their members have not yet sent overseas as a reason to keep paving the way for them by passing unfair trade deals! Do they really expect a "thank you" from the American worker?

The truth is that the Fat Cat CEOs who stand to gain from FTAs would simply love another round of trade deals to make sure they can ship out the rest of the jobs wherever they please, whenever they please. As long as they can escape progressive, pro-worker regulation that ensures shared prosperity and sustainability, they'll be supporting any and every trade deal, no matter how horrendous the abuses of the regimes themselves or the abuses of their paramilitary allies.

Hats off to the Oregon Fair Trade Campaign for this one. World-class spoofing, indeed! My favorite is the part where they slam the bus as being too "low-brow" a mode of transport. Kudos.

Trade battles on the big screen at national conventions

If the presumptive presidential contenders and their advisors have still not figured out - ahem - the political costs of surrendering to so-called "free trade" policies of the NAFTA/WTO variety against the interest of, well, almost everybody, they might be surprised to find some people getting a little riled up about the issue at convention time: delegates to both the Democratic National Convention (August 25-28 in Denver) and the Republican National Convention (September 1-4 in St Paul) will be treated to a "sneak peak" viewing of the latest Hollywood indie extravaganza...

Stuart Townsend's Battle in Seattle won't open for another month for the rest of us (September 19th and 26th in select cities across the country), but thanks to the folks behind the Impact Film Festival, convention delegates will get an inspiring (and timely) look-in on a rocking film set in Seattle during the WTO protests.

With a star-studded cast (Charlize Theron, Woody Harrelson, Andre-3000, Ray Liotta, Michelle Rodriguez and more), everyone will want to see the story of the 5-day uprising that forced the collapse of the WTO's 1999 Seattle ministerial. The film is sort of like Crash, following the lives of twelve characters during those historic days. Woody plays a cop – no kidding. So does Tatum Channing. Andre Henderson and Michelle Rodriquez are protestors. One of the most powerful "people's" moments in recent U.S. history never looked so beautiful.

Maybe a trip down that particular 'memory lane', to the days when more than 50,000 union members (voters!), environmentalists (also voters!), students (read: youth voters!) and more converged in Seattle to speak truth to power in the face of the world's biggest corporations - and their Washington DC pundits - will keep the politicians just a little more honest when they talk about the looming trade issues of our time?

For the rest of us, now is the time to start booking those advance tickets for the Battle in Seattle showings closer to home. The film will be opening:

• September 19:   New York, San Francisco and Seattle (of course!)
• September 26:   Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Sacramento and Washington, DC.                        

Groups of 25 or more receive discount tickets. To find a theater near you call 866-758-1258 or visit www.battleinseattlemovie.com/labor

To organize an event around the film's release, contact Michael Crawford at 202-546-4996 or mcrawford@citizen.org

Latest Bush Move on NAFTA Trucks

See our latest statement here.

Bush Administration Defies Congress, Extends Dangerous Cross-Border Truck Pilot Project for Two More Years

Statement of Lena Pons, Policy Analyst, Public Citizen

In announcing today that it would extend its cross-border trucking pilot project for two more years, the Bush administration continues to flout Congress at the expense of highway safety. This is the latest of many moves by the administration to give Mexico-domiciled carriers operating authority in the United States beyond a limited border zone despite lawmakers’ clear instructions to the contrary.

More at the link.

No Gold Medal for U.S.-China Trade

Just in time for the Beijing Olympics, Rob Scott from the Economic Policy Institute put out a great paper that updates his numbers on how many jobs could have been supported with balanced China trade.

He figures that an additional 2.3 million jobs could have been supported, and he also looks at some of the wage effects of this trade imbalance: 

Because U.S. exports to China are much more commodity intensive (i.e., comprising products such as grains, steel scrap, and paper scrap) than Chinese imports (99% of which are manufactured products), average wages earned in jobs producing U.S. exports to China paid 4.4% less than the jobs displaced by imports from China. More than one-fourth of U.S. exports to China on a value basis were commodities.

His paper was released with the fine folks over at the Alliance for American Manufacturing.

Gown joins town in resisting corporate glob

Greg Ip from the Wall Street Journal publishes an interesting finding:

In 1997, 58% of college graduates said globalization had been good for the U.S. while 30% said it had been bad, according to a poll conducted for the Wall Street Journal and NBC News. When the poll asked a similar question this past March, opinion had flipped: 47% of graduates thought globalization was bad and just 33% thought it was good. Respondents with high school educations started out negative on globalization and have become more so...

“The political impact is potentially quite important because it’s just not clear where support for engagement with the world economy is going to come from, if not from college-educated workers,” says Kenneth Scheve, a political scientist at Yale University who studies such attitudes.

Calling it by its name

Judith Warner of the New York Times blogs a little bit more about the horrific double standard in the way we approach gender and work issues, and the JEC's new report:

This week, Congress issued a report, [that] states categorically that mothers are not leaving the workforce to stay home with their kids. They’re being forced out...

Men, of course, were hit hard by the recession and weak recovery, too; in fact, as Louis Uchitelle of the Times reported earlier this week, the workforce participation rates of men aged 25 through 54 have dropped from 96 percent in 1953 to 86.4 percent today.

But when men in their prime working years drop out of the workforce we don’t say they’ve gone home to be with their kids.

We say they’re unemployed.

The distinction is truly meaningful beyond the neat way it encapsulates our inability to separate ideology from fact when it comes to thinking about mothers and their much-vaunted “choices.” Unemployed people, after all, are entitled to benefits. As a society, we tend to think it’s incumbent upon us to get them working again — for their own good, individually, for the good of their families, and for our collective welfare. Politicians promise to retrain them. Devise policies to retain them. The unemployed still fall under the ever-retracting umbrella of people we consider, to some extent, to be worthy of our care.

Mothers, with their glorious array of post-feminist lifestyle options, have long been seen as something else. They’re individuals, making choices, responsible for the fallout of those choices even if, in point of fact, those choices were made for them by a weak economy, the unaffordability of child care or an inflexible workplace. They don’t need “government handouts” like quality child care, flextime, sick days, family leave and top-notch afterschool programs, because they’ve made their proud choices and, by golly (unless they’re whiners), they’re going to go it alone.

I’m so glad that, at long last, this fiction has been officially acknowledged.

U.S. State Legislatures Slam Colombia FTA – Again

The pro-Colombia FTA forces are getting more and more desperate. Yesterday they tried again to sneak through a resolution at the National Conference of State Legislatures that already got slammed 3 months ago in the same forum. What gives? Well, this time the reaction against their efforts was so strong that it got shot down on a voice vote that made the prospect of a vote tally embarrassing.

Read the full story on our press release, after the jump.

Offshoring: It's Not (Just) A Dude Thing

Offshoring, downsizing, rightsizing... mention these words, and the image that pops in most people's heads is a hefty Midwestern man grumbling about his economic problems and then voting Republican.

But Lou Uchitelle has a piece today entitled "Women Are Now Equal as Victims of Poor Economy" that shows this view to be fatally flawed:

After moving into virtually every occupation, women are being afflicted on a large scale by the same troubles as men: downturns, layoffs, outsourcing, stagnant wages or the discouraging prospect of an outright pay cut...

Hard times in manufacturing certainly sidelined Tootie Samson of Baxter, Iowa. Nine months after she lost her job on a factory assembly line, Ms. Samson, 48, is still not working. She could be. Jobs that pay $8 or $9 an hour are easy enough to land, she says. But like the men with whom she worked at the Maytag washing machine factory, now closed, near her home, she resists going back to work at less than half her old wage...

The Joint Economic Committee study cites the growing statistical evidence that women are leaving the work force “on par with men,” and the potentially disastrous consequences for families.

“Women bring home about one-third of family income,” said Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York and vice chairman of the Joint Economic Committee. “And only those families with a working wife have seen real improvement in their living standards.”

Remember all the wage stagnation that we talk about on this blog? Well, what Maloney is saying is that the only reason there's not rioting in the streets is because BOTH parents are now working for low pay. Mix this with the Alan Greenspan admission that American paychecks only look good when seen through the flood of imported cheap plastic gadgets, and if you get drunk enough after your third shift, you might almost think your living standards are rising.

It's pretty rare in this town that Congress would be on the vanguard of a scarcely examined idea (even one that affects large numbers of Americans). And official feminism doesn't tend to focus on these working-class issues. Fifty years from now, when we're looking back on how America developed a comprehensive approach to class and gender issues, Maloney's report will register as one of the foundational steps: admitting that there's a problem, and one that's not going to go away by just putting a few rich women in high-paying positions and pretending like that's a victory for the movement.

Who will play that funky music in our electoral future?

(Disclosure: Global Trade Watch has no preference among the candidates.)

We don't get into election analysis here beyond the trade issue. But a couple of months ago, my hometown pride swelled as the extra long primary season took candidates into parts of the country like my home Kentucky that rarely figure into national politics.

That was a few months ago. Given the way things have turned out in Appalachian states, however, I now hear the daily quips about from East Coast "liberal" friends, acquaintances and "fr-enemies" that range from ridicule to vitriol about the "backwater's" 15 minutes of fame. There has been a "discovery of the other among us" - the white working class (WWC) - as I get to hear any number of jokes about incest and hicks. Some politicos are choosing to pathologize the WWC, while some suggest than even the whiteys know not the full depth of backwardness that is within them. (And, btw, all the candidates need to leave the amateur sociology to the pros.)

Some of the more sophisticated analysts have taken to asking whether the WWC is even needed for electoral purposes anymore. Alan Abramowitz and Ruy Teixeira have written a paper entitled "The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class." This is a useful companion piece to Ruy's 2000 book with Joel Rogers entitled "America's Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters." They look at the work of Larry Bartels and Thomas Frank, and offer some commentary on an emerging GOP strategy to attract WWC voters authored by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam. Among the main findings of the more recent paper:

Oregonians Bring The Pain to the Death Squads

The Oregon Fair Trade Campaign rallies outside of the office of Rep. Darlene Hooley (D-Ore.), who has yet to take a position the Death Free Trade Agreement (aka Colombia FTA).

How to break a strike

Advocates of NAFTA argued that they pact would help keep consumer prices low and move the economy towards a more efficient allocation of resources. Just one serious drawback: such permanent tariff reductions remove political uncertainty from firms' cost-benefit calculation. Put differently, the price attached to risk was reduced. And manipulating risk levels is one of the few weapons that the working class has to gain concessions from the rich: think strikes, for instance.      

When firms can be certain that they will never have to pay tariffs on the reimportation of their products produced offshore, strikes matter a wee bit less, as this story over the weekend from the NYT summed up:

The auto industry’s longest strike in more than 40 years, a walkout at a parts supplier that disrupted production at 32 General Motors plants, will end within days if the picketing workers ratify a tentative agreement reached late Friday with their employer, American Axle and Manufacturing....

People involved in the negotiations have said they expect the agreement to call for closing two or three plants, offering buyouts worth as much as $140,000, and drastically reducing the wages and benefits of workers who remain with the company...

American Axle has said it needs to cut wages nearly in half, from about $28 an hour to as little as $14, to remain competitive with rivals that have squeezed similar concessions from the U.A.W. During the strike, the company threatened to permanently close the plants where workers were picketing and shift work to Mexico instead.

This is capping off nearly 15 years of NAFTA being used to break labor's back. Our friend Kate Bronfenbrenner did a study for the North American Commission on Labor Cooperation showing that after passage of NAFTA, as many as 62 percent of U.S. union drives faced employer threats to relocate abroad, and the factory shut-down rate following successful union certifications tripled. Such defeats provide the institutional backdrop to a generation of wage stagnation and corporate takeover of government.

Redundant trade, Larry Summers, NAFTA

This piece in the Times featured an issue that we will be doing a report on soon: redundant trade.

Cod caught off Norway is shipped to China to be turned into filets, then shipped back to Norway for sale. Argentine lemons fill supermarket shelves on the Citrus Coast of Spain, as local lemons rot on the ground. Half of Europe’s peas are grown and packaged in Kenya...

Increasingly efficient global transport networks make it practical to bring food before it spoils from distant places where labor costs are lower. And the penetration of mega-markets in nations from China to Mexico with supply and distribution chains that gird the globe — like Wal-Mart, Carrefour and Tesco — has accelerated the trend.

But the movable feast comes at a cost: pollution — especially carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas — from transporting the food.

Under longstanding trade agreements, fuel for international freight carried by sea and air is not taxed. Now, many economists, environmental advocates and politicians say it is time to make shippers and shoppers pay for the pollution, through taxes or other measures.

“We’re shifting goods around the world in a way that looks really bizarre,” said Paul Watkiss, an Oxford University economist who wrote a recent European Union report on food imports.

He noted that Britain, for example, imports — and exports — 15,000 tons of waffles a year, and similarly exchanges 20 tons of bottled water with Australia. More important, Mr. Watkiss said, “we are not paying the environmental cost of all that travel.”

Larry Summers had a must-read piece in the FT:

growth in the global economy encourages the development of stateless elites whose allegiance is to global economic success and their own prosperity rather than the interests of the nation where they are headquartered. As one prominent chief executive put it in Davos this year: “We will be fine however America does but I hope for its sake that it will cut taxes and reduce regulation and put more pressure on young people to study in the ways that are necessary for it to be able to keep competing successfully.”

The chief executive was sincere and he captured an important truth. Even as globalisation increases inequality and insecurity, it is constantly and often legitimately invoked as an argument against the viability of progressive taxation, support for labour unions, strong regulation and substantial production of public goods that mitigate its adverse impacts.

In a world where Americans can legitimately doubt whether the success of the global economy is good for them, it will be increasingly difficult to mobilise support for economic internationalism.

