Tea Party Express Goes After Olympia Snowe/Jonathan Tasini Goes After The Latest Tragic "Free Trade" Capitulation

Yesterday, just as the psychopaths from the Tea Party Express were painting a target on Olympia Snowe's back, the mainstream conservative Maine senator joined a bipartisan coalition introducing the Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act of 2011. The other principle co-sponsors are Sherrod Brown (D-OH) in the Senate and Sander Levin (D-MI), Tim Murphy (R-PA), and Tim Ryan (D-OH) in the House, all 5 representing areas that have lost significant numbers of jobs to the misguided and misnamed "free trade" policies perpetrated on the country by Big Business with the active connivance of a transpartisan political elite that included not just the regular suspects like the two Bush clowns but also Clinton and now Obama. The bill is exactly the same one that the House passed with a huge bipartisan majority last year, 348-79 (249 Democrats and 99 Republicans), despite hysterical opposition from Boehner and his corporate cronies. The bill calls for China's manipulated and grossly undervalued currency to be treated as an actionable subsidy under U.S. trade law. You can imagine how the financiers of the Tea Party Express-- some of the wealthiest and most corrupt "businessmen" on Planet Earth-- reacted to that. (Actually, you don't have to imagine: "The conservative group, arguably the most organized and best funded campaign tool in the tea party movement, announced Thursday afternoon that it plans to fight the moderate Republican’s 2012 re-election effort. Snowe enjoys tremendous popularity across the political spectrum in her home state... 'As tea party activists we have a responsibility to support fiscally responsible, constitutional conservatives-- and Olympia Snowe is about as far as one can get from that,' the Tea Party Express wrote to supporters in a fundraising message Thursday evening. 'Olympia Snowe doesn’t respect the responsibility of her job to serve the American people-- she instead serves the liberal interests of the news media and Washington, D.C. political establishment,' the message added. 'It’s time for her to be voted out of office once and for all! We need to defeat Olympia Snowe. Please help us with the most generous contribution you can afford.'”)

Meanwhile, the U.S. trade deficit with China has cost more than 2.4 million jobs since George W, Bush took office and really ramped up the off-shoring and outsourcing big time. Maine is one of the state's hardest hit by a plague that Wall Street loves but by which the American middle class is being decimated and turned into a third world country. Scott Paul, Executive Director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing was right on top of this early yesterday:

"Passing legislation to hold China accountable for its currency manipulation is one of the very few bipartisan things Congress could do to lower our trade deficit, create manufacturing jobs, boost economic growth, and cut spending-all at the same time. This bill passed overwhelmingly in the House last year. We challenge the House to pass the re-introduced legislation before the next semi-annual currency report is due: April 15. We will be working hard with manufacturers, labor union members, and Tea Party supporters to secure this goal."

Tea Party supporters are very different from Tea Party financiers-- as the Alliance for American Manufacturing us about to find out. Someone who has been talking about that for a very long time is labor actvist, author and former congressional candidate Jonathan Tasini. Yesterday in a post about the tragedy of "free trade" he concluded by pointing out that "We are being played. People against people. Worker against worker. Community against community."

Amid all the partisan rancor in Washington, Boehner and Obama have been blowing each other kisses over trade policy. Both are heavily financed by multinational corporate interests whose bottom line is "free trade," no matter by many Americans are pauperized. It's the most obvious place for them to work together, just like it was for Clinton and his Republican-controlled Congress, which passed-- with a lot of Democratic arm twisting by Rahm Emanuel on Clinton's behalf and even worse tactics by Tom DeLay on Wall Street's behalf-- the catastrophic NAFTA legislation. Obama and Boehner are determined to pass the same kind of job-exporting travesties for South Korea, Colombia and Panama. Tasini reminds us that this is no flip-flop by Obama.

As a candidate for office and as president, he has said, sadly, that he is a committed "free trader." So, it is not that he is abandoning promises--he simply is, in my opinion, wrong. But, he is very much keeping his promises: to the vast array of corporate interests who have supported him from the outset. Hiring Bill Daley as White House chief-of-staff sealed the deal: Daley was Bill Clinton's point person for the selling of NAFTA in 1993-- and I use the word "selling" because Daley used the U.S. Treasury to buy Congressional votes by promising a variety of projects (If you want an in-depth investigative look at that sorry story, I highly recommend the Center for Public Integrity's The Trading Game: Inside Lobbying for the North American Free Trade Agreement)

But, these agreements are a disaster for the future of decent wages and prosperity-- not just in this country but around the world.

We can have a reasoned debate about this. But, to do so, I would submit that we need to get away from the false, tired debate and marketing phrases that pit "free trade" versus "protectionism." There is no such thing as "free trade"-- it has probably never existed in the  form envisioned by David Ricardo.

Certainly, today, so-called "free trade" is in fact very much MANAGED trade. I urge people to read, as I have, so-called "free trade" deals-- they are densely-packed huge volumes of text that set out PROTECTIONS for capital and investment (particularly, intellectual property and patents).

And no one I know opposing these disastrous, middle-class killing trade deals is against trade. They are not "protectionists"-- they are people who want trade based not on corporate rights but on trade that creates a floor for wages around the world and boosts community standards, not tries to make a buck on the undercutting of standards.

One of the smoke-and-mirror tactics we will read a lot about is the "get-tough" position the Administration will take on enforcement.

But, enforcement is a complete sham, designed simply to convince people to support a disastrous trade policy.

...[W]e have an entirely inadequate system in this country just to watch over safety and health in the workplace, funded at a minuscule level of several hundred million dollars-- and, yet, we even more ludicrously proposed, in the past, to oversee labor rights enforcement over three countries (the U.S., Mexico and Canada) at a laughingly pathetic and criminal level of a couple of million bucks?

Why would anyone now believe that enforcement in South Korea, Colombia or Peru be any different?  

The fact is enforcement is a farce. It was a farce created to buy a few votes to jam NAFTA through a Democratic Congress. It was a farce concocted by a Democratic president and his Labor secretary (Robert Reich), who were both full-throated champions of NAFTA and so-called "free trade."

But, here is a larger point: there is no enforcement that can work. Ever.

The problem is not enforcement of NAFTA-like agreements.

It is NAFTA-style trade itself and its very conception and framework. Labor and environmental rights are slapped on as add-ons to deals that are sideshows to the meat of these agreements-- protecting capital and investors’ rights. We cannot "fix" NAFTA-style trade deals unless we destroy the fundamental motivation behind them-- lower wages and a careful obliteration of every reasonable regulation to protect individuals.

Which very much explains why Republicans are so gung-ho in their support. But why do conservative Democrats like Obama get behind it so vehemently. Perhaps the fact that Obama is Wall Street's most heavily financed candidate ever will help idealists in blue t-shirts understand the scope of the problem. He seems to have changed a bit: