Meet Pat Lang-- Another Progressive Fighting To Protect Ohio Working Families From Toxic Corporate Trade Policies, Ignored By The Beltway Insiders

A few days ago, we met Democratic congressional candidate, Missa Eaton. I asked her to blog about an issue that really animated her decision to run for Congress. It was no surprise that she immediately picked the corporate trade policies that have devastated the industrial heartland of northwest Pennsylvania. Today we're going to meet another Democrat, Pat Lang, attempting to take out another freshman Republican representative of the 1%-- in this case banking lobbyist Steve Stivers. And it was no surprise when Pat picked the same topic. Corporate trade policies have devastated the Ohio industrial heartland as well.

Pat's district stretches from downtown Columbus, Ohio to the state's Appalachian foothills. It's a newly gerrymandered district that was originally drawn to be safe for Stivers. But it isn't. As part of a last minute compromise they included a nice blue chunk of Columbus, making the district much more swingy. Pat is the twice-elected law director of Athens, another blue city in the district, and his tenure at that job has proven him to be a champion of working men and women. I asked him to share his thoughts about the state of the Democratic party when it comes to "free trade." Here's his guest post. If you like what you read, you can contribute to Pat's campaign and find him on Facebook and Twitter.

Trade Deals? More Like Raw Deals.

-by Pat Lang

When I announced that I'd be running against Steve Stivers in Ohio's gerrymandered but winnable 15th Congressional District, I promised that I'd fight for middle class families in Washington. Sounds like a common-sense promise for a Democrat to make-- but a third or more of our party's membership forgot about working folks at one of the only moments of these past two years when it really counted.

I'm thinking of the votes by Congress to approve so-called "free trade" agreements with South Korea, Panama and Colombia last fall. The Beltway media didn't do much to let you know-- we were, after all, in the midst of a nationwide BlackBerry outage that surely warranted the attention-- but 66 Democrats in the House joined the 234 Republicans who approved the Panama deal. A full 59 Democrats said yes to the Korea pact and 31 to the Colombia agreement. That last vote came in spite of the fact that Colombia is about the deadliest place in the world to be a trade unionist, as you might have read about here at Down With Tyranny.

All of this took me back to a time when I was too young to vote but old enough to tell right from wrong, growing up in the small town of Albany in Appalachian Ohio. NAFTA took effect when I was a junior in high school. At the time, my mom was a waitress and my dad was a teacher in one of the poorest school districts in the state. They weren't getting rich, but thinking about it now, maybe they were lucky. Our family's friends and neighbors in manufacturing jobs were not. Even more evident in my hometown was the ripple effect, especially on mine workers.

According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), 682,000 jobs have gone south because of NAFTA, including more than 34,000 in Ohio. Only Michigan, Indiana and Kentucky have fared worse-- although every single state has seen a net job loss. The jury is in and the verdict is obvious: NAFTA has been terrible for Ohio and terrible for America. Incidentally, EPI says the Korea deal will cost us another 159,000 jobs.

Is every Democrat a sellout on trade? I am happy to say that this is not the case. Here in Ohio, Sherrod Brown was one of only 15 members of the U.S. Senate to vote against the Korea trade agreement. In fact, he voted against all three pacts. "These agreements haven’t led to net job creation," Senator Brown said after the agreements became law. "There were jobs created by NAFTA and CAFTA (the Central American Free Trade Agreement)-- but when balanced against the jobs lost, the result has been massive job and trade deficits."

I applaud Senator Brown for standing up for middle class Ohioans-- but to turn the tide against bad trade deals, we need Democrats in the House who will speak for working families. When he was serving in the House himself, he fought against CAFTA. It passed by the narrowest of margins: two votes. More than a dozen yes votes that night came from Democrats.

And the next Congress may very well cast the biggest vote yet on trade. If you haven't heard about the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), read up. The CWA isn't the only union who thinks that the TPP is "NAFTA on steroids."

No doubt, our work is cut out for us this fall in central and southern Ohio. The incumbent in the 15th District, Steve Stivers, is a career banking lobbyist that received more campaign cash from banks in 2011 than every member of the House except the Speaker-- in his freshman year, no less! But we have a plan to win, polling to show that Stivers is vulnerable and a district where all 12 counties voted to restore Ohioans' collective bargaining rights last year.
 
My part of the Buckeye State ought to be represented not only by a Democrat, but a Democrat who really will fight for working families. That's exactly what I'll do.