And Lori makes a point in the WSJ that a lotta folks have been missing:

Regardless of the ebb and flow of concern over free trade, some globalization critics say the dangers to the accord are real.

Next year's North American summit would be "an opportune time for a President Obama or a President Clinton to follow through on their pledge to renegotiate," said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch division. She said either leader would be "under enormous pressure to make some changes in those agreements," in part because of the potential impact on domestic-policy priorities such as addressing climate change or the health-care crisis.

"The real issue that could threaten [Nafta] isn't politics, but the agreement's actual outcomes," not just for workers in the U.S. but also in Mexico in particular, she said. "People don't have a problem with trade -- it's this version of the rules."

Behind the Fast Track Death

I am heading out of town for a week or so for Passover, but here's one last post before I go. Our friends from Human Rights Watch have an excellent post over at the Hill:

Congress is right to delay consideration of the US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA). What’s at stake here is a fundamental principle: that free trade should be premised on respect for human rights, especially the rights of the workers producing the goods to be traded.

Colombian workers cannot exercise their rights without fear of being killed. Just in the first three months of this year, 17 Colombian trade unionists have been assassinated—a substantial increase over the 10 killed in the same period last year.

Dan Wolfensberger writes in Roll Call:

Pelosi, however, is the first Speaker in the history of the 34-year-old statute to ask the Rules Committee (with House approval) to suspend the expedited timetable for consideration. The House handily endorsed her gambit Thursday, 224-195.

Just as it is unlikely that Congress will grant Bush his requested renewal of fast-track negotiating authority so late in his term, it is even more difficult to imagine a Democratic president even asking for it... It is also highly unlikely that the next Congress, which is likely to contain an even larger Democratic majority in both chambers, will grant whomever is president such authority. All this poses a new challenge to both branches of how to reconfigure our trade relations and processes over the next four to eight years...

The Politico gives the inside scoop on Fast Track death:

Democrats broke more than three decades of precedent by changing trade rules to suspend consideration of the deal. But they also displayed a procedural acumen that was less evident during their first, sometimes bumpy, year in power...

McGovern and other Democrats on the Rules Committee began discussing the possibility of stripping the time requirements from trade rules as early as January, members and aides said.

Those conversations were hypothetical, however, until the White House began to make noise about sending the Colombia agreement to Capitol Hill before Pelosi signed off on it. That prompted McGovern and Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise McIntosh Slaughter (D-N.Y.) to call for a meeting with the speaker.

Slaughter and McGovern oppose the trade deal for different reasons. The Massachusetts Democrat believes Colombia has not gone far enough to rectify its history of violence toward labor leaders.

Slaughter, meanwhile, opposes the measure because she believes it would deal another blow to her upstate New York district, which already suffers from the steady export of jobs.

Both opposed any maneuvering by Bush to force a vote, and both believed that stripping the time requirements was the best way to stop the president in his tracks.

And we got some feedback on a post from earlier this week on Fast Track, and just wanted to point out that Pelosi's action to cancel Fast Track virtually guarantees that the Senate will also not take action.

Office Park Jobs At Risk in Pennsylvania and What the Candidates Will Do About It

David Brooks asks the candidates in the New York Times:

Aren’t there windows in the vans they use to drive around the state? Don’t they see that most middle-class voters are service workers in suburban office parks, not 1930s-style proletarians in the steel mills?

Interestingly enough, a new analysis finds that it's not just Blue Collar jobs that are at risk anymore, but more than 286,000 Pennsylvania jobs (that's right, we're just talking about Pennsylvania) are highly susceptible to being offshored in the near future - from mathematicians to architectural drafters to editors and writers. Suburban workers, that's right, we're talking about your jobs!

But Brooks also says that many solutions currently offered by the candidates won't have an economic impact - and he's partially right. Without specifics, what will this set of trade-talking candidates actually do when they get to the White House? That's why groups like ours have been calling on the candidates to make real commitments to overhaul our failed NAFTA-WTO trade policies. You can read their most recent campaign commitments to Pennsylvanians on trade issues at the Citizens Trade Campaign here.

Focusing in on the economics and foreign policy

I had a piece on the record of NAFTA in my hometown paper today, the Courier-Journal, which typically (and today was no exception) is a big supporter of NAFTA-style trade deals.

If NAFTA is so rotten, why does Congress keep passing similar deals? The few special interests benefiting from these pacts have armies of lobbyists, give millions in campaign contributions and are shameless scaremongers. Their latest line, for instance, is that expanding NAFTA will counter the influence of Venezuela. In reality, the damage done to most people in our trade partner countries by NAFTA-like policies has been a major factor in breeding anger against the U.S. and support for populism.

Thankfully, the 2006 elections ushered in a freshmen class full of fair traders. The new political reality was on display in last year's vote on a NAFTA expansion to Peru. Reps. John Yarmuth and Ben Chandler joined a majority of Democrats in opposing the deal, which was also opposed by American and Peruvian unions, church leaders and environmental groups. Yet Indiana's Baron Hill and Brad Ellsworth were among the minority of Democrats who caved to corporate pressure and voted for the NAFTA expansion. This is a bad record to have as Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton tour Indiana bashing NAFTA and distancing themselves from their own mixed records on trade.

There are some other great pieces out there circulating now too. Kevin Gallagher has a great piece looking at the economic impact of the deal:

The U.S.-Colombia Free Trade deal is one of the most deeply flawed trade pacts in U.S. history. It will hardly make a dent in the U.S. economy, looks to make the Colombian economy worse off and accentuate a labor and environmental crisis in Colombia. The Democratic majority in Congress is right to oppose this agreement and call for a rethinking of U.S. trade policy.    

According to new estimates by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, the net benefits of the agreement to the U.S. will be a miniscule 0.0000472 percent of GDP or a one-time increase in the level of each American's income by just over one penny. The agreement will actually will make Colombia worse off by up to $75 million or one tenth of one percent of its GDP; losses to Colombia's textiles, apparel, food and heavy manufacturing industries, as they face new competition from U.S. import, will outweigh the gains in Colombian petroleum, mining, and other export sectors, it concludes.

Adam Isacson has an interesting piece tackling the national security argument for the Colombia FTA:

Dealing a blow to small-scale producers in places like Cauca, Nariño, or Putumayo could damage the livelihoods of thousands of farmers who, as it is, are just getting by. It could add to the ranks of rural dwellers who see no other option but to plant coca. It could add to the population of young rural Colombians susceptible to recruitment by guerrillas or "emerging" paramilitary groups.

In the absence of a "Marshall Plan" for Colombia's countryside—which is not forthcoming—the FTA could deal an economic shock to zones that, while sparsely populated, are of central importance to the effort to combat armed groups and the drug trade. Rather than making the Andes safer, the FTA could trigger a more immediate national-security threat.

In other news, support for the free market system is dropping in the US and around the world, according to a new poll from PIPA. Finally, Policy Matters Ohio has a great report out calling for an industrial policy for "green" and "blue"-friendly lightbulbs.

Bitter fallout, murders, dodges, rules, deals

(Disclosure: Global Trade Watch has no preference among the candidates.)

Following Obama's "bitter" comment, most progressives are rallying to his defense: see Sirota here, Jane Smiley here, and Katrina vanden Heuvel here. A lot of progressives I know think that Obama was just channeling Thomas Frank. I dunno, I read the comment as throwing Frank in with the Kansans, and dismissing both. After all, trade criticism was listed right along religion as a seeming opiate of the masses. It seems, however, from yesterday's news cycle that Obama did not intend to send this message. Obama now says:

“Obviously, if I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that,” Obama said in a phone interview with the Winston-Salem Journal. “But the underlying truth of what I said remains, which is simply that people who have seen their way of life upended because of economic distress are frustrated and rightfully so.”

On the right, Bill Kristol, no NAFTA opponent, writes in the NYT on the Obama bitter remark:

Obama ascribes their anti-trade sentiment to economic frustration — as if there are no respectable arguments against more free-trade agreements. This is particularly cynical, since he himself has been making those arguments, exploiting and fanning this sentiment that he decries. Aren’t we then entitled to assume Obama’s opposition to Nafta and the Colombian trade pact is merely cynical pandering to frustrated Americans?

But mostly, all was quiet on the trade angle of Obama's remarks from the corporatists, who love to use the Guns-God-Gays wedge issues while also pushing failed trade policies.

In other news, BoRev shows video showing Hillary unwilling to answer questions about her husband's ties to Colombia.

Simon Romero writes on the union killings in Colombia, showing that Citigroup employees are among the unionists targeted for murder just this year - which has seen an uptick of killings relative to 2007:

The case of Leonidas Gómez, Ms. Gómez’s brother, is one of several examples of union officials killed in recent weeks who were involved in organizing rare protest marches last month against paramilitaries. Government investigators here said they were investigating all the recent killings but had not yet identified those responsible.

Carlos Burbano was a vice president in the hospital workers’ union of the municipality of San Vicente del Caguán in southern Colombia who disappeared March 9. His body was found four days later in a garbage dump in an area considered paramilitary territory. Mr. Burbano, who had received threats before from paramilitaries, had been stabbed multiple times and burned with acid.

Like Mr. Burbano, Mr. Gómez, a member of the Bank Workers’ Union here in Bogotá, was an outspoken critic of the paramilitaries. He had also traveled throughout Colombia to speak against the trade deal, which he expected to raise salaries of senior Citigroup executives while eroding the benefits of employees, said Luis Humberto Ortiz, a fellow union official and Citigroup employee.

Mr. Gómez, last seen at a meeting with leftist politicians on the night of March 4, was found dead in his apartment on March 8, with stab wounds and his hands tied behind his back. Missing from his apartment were his laptop computer, U.S.B memory sticks and cash from his pockets, said his sister, Ms. Gómez.

Inside U.S. Trade on Friday had some interesting dissection of what Pelosi's Fast Track move last week means. Here is my paraphrasing of their reporting:

1. Pelosi - confirmed by Rules Cmte and House vote - removed the Fast Track timeline, as well as the provision that it is highly privileged and cannot be debated. This safeguards against the scenario where Rangel passes it out of Ways and Means Committee but Pelosi remains opposed. It also safeguards against any member of Congress calling for a vote when they want. So leadership will be in control.
2. The Colombia FTA is still not amendable, however, and the Senate rules remain the same: once the House sends it up, the FTA has up to 15 days in Finance Committee, and up to 15 additional days for a floor vote.
3. However, if the Senate wants, it can vote under Fast Track rules today, but then would have to formally approve it again after the House sends it up. (This happened on CAFTA, when the Senate GOP leadership just wanted to get some momentum going by passing the pact before the House, and then taking a second vote later.)
4. Because Bush has already dropped the Colombia FTA, it will have to be voted on this Congress, or it dies. Next year, if the president wanted to resubmit it, they could, but it wouldn't automatically receive Fast Track treatment. A new Fast Track vote would have to be taken if they wanted that to apply. Ed. comment: I'm betting we see Fast Track replaced by a different system, so I wouldn't expect any new Fast Track votes.

Finally, IUT cites an April 4 letter from Rice, Paulson and various cabinet secretaries to Pelosi saying that:

In seeking to identify an agreed path forward for the Colombia FTA, the Administration’s efforts have been guided by three objectives you identified in conversations with several of us that need to be met before the Colombia FTA would have the necessary support to pass the House of Representatives. They are: (1) a strong, bipartisan vote on legislation to implement our FTA with Peru; (2) a solid Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) reauthorization package; and (3) progress on labor violence and impunity in Colombia. As noted above, the first objective was satisfied by the strong bipartisan votes on the Peru FTA last year. [emphasis added]

That's the first time I've seen such clear preconditions on the record. Wonder if they're true?

Fast Track Death - live blogging

The House is doing an hour of debate on Fast Track for Colombia. I'll try to type the basic things that people are saying, and bracket any editorial remarks.

Rep. Slaughter (D-NY): Fast Track outsources our very basic legislative responsibility. We can alter this rule, and it won't affect the FTA or the Senate's actions in any way. We're on the edge of economic ruin, now is not the appropriate time to bring up a flawed agreement. Damage to workers and Afro Colombians too significant to warrant passage of this bill. It is our preregorative to suspend Fast Track if timing necessitates it. WE ARE REESTABLISHING THE HOUSE OF REP AS CO-EQUAL TO THE PRESIDENT

Rep. David Drier (R-Calif.): I've never seen Democrats align with Hugo Chavez and FARC. We are considering the Hugo Chavez RULE. Process is substance. He's reading the Fast Track rules as evidence that it's a Democratic process. Cites number of codels as upholding democratic principles. This is an unprecedented rule change. They are making up this nonsense as they go along. Venezuela threatens not only Colombia but very idea of democracy and free markets.

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY): I doubt that there's anyone who has the concern for Colombia. Not only with their political problems, but also their fight against drugs. Mr. President, you forgot to consult with the Ways and Means Committee. I don't remember the last time anyone has talked about the bill, instead they only want to talk about Chavez and Castro. Suggests some kind of a trade off for urban policing technology.

Rep. Diaz Balart (R-Fla.): This day will live in infamy.

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.): I'm open minded, but I'm not a cheap date.

Rep. Jim McCrery (R-La.): This bill turns off the timeline entirely.

Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) [- voted against the Peru FTA, but now is supporting an identical deal for Colombia - where unionists are murdered.]

SORRY. FLAKED. TOO MUCH INTOLERABLE RHETORIC ON BOTH SIDES.

Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.): So this is a rule from 1974. Guess what? we were the manufacturing collosus of the world. Until today, Congress never had a spine to stand up to the president before. Today is a new beginning.

