Connecting The Dots On “Free” Trade

As many of us know, Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic congressional leadership recently announced agreement on free trade pacts with Panama and Peru based on the assumption that “labor and environmental standards” had been incorporated into those agreements.

I would feel more comfortable about this if it weren’t for this (from David Sirota via Prof. Marcus – I got into this issue a bit in a comment at takeitpersonally last night)…

On trade, Public Citizen has shown that the Democratic Party relied on candidates who ran against lobbyist-written trade deals in order to win many of the crucial conservative-leaning districts that were necessary to win the congressional majority. Yet, as we've seen over the last week, a handful of senior Democratic leaders are joining with the Bush White House in an attempt to ram an ultra-secret free trade deal through Congress, acknowledging that in order to be successful, they will rely on all Republicans and just 25 percent of Democratic lawmakers. As rank-and-file Democratic lawmakers and organizations representing millions of workers, farmers and small businesses have raised objections to the deal, Reuters reports today that Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) is digging in, saying that if he knew what he knew now about how serious rank-and-file Democratic opposition to lobbyist-written trade policy was, he would have tried to negotiate the deal in even more secrecy than it was negotiated in the first place.

Boy, isn’t that comforting on Rangel’s part – “hey, if I’d known these deals would stink so badly, I would have done a better job of hiding them.”

Another important consideration in all of this was the subject of a fine New Yorker column by James Surowiecki last week (I’d link to it, but the link is a bit flaky) about how American companies insist on intellectual property changes to the laws of other countries ostensibly as a protection against pirating of their products (think Microsoft, Pfizer, and Disney). Surowiecki notes, for example, that South Korea “will now have to adopt the U.S. and E.U. definition of copyright – extending it to seventy years after the death of the author.”

Why is this bad? Surowiecki continues…

“The great irony here is that the U.S. economy in its early years was built in large part on a lax attitude towards intellectual property rights and enforcement. As the historian Doron Ben-Atar shows in his book ‘Trade Secrets,’ the Founders believed that a strict attitude towards patents and copyright would limit domestic innovation and make it harder for the U.S. to expand its industrial base.”

Surowiekci also notes that strict patent protection in developing economies can be used to keep competitors from entering into new markets, as well as limiting the access of consumers to valuable new products. Surowiecki continues by stating that Alexander Hamilton (as noted by Ben-Atar), this country’s first Secretary of the Treasury, advocated in his “Report on Manufactures” written in 1791 the theft of technology and the luring of skilled workers from foreign countries.

With this in mind, I want to point out the following from today’s New York Times story on the immigration bill currently being debated in the Senate.

The speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, expressed concern on Sunday about a central element of the bill, under which the government would establish a point system to evaluate would-be immigrants, giving more weight to job skills and education and less to family ties.

“I have serious objection to the point system that is in the bill now, but perhaps that can be improved,” said Ms. Pelosi, a California Democrat. She asserted that this part of the bill, ardently sought by the White House and Republican senators, could undermine “family unification principles which have been fundamental to American immigration.”

What does immigration have to do with “free” trade, I hear you ask? Plenty, if employers continue to adhere to the rather brazen propaganda that alleged labor shortages in this country are the reason why they are seeking hires from offshore. This “points provision” in the bill would effectively legalize the practice of allowing, for example, Manuel, who has some IT training or education from somewhere (or an aptitude at least) entry into this country, while telling his brother Juan, a barely or even unskilled laborer, to get the hell out.

To say nothing of how this repugnant practice would destroy families, it would seem to tie in nicely to the thinking in this country dating back to Alexander Hamilton, wouldn’t it? Particularly since, as Surowiecki noted, intellectual property agreements (referred to very briefly at the bottom of the Boston Globe story) take precedence in a rather extreme way over worker and environmental safeguards in these agreements anyway (and does anyone honestly think that an American company would do anything less than make our hypothetical friend Manuel sign over all rights to his patent if he created something as an employee?).

And to further “catapult the propaganda” that we need immigration bills allowing highly-to-reasonably-skilled workers only to compete in “free” trade deals, I give you this AP story with more highly specious numbers about the decreasing number of manufacturing jobs required a more extensive skill set on the part of employees than ever before.

I’m not questioning the claim about the jobs and the skill set. However, I am questioning the highly specious and pejorative language in the article about people of this country who allegedly have no desire to perform blue collar work.

And who would say such a ghastly thing? Why, the National Association of Manufacturers, of course.

And since the AP story didn’t tell you more about these cretins, I’ll come back to David Sirota here and let him do this better than anyone else I know. And to further note the ultra-capitalist Repug-simpatico “cred” of these people, I give you this story of Michael Baroody, a lobbyist with this group who Dubya has nominated as the head of the Consumer Products Safety Commission (do I need to point out that this is yet another “fox guarding the hen house” situation?).

Despite all of this, though, the Peru and Panama trade deals do make some concessions for the environment and workers rights, particularly regarding child labor (as noted earlier), so that’s better than nothing. But assuming Congress sends those agreements to Dubya, nothing beyond that should even be considered until after he and the Bushco cabal are gone; next up are South Korea and Columbia, two countries with all kinds of issues that, possibly, cannot be addressed by any government, particularly the one we have now (and that indictment goes to both of our major political parties when it comes to these agreements, by the way).