You Can Blame Free Trade, You Can Blame Rahm Emanuel, You Can Blame It On The Bossa Nova-- But You Can't Blame Alan Grayson

Almost the second Obama realized Nancy Pelosi would be leaving the Speaks chair he saw an opportunity to deliver to the Big Business interests who he thinks will once again finance a presidential campaign for him. We looked at it Wednesday in a post called When The Republicans Talk About Compromise....

[T]he same way Clinton stepped up to the plate for Big Business as soon as he took over the White House and had Rahm Emanuel force enough Democrats to do what George H.W. Bush was unable to deliver-- NAFTA-- Obama and Boehner will be delighted to work together on more job-killing trade deals that Pelosi would never have allowed.

Trade is one of the few areas where the White House hopes, with some reason, to find agreement with resurgent Republicans. Obama is headed to South Korea for a G-20 meeting on Nov. 10-11, where he hopes to finalize the pact that was negotiated by the George W. Bush administration.

...The GOP has been pressing for the South Korea deal to move forward. Obama, who wants to burnish his business credentials ahead of his expected 2012 reelection bid, also has a strong interest in seeing the $70 billion trade deal approved.

If passed by Congress, the South Korea pact would be the largest U.S. trade deal since the North American Free Trade Agreement of the early 1990s with Canada and Mexico.

Yesterday Digby pointed to a fascinating new dynamic aborning in Congress, or possibly aborning-- and "free" trade, detested by voters across the political spectrum but absolutely demanded by the elites who write the checks that make the campaigns go round and round-- is the crucible.

Obviously, if they try to push this through the lame duck the dynamics are slightly different, but if they do it in the next congress it's going to be a very interesting experiment. You'll see the emboldened Tea Party wing under DeMint flexing its muscles but you'll also see a much more progressive Democratic caucus in the House. This is one of the rare cases in which you could theoretically see progressives and Tea Partiers join together (like the first TARP vote, before Obama and Boehner twisted arms to pass it.)

My personal instinct is to say that the tea partiers will fold under pressure, but I'm not entirely sure of that. They are looking for ways to distinguish themselves from the establishment and this may be their best shot.

Actually, it won't be the first time that the King of the Teabaggers (along with other teabagging extremists, Ron Paul and Mike Pence) worked with progressives to stop GOP corporate excesses. Coming from a somewhat different perspective from DeMint, union activist and author Jonathan Tasini wrote urgently about Obama cutting deals with Boehner on "free" trade on the backs on American workers. Like most progressives, Tasini recognizes that the Bush/Clinton "free" trade agreements "are directly connected to the decline in wages-- both because they encourage the movement of high-wage jobs to lower-wage countries... AND because so-called 'free trade' is based on the fundamental principle of the race to the bottom on wages. The world of trade today is not based on the best product. It is based on wage and regulation arbitrage. That is, worldwide corporations are simply looking for the places to do business where they can get the cheapest wages and the lowest level of regulation possible (as in lax environmental standards, no labor standards and no protection for anything-- except for capital and corporate intellectual property right). And they are clear: they do not care about creating jobs here."

[T]he Nancy Pelosi-led House (and I invoke her name positively because she deserves credit for this) was the finger in the dike preventing the passage of the so-called "free trade" agreements with South Korean and Colombia (and Pelosi did that even when there were senior Democrats like Charles Rangel who were trying to do the bidding of corporate lobbyists). You can bet your life that the John Boehner-led Lobbyist Convention (what we once used to call the "House of Representatives") will now press for the passage of those deals. While a smattering of Republicans in the past did oppose so-called "free trade," their numbers have never been consequential. These deals will now pass the House. Absolutely guaranteed.

Take no comfort about the Senate. On trade, the Senate Democratic caucus has been, as a whole, much more inclined to support so-called "free trade." I am not even sure whether Sherrod Brown-- the main Senate sponsor of the TRADE Act, which would try to usher in a new sane era on trade--could muster enough votes to filibuster a so-called "free trade" deal. The House has been the bulwark. With the House gone, it's over in the Senate. There will be no reason for the Senate leadership to hold these deals back.

And the president has not been an ally in this area. He has consistently, going back to the 2008 presidential primaries, referred to himself as a "free trader." In his last State of the Union address, he said:

And that's why we'll continue to shape a Doha trade agreement that opens global markets, and why we will strengthen our trade relations in Asia and with key partners like South Korea and Panama and Colombia.

As important, this is also terrible politics. I think it is understandable why people are angry. The truth is the people have been robbed by the entirely bankrupt system of the "free market"-- and so-called "free trade" has been an important oil in that robbery. Rather than focus on the phony deficit "crisis," the president and the Democrats should be talking about how to stop the robbery-- and approving more so-called "free trade" agreements is, to put it mildly, off message.

If we want to "hear the message," it is that everyone is sick and tired of being screwed by the big corporations and the top one percent of the wealthy in this country who care only about draining more of our national wealth into their own pockets.

...Vote against any candidate who will vote to let corporations attack our wages and pensions and the American Dream by forcing workers everywhere to work for slave wages.

Over the past few election cycles, opposition to so-called "free trade" was an electoral winner. Public Citizen showed how in 2006 and 2008 Democratic gains came partly because of a rejection of the so-called "free trade" model.

In a new analysis by Public Citizen released today, the organization says:

House Democrats that ran on fair trade platforms in competitive and open-seat races were three times as likely to survive the GOP tidal wave than Democrats who ran against fair trade, according to a comprehensive 182-race, 70-page report released today by Public Citizen. The GOP tsunami obliterated many candidate-specific features of the midterm contests, but trade, job offshoring and/or government purchases of foreign-made goods were a stunningly persistent national focus of midterm election campaigns, with 205 candidates campaigning on these issues. A record number of 75 Republicans adopted some fair trade messaging as well, 43 of whom won their races. More than sixty races became "fair trade offs," where both the Democrat and Republican ran on fair trade themes. Only 37 candidates campaigned in favor of more North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)-style trade agreements-- about half of these candidates lost.

This is another case of a blurry Democratic message-- one where professional politicians who happen to be in the Democratic Party are trying to please the special interests that are congenitally linked to the Republican Party. Rahm Emanuel harnessed the energy behind this, perverted Obama's message, helped him finance his White House bid and has now wreaked havoc on the Democratic Party and the Democratic brand. And just the way the voters repudiated his Blue Dogs and New Dems this week-- the Blue Dog Coalition lost 30 of its 55 members and the New Democrats lost 27 of their 69 members-- Democrats should, once and for all, repudiate the corporate shills and let them go their own third way-- starting with Emanuel.

As I was finishing up this post, a friend sent me this report from Richard Wolffe claiming that Team Obama is blaming Emanuel-- though not for the right reasons. They were angry he wasn't around for the end of the campaign and angry that he wasn't there to make Obama more transactional and even less idealistic. No one would ever imagine-- not in Washington-- that crapping on the Democratic brand the way he has, confusing voters about which party supports Wall Street, which party is for outsourcing, which part is for the middle class... could possibly be what ails the Democratic Party and should be why they should really be pissed off at Rahm Emanuel, a creature of Wall Street who has never failed the people who took him from being a foul-mouthed pischer to a foul-mouthed multimillionaire.