Rep. Jerry Weller (R-Ill.): [Colombia is safer that Washington, DC. Pretty rich coming from a guy married to Guatemalan death squads.]

Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.): Talking about globalization's squeeze on middle class Americans. If people don't win, they'll turn against trade per se.

Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.): We didn't have FTAs before Fast Track.

Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas): [Calls us chickens.]

Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.): They call it Fast Track so that we don't have to argue about process.

Measure to kill Fast Track passed: 224-195. On the Dem side, Melissa Bean (Ill.), Dan Boren (Okla.), Allen Boyd (Fla.), Jim Cooper (Tenn.), Bud Cramer (Ala.), Henry Cuellar (Texas), Baron Hill (Ind.), Nick Lampson (Texas), Tim Mahoney (Fla.), and Jim Matheson (Utah) crossed sides. On the GOP side, Bob Aderholt (R-Ala.), Virgil Goode (R-Va.), Robin Hayes (R-N.C.), Walter Jones (R-N.C.), Ron Paul (R-Texas), and Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) crossed party lines. John Tanner (D-Tenn.) voted present. Bob Andrews (D-N.J.), Tim Bishop (D-N.Y.), John Larson (D-Conn.), Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), and Albio Sires (D-N.J.) did not vote.

Colombia-Congress-Fast Track: What happened, What we will do, and What you should think

Statement of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch Director Lori Wallach on Decision to Remove Fast Track Treatment from Colombia Free Trade Agreement:

We applaud House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for reasserting congressional authority over trade by removing Fast Track treatment from the Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA).

Public Citizen will apply its full resources to ensure that the Colombia Free Trade Agreement is defeated by Congress.

The United States should never have negotiated a trade agreement with Colombia, a country with a shameful record of labor leader assassinations and systematic violence against Afro-Colombian communities whose current government has been linked to deadly right wing paramilitaries.

The Colombia FTA includes the most egregious provisions of NAFTA, including extraordinary foreign investor protections that promote offshoring of U.S. jobs and expose domestic health and environmental laws to attack in foreign tribunals; and agriculture rules that will devastate hundreds of thousands of subsistence farmers in Colombia, making them poorer and undermining U.S. security interests in the region. The deal also replicates NAFTA's  limits Buy America and green procurement policies and on imported food safety and inspection requirements.

Penn steps down; other heart attacks

Mark Penn stepping down from Clinton campaign... I guess now he can focus full time on destabilizing other countries instead of his own. [UPDATE AT 1153 AM, JOHN HAS POSTED ON SOME OF THE TRADE BAGGAGE OF THE DUDE WHO IS REPLACING PENN.]

Inside US Trade from Friday also had a number of heart attacks. Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) said:

“My goal is to get a robust TAA signed by the president and once that occurs I think we will be in a much better position on Colombia. ... Taking on these issues can clear the way I think for the pending trade agreements.”... Baucus admonished both labor unions and business groups in the speech. ... But AFL-CIO Policy Director Thea Lee... said that if President Bush introduces the Colombia FTA bill over the objection of the congressional leadership, it will be defeated for a number of reasons: the economy is in recession, it is an election year and there is a Democratic majority in the House and the Senate. In addition, the last election in the House saw 27 free trade representatives replaced with fair traders, she pointed out."

It's true! More than 27, in fact. Check it out!

Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), the House Dem Whip, also had some strange things to say. From IUT again:

According to Clyburn, Hoyer is “very supportive” of the agreement, but he is “not so sure that we got it at the point where we can get the full leadership to endorse it.” Everyone in the Democratic leadership voted for the Peru FTA, he pointed out. A Hoyer spokeswoman said Hoyer remains undecided on the Colombia FTA and said Clyburn did not accurately describe Hoyer’s position, however.

Clyburn said he would work with other Democratic leaders between through next week in order to get the Colombia FTA “in shape” for a possible vote, explaining that he expects the administration to submit the implementing bill next week in order to have the maximum number of legislative days for a vote this year.

He acknowledged that a vote on a controversial piece of legislation could be made more acceptable by linking it to another important bill. “A lot of times you cobble together coalitions to get things passed and people swallow on one end in order to get what they want on the other,” he said. “Whether or not that would be an approach we would take, I don’t know.”

He said White House cooperation on a new Trade Adjustment Assistance bill might help with the passage of the Colombia FTA and said this was a “big part” of Rangel’s “concerns.”

UPDATE AT 11:50 AM - BUSH JUST SIGNED THE LETTER TO DROP THE FTA IN CONGRESS. WE'LL TRY TO FIND THE VIDEO... FUNNIEST PRONUNCIATION OF "URIBE" EVER.

Mark Penn. Wow.

Wowzers. WSJ (and the rest of the Western world) reporting on Hillary advisor Mark Penn meeting with President Alvaro Uribe to talk Colombia, and Penn is apologizing. Teamsters are hitting back, and Change to Win is hitting back. We'll stay tuned to see what happens, although both Hillary and Obama have said they will vote against the NAFTA expansion to Colombia, which Bush may try to submit to Congress as early as next Tuesday. (Saturday update: Uribe canceled Penn's firm's contract.)

Meanwhile, WSJ blog reports that Obama hits back against Uribe:

Sen. Barack Obama pushed back against criticism from Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, who said Obama opposes the free-trade deal between Washington and Bogota because of election politics.

“I think the president is absolutely wrong on this,” Obama told reporters on his plane Friday morning. “You’ve got a government that is under a cloud of potentially having supported violence against unions, against labor, against opposition.” The Illinois senator has promised to rebuild America’s reputation abroad.

In related news, Max Baucus gives us his definition of nutcake; and Bob Novak further deflates his credibility by suggests U.S. labor is controlled by Venezuela's Chavez (funny, I worked on Venezuela a few years back and remember quite the opposite).

(Disclosure: Global Trade Watch has no preference among the candidates.)

New NAFTA facts for your brain and heart

The Bush administration is getting restless! The candidates' ongoing campaigning against the NAFTA trade model is putting quite a spotlight on their efforts to expand NAFTA to the union murder capital of the world (Colombia.) Bush's latest counterinformation is here; our latest countercounter is here. Get your facts on! Here's a clip:

CONCLUSION: Can we evaluate the promises on NAFTA? Yes, we can!

An army of think tanks and corporations spends millions every year in an attempt to muddle even the basic facts on NAFTA. We know that under NAFTA, the U.S. trade deficit is up, manufacturing jobs are down, wages are stagnant, Mexican immigration is up, Mexican growth is down, and policy space has been seriously limited. Bush administration officials and pundits can debate whether any of these facts matter, but they cannot make up their own facts, nor serve up irrelevant ones in the hope of distracting policymakers or the public from continuing to demand trade policy change.

Great read on Mexico under NAFTA

Gabriel Palma is one of the best progressive economists in the world. Originally hailing from Chile, he decamped to Cambridge, currently serving as one of the few Keynesians that the neoliberals that took over his department haven't kicked out. I was in his class for about a week, before I realized that in order to take graduate econometrics, you must know something about math and statistics. At that point, after spending my undergraduate years fighting the man rather than taking the tougher classes, I decided to further postpone the learning. As I take night classes these days, I am kicking myself for not having bitten the bullet while it would have been easier.

Oh well. That doesn't stop me (or you) from getting your learn on with Gabriel's work on NAFTA and Mexico. The paper is a few years old, but it remains one of the better expositions of what went down before and since NAFTA went into effect. Among his findings:

• Just nine countries account for 90 percent of manufactured exports from developing countries. Mexico is the only one of these to thoroughly go through the neoliberal ringer, courtesy of NAFTA and NAFTA-like policy changes.
• Oil used to dominate Mexico's exports, but now manufacturing (increasingly high technology) constitutes the vast majority.
• Like here at home, Mexican wages are scarcely above their 1980s' levels - whether you're looking at the maquila or non-maquila sectors. In the maquilas, you didn't have to pay anyone much of anything, since there was a bottomless pool of rural Mexicans separately getting displaced by Mexico's agriculture rules.
• Unlike here, where bubbles and debt made up for the loss of demand brought on by the trade deficit, Mexico used export growth to make up for the loss of demand brought on by wage stagnation.
• The traditional non-export manufacturing sectors have not seen hardly any increase in investment, meaning that the maquilas (which attracted tons of FDI) did not feed back into other sectors of the economy.
• It turned out to be a weak substitute for real growth, however, since value added in the maquilas and auto sectors remains about where it was before NAFTA, despite the massive increase in both maquila exports and imports.
• From just 2001-2002, 545 maquilas left Mexico for China, shedding hundreds of thousands of Mexican jobs. So much for that experiment. But as my colleague Carlos Salas shows in an upcoming paper, the few workers that got to keep their jobs have seen their wages bid up somewhat. And with absolutely none of this background, we can now see the Bush administration taking credit for the momentary respite from hell. Oh joy! A rounded development policy proposal is just around the corner, I. Am. Sure.

Now, as Rev. Jeremiah Wright might say, the chickens are coming home to roost. As CEPR documents in a recent paper, Mexico stands to lose an amount equal to 3 percent of their GDP due to the overreliance on the U.S. export market (bloated to massive deficits), which will now come crashing down thanks to our recession. Sustainable growth, anyone?

The youth are getting restless

Progressive life in the U.S. can be rough. The two main political parties and many environmental and non-profit groups in the U.S. are not really structured to facilitate mass participation, university "activism" has turned towards the depoliticized navel gazing of much of "cultural studies", blogs are cool but limited and not immune from collective action problems plaguing other platforms for action, and the union movement has been generally on the decline for decades. How's a young person to tune in, turn on, and drop (metaphorical) bombz on the system?

United Students Against Sweatshops has filled an important void  in leadership development for young progressives. The coalition has offered many yoots their first exposure to labor and solidarity organizing, and perhaps and unfortunately their last exposure to open and honest debates about politics with a small p (as opposed to big P, as in Politico), as some of us in the early days of USAS grappled with. While the group has done pioneering work on overseas labor conditions (hence the name), it has also been at the forefront of making U.S. campuses more labor friendly, both by supporting cafeteria and TA unions, and changing attitudes of upper and middle class students.

It is vital that groups like USAS continue to flourish and grow, so that there are many many more people involved in moving our country forward. Anyone who wants to help with that vision is encouraged to turn out tonight for USAS' 10-Year Anniversary Celebration here in DC, or simply donate online to a worthy cause. You can do both or either here.

Trade back-and-forth in OH

Disclosure: Global Trade Watch has no preference among the candidates.

Clinton and Obama's showing in last night's Democratic debate gave us a few more glimpses into the candidates' plans for redirecting our trade policy. The highlight of the debate was both candidates' commitment to renegotiate or threaten to opt out of NAFTA. Though neither would commit to pulling out of NAFTA in the six month time frame, this is still a dramatic statement that we have not seen from either of the candidates previously. For more background on their stances, check out David Sirota's primer from yesterday.

This news will come as a great big sigh of relief for many Americans who have seen their lifestyles turned upside-down by our misguided trade policies - including NAFTA and almost a dozen clones that we've seen materialize since.

The CNN Political Ticker notes the moment and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown's reaction:

Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were asked if, as president, they would opt out of NAFTA in six months. Both candidates said they supported restructuring NAFTA and would use the threat of opting out of the agreement as a negotiating tool.

"They said it exactly right," Brown told CNN. "I want trade and more of it. I want it under different rules."

Brown voiced loud opposition to NAFTA during his 2006 Senate campaign, in which he unseated GOP incumbent Mike DeWine.

"If we say we want a different NAFTA," Brown continued, "they will negotiate, always with the threat of opting out if they don't, and that's exactly the right position. And I was thrilled, because I have not heard either of them specifically say that and they answered the question directly."

MLIVE, a Michigan news service, says that their state sympathizes with "Ohio's special beef":

Until now trade generally has been a low-profile issue in the long Democratic campaign. But Ohio has a special beef with U.S. trade policy, which union activists and many Democrats blame for a steep manufacturing decline.

Only Michigan has suffered a greater loss of manufacturing jobs than the 265,000 (23.7 percent) Ohio over the past seven years, mostly as a result of corporate outsourcing and plant closings. It's the worst jobs loss in Ohio "since the end of the Great Depression," according to the American Manufacturing Trade Action Coalition, a manufacturers association.

"Trade is an issue here," said Amy Hanauer, executive director of Policy Matters Ohio, an issue think tank, "and NAFTA is a proxy for trade. ... It may hurt Hillary Clinton."

The political consequences were made abundantly clear two years ago when Democratic Rep. Sherrod Brown unseated Republican Sen. Mike DeWine handily, chiefly by denouncing U.S. trade policy.

The New York Times reported this morning from the famous Midwest stumping-ground:

“We’re sick and tired of the empty promises and the same old story line about Youngstown and the mills,” said Phil Kidd, 28, a blogger and community activist who has sold 10,000 T-shirts that shout “Defend Youngstown” over the image of a steelworker wielding a sledgehammer. “The problem is that this is a rubber-stamp Democratic area so they know it’s almost a guarantee they’re going to get our vote. We just have to hope that this time whoever wins won’t forget about us.”

Both Democratic candidates have promised to remember, kicking off their Ohio campaigns here with fiery populist speeches they hope will appeal to the 100,000 Democratic stalwarts who live up and down the Mahoning Valley, the cradle of the Ohio steel industry and a place that has been shedding union-wage manufacturing jobs for the last 30 years...

Mr. Obama has also honed his message to tap into the anger and despair heightened by growing unemployment and the foreclosures that have felled 79,000 homeowners in the state. In a speech at Youngstown State University, he told the crowd he would give generous tax breaks to the middle class, establish a $10 billion fund to help homeowners facing foreclosure and provide incentives to companies that invest in struggling cities.

“Everywhere I go — not just in Youngstown, but everywhere — you see people who have worked in a plant for 20 years, put their heart and soul into building profits for shareholders,” he said. “Suddenly, the rug’s pulled out from under them; the job’s shipped overseas. They don’t have health care. They don’t have a pension. They’re trying to compete with their teenage kids for a job paying seven bucks an hour at the local fast-food joint.”

If the after-work crowd at the Golden Dawn tavern is any guide, Mrs. Clinton still enjoys solid support from the men whose rough hands and plain-spoken ways put them in the coveted demographic that analysts say hold the key to winning Ohio next Tuesday.

Many of the men who were sitting at the bar and salting their goblets of beer had clearly absorbed Mrs. Clinton’s contention that her opponent is too inexperienced to be president.

From The Washington Post, an elaborate lie-detector scale:

You would not think so from the way they have been attacking each other, but Clinton and Obama are not all that far apart on NAFTA. They both believe in free trade, but they both contend that the United States has gotten a bad deal from the way NAFTA and other trade deals have been enforced. Both candidates have used quotes selectively to slam each other. Two Pinocchios apiece.

ONE PINOCCHIO: Some shading of the facts. TWO PINOCCHIOS: Significant omissions or exaggerations. THREE PINOCCHIOS: Significant factual errors. FOUR PINOCCHIOS: Real whoppers. THE GEPPETTO CHECK MARK: Statements and claims contain the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Is it all about whitey?

"White Men Hold Key for Democrats", blared the Wall Street Journal headline, in discussing the Obama and Clinton's camp supposed courting of the white male "blue collar" vote in Ohio. Speaking as a white person (okay, and someone who had a class in whiteness studies led by a Korean guy who studied lesbian Iron Maiden fans in Appalachia), we're not that used to having our race pointed out to us quite so openly. That's what makes my new favorite blog, Stuff White People Like, such a hoot. (It's so true! I do totally heart standing still at concerts! lol lol, etc.)

Clearly, though, white men are a demographic group that left the Dems first in the 1960s-1970s, and again following the Dems' support of NAFTA in 1993-94, as Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers aptly showed in their 2000 book. This is a group that cares a lot about trade policy and economic security, and appealing just to the "latte-drinking, Prius- driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies" crowd is not likely to play that well in Ohio, as evidenced by the Machinists' president using that as an epithet against the supporters of one candidate.

But, c'mon people, it's not just about white people, as a new study released today from my buds John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer from the Center for Economic and Policy Research shows. Among its findings:

Today, only 15.7 percent of all black workers are union members or covered by a union contract at their workplace. Twenty-five years ago, that share was 31.7 percent. Part of the reason for the decline in unionization among African Americans is the decline in U.S. manufacturing. But even within manufacturing, unionization rates have been falling. On average, manufacturing workers are now no more likely to be in a union than workers in the rest of the economy.
 
The study, which analyzed data from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey, found that the share of African Americans in manufacturing jobs fell from 23.9 percent in 1979 to 9.8 percent last year. From 1983 to 2007, unionization rates among African Americans dropped from 31.7 to 15.7 percent. Unionization rates also dropped among whites (from 22.2 to 13.5 percent) and Hispanics (24.2 to 10.8 percent) during the same period, but the declines were not as steep as those for African Americans.

So it may be more apt to say that "The Economy Holds the Key for Democrats," or indeed for anybody wanting to compete in states where manufacturing and unions matter.

Labor standards do not equal rising living standards

To listen to some of the recent chatter in the presidential debate about trade policy, you would think that the only problem with NAFTA is that it didn't contain core international labor standards in the main body of the text. As we've pointed out, core labor standards are only the beginning of what needs to be fixed with the failed NAFTA model, and many labor unions think even the labor standards achieved in the Peru FTA - supported by all the top contenders for president - didn't take us to where we need to be on that issue alone.

But this debate even obscures a larger issue: that labor standards are not going to put food on anyone's plate. As our own Lori Wallach notes over at Huffington Post,

Strong labor standards are necessary, but they are not sufficient to alter trade agreements' damaging economic outcomes for Americans. Labor rights requirements in trade pacts will provide workers in trade partner countries with essential tools to organize for improved wages and conditions over many decades as part of creating a social contract that may take a century to establish, as it did in the United States. However, a future president has a duty to secure tangible gains for Americans who are losing their jobs and seeing their wages stagnate today, and who fear for their children's futures in the coming decades. That requires changing the status quo trade model by eliminating provisions that promote immediate offshoring of U.S. production and jobs. The foreign investor protections included in these agreements directly incentivize offshoring by removing the risks normally associated with relocating to low-wage developing countries.

Indeed, the *best* case scenario for labor rights in an FTA over the short-to-medium term is that there is a lawsuit brought by the U.S. government against a developing country for failure to comply with labor rights (subject to multiple and difficult to meet conditions). This could be awesome, no doubt about it, and would provoke an important debate. But lawsuits alone will not put food on the table in either the U.S. or Mexico.

How did we get into the position where labor rights became the outer horizon of the thinkable? For some insight on the question, I highly recommend this article by Robert Howse, "From Politics to Technocracy". Howse is probably more sympathetic to the overall GATT-WTO agenda that we here at EOT, which makes some of his insights all the more interesting. His read on history is that the basic trade policy infrastructure was drawn up in a time of Keynesian welfare states in developed countries, where "one simply assumed a certain toolbox of effective nontrade policy instruments, and the stability and viability of the social bargains within states as well, or at least the stability of institutions that construct and reconstruct such social bargains." In other words, many in the group assumed massive domestic redistributive interventions in the "free market" were just fine, while they should be limited in actions between governments internationally. All of this, it was thought, could be technocratically managed, if one were to restrict "politics" to the domestic sphere.

But the growth of neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s (which I would argue was fed by this very group of trade lawyers) decimated the ability/willingness of states to have effective domestic responses to economic problems.

Afro-Colombians reiterate opposition to Colombia FTA

Marino Córdoba, founder of the Association of Internally Displaced Afro-Colombians (AFRODES), has a nice guest blog post at The Hill entitled "Why Afro-Colombians Oppose the Colombia FTA."  The whole post is worth a read, but the juicy tidbits include:

...At the end of 2007, angered by the strong opposition of the majority of Afro-Colombian communities to the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA,) Uribe created a new Commission in Colombia that directly challenges our legal governance structure.

Cynically dubbed the Commission for the Advancement of Afro-Colombian People, it would undermine our communities’ ability to advance development strategies chosen by our people that comport with our needs and that help even the economic playing field... President George Bush and other U.S. Uribe allies, such as Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), and the vast array of lobbying firms hired by the Uribe government are now trying to tout this outrageous Commission as evidence that Afro- Colombian concerns are being addressed as they push to pass the FTA.

Córdoba says that thanks to a vibrant civil society movement in the 1980s, Afro-Colombians enjoy full legal recognition of their cultural rights and collective ownership of their lands (he specifically mentions Law 70 of 1993 (PDF), a rather remarkable piece of progressive legislation that I'd encourage anyone to read).  Yet this recognition has been undermined by paramilitary organizations forcing Afro-Colombians off of their land: "Tens of thousands of us have been forced to flee... clear[ing] the way for the entry of oil palm plantations, logging operations, and mining projects advanced by allies of the Uribe Administration."

The Colombia FTA's Chapter 10 contains the same poisonous investor rights provisions as NAFTA, CAFTA and the Peru FTA.  If the FTA is implemented, these provisions will only exacerbate the situation, empowering foreign companies to engage in resource extraction made possible by the illegal and often violent forcing of Afro-Colombians off of their land — land supposedly guaranteed to them by Law 70.

Pre-Super Tuesday reflections

(Disclosure: Global Trade Watch has no preference among the candidates.)

A lot of folks are offering their reflections the relative merits of the candidates (see here, here, here, and here.) I was able to share mine at San Francisco's NPR station a little earlier today.

As I see it, we should evaluate trade policy on three overlapping dimensions:

1. Who is affected
2. How is it made
3. What are the "surprise" implications for non-trade policy

On the first front, I'm thinking of how our trade policy has resulted in (or not helped us avoid) a skyrocketing trade deficit, largely stagnant wages and farm prices, and the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs, hundreds of thousands of family farms, and an increasing number of service sector jobs. Nearly every candidate touches on this part of the issue - even Huckabee and Romney with their comments on manufacturing. (McCain has spoken about compensating losers through TAA.) With the exception of Ron Paul (who calls for scrapping the WTO, NAFTA, etc. directly), the whole field talks about the losses from trade policy for many people. They are largely silent on the trade-wage connections.

The second category relates to how we make trade policy. For four decades, our trade policy has been conceived under the undemocratic Fast Track mechanism, which takes away Congress' constitutional authority and responsibility to set our trade policy, and gives it to an executive branch that sets the terms and picks the partner countries and writes the deal, leaving Congress only an up or down vote. Obama has talked about replacing Fast Track, while Clinton has said she will hold off from asking for Fast Track until she reviews past agreements.

Finally, as we have long been arguing, trade policy these days is only marginally about trade. Much of the 600-page texts of the WTO and FTAs has to do with how we adopt policies domestically. Thus, a move to universal health care could be challenged as a limitation on market access for health insurance companies. Under our FTAs, investors can demand taxpayer money for public interest policies that limit their future expected profits. Obama has addressed investor-state, consumer protection, and domestic regulation. We haven't heard much from the other candidates on this dimension.

As we'll document in an upcoming report, both the Dem and GOP health care and climate change proposals could face WTO challenge. More specific responses to these and other questions can help voters can make an informed choice.

The Colombian Corporate Agenda... from the inside

Today, at an event at the Council of the Americas, a corporate organization, I was introduced to a delegation of corporate CEOs from Colombia: David Bojanini of South American Insurance, Manuel Carvajal of the Carvajal Corp., Antonio Celia of Promigas and Francisco Diaz of the Corona Organization.

The event was introduced as a discussion of whether the "free trade agreement" would help improve Colombia, but amongst the diverse panel made up entirely of CEOs of Colombia's corporations (but from different geographic regions, perhaps? Though not even sure about that...), no one said that the FTA would be a bad idea, omitting the perspective of most civil society groups in Colombia and not leading to much of a discussion.

Each businessman outlined their commitment to improving life in Colombia. Antonio Celia said, "we provide jobs...hoping that they [workers] will be compensated with commitment and personal reward." (I'm sure most Colombians would prefer a living wage)

They also said that as opposed to Mexico pre-NAFTA, Colombia's corporations have a real sense of social responsibility and the problems were different in Mexico. (a  reminder that drugs were one of the major issues during the NAFTA debate and last I heard most of our cocaine still comes from Colombia...?)

Bojanini said that he is "very concerned about the well-being of our employees. We have deep respect for our labor unions - many of our companies have unions. We support free association." (and still the most dangerous country for unionists in the world)

After going on about all the contributions of what they admitted was not a representative sample of Colombian CEOs, Francisco Diaz strained to say, "we're trying to tie this into the FTA..."

There was also the obligatory exchange about Venezuela and Chavez (that "purveyor of false populism" Bush mentioned last night in the State of the Union). The CEOs cited that the #1 market for Colombia corporations is the U.S. and #2 is Venezuela. The businessmen also said that the private sector has no control over this and will continue to send the "wrong signal" by exporting to Venezuela, but the government can't send the "wrong signal" by rejecting the trade agreement, because the top two exporters might switch places and then the world will end!!! ahhh!! This was an especially interesting statement given the frame of this forum as about Corporate Social Responsibility, but I guess by this point they had forgotten the corporate responsibility part...

The CEOs were also excited to announce that they were adopting a few conventions of a Human Rights Code of Conduct that they had written. I would think that since they wrote it they would sign up for all of it, but apparently some of the private-sector written Human Rights Conduct just went too far in supporting human rights.

And then they assured the people around the table including a few reporters that this forum and this trip was in fact "not a PR effort." (Well, at least with only the two reporters who showed up and the arguments full of holes, it wasn't a very successful PR effort.) 

When will people get embarrassed about Colombia?

Nobody could accuse the Washington community of lawyers that is responsible for our trade policy of being overly concerned with social justice.

But, c'mon, give me a break. Usually when we have trade debates in this town, they center around making one-way streets into two-way streets, keeping the bicycle of trade moving forward, bashing protectionists and isolationists, engaging not retreating, etc.

Enter the debate around the Colombia FTA. Back in the 1990s, even some Clinton administration officials were cited in the Christian Science Monitor as thinking NAFTA expansion to Colombia was a bad idea - precisely because of the country's ongoing civil war and drug problem. Today, it's no secret that a majority of members of Congress and the entirety of the Democrats' base is utterly opposed to a Colombia FTA, both on the grounds that it's a NAFTA expansion and that it's the biggest unionist-murdering country in the world. In most popular discussions of the pact, this latter fact is THE talking points - people murdered. Thousands of them. With total impunity.

So when the advocates of the Colombia FTA take to the stage, they're rarely talking about bicycles or exports. Their main talking point is that UNION MURDERS HAVE GONE DOWN. Is there no shame?? Who cares if they're up or down... if you had to lead with that fact, you have a problem. In Europe, they have a whole host of social and developmental criteria before you can join the European Union. Not here. The bigger the freak social problems you have, the better.

A Republican at an event I was recently at put it bluntly: how many fewer murders do you want to see before you pass the FTA? What's the specific target? Some Dems in attendance had to respond that they would be glad to expand NAFTA to Colombia, but "more progress [on murder] needs to be made." It's like the saying about porn, I guess the Dems'll know sufficient murder reduction when they see it. Problem is, none of us'll know beforehand. Might it be time to get beyond the country-specific critique and blast the failed model instead?