Why doesn’t Bill Daley, the White House Chief of Staff, just come right out and say it: we’re going to ram through these so-called "free trade" deals because, dammit, we need that corporate cash for the re-election campaign? Just be honest. Stop coloring it in the phony Republican-corporate rhetoric of "job creation". Then, at least, we can have an honest debate about the disaster–economic and political disaster–of so-called "free trade" and the new push to get through the deal with Panama.
No surprise that Bill Daley is ramping up the drive to push through the deals with South Korea, Colombia and Panama. He served as Bill Clinton’s point person in the 1993 arm-twisting and legalized bribery campaign to push through NAFTA–the model for all disastrous so-called "free trade" agreements that have followed. In fairness to Daley, though, candidate Barack Obama repeatedly said in 2007 and 2008 that he was a "free trader".
The key part of the sham on these deals is a promise to "fix" the deals to take into account labor rights and environmental protections. I’ll just reiterate what I wrote four months ago about the so-called "free trade" deal with South Korea. There simply is no such thing as "free trade", at least not if we are talking about the NAFTA model.
"Free trade" is as real as the phony government deficit-debt "crisis", as real as the Wall Street "reforms" (that left mostly the same people in charge of the financial system, making it almost a certainty we will have another financial calamity) and as real as Robert Reich’s promise that if we all just get smarter and get a college education, we’ll be fine (no one uses the absurd term "symbolic analyst" anymore and thank god for that).
I could write a "free trade" agreement in 10 pages, okay, maybe 20. But, these deals are hundreds and thousands of pages long because they are very much managed and tightly controlled corporate trade—-they set forth very specific, detailed protections for capital and investor rights (particularly, the Chapter 11 rules). [more after the fold]
And the sooner we stop repeating the term "free trade"—which is a great marketing phrase because who isn’t for something "free" and who doesn’t want to trade—the better for the American people and our understanding of what is really afoot here: we are being robbed by these trade deals. Not simply because of the off-shoring of jobs. But because NAFTA-style trade is based on one thing and one thing only: wage and regulation arbitrage.
Every NAFTA-style deal essentially sets up a framework that allows companies to move production in search of low wages and/or undermine regulations that protect people and communities. That is what trade is about today.
And enforcement is just a sham. It was in NAFTA–and it is for the Panama deal.
In February 2008, I posed a challenge to then-candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama who were both pledging to renegotiate NAFTA in order to enhance enforcement of labor and environmental enforcement. The labor and environmental provisions were added on to NAFTA because that was the only way to buy a handful of Democratic votes to ram through the agreement.
NAFTA enforcement was supposed to have been under the purview of the Commission for Labor Cooperation (CLC). The CLC was supposed to be funded, partly by the U.S., via a $2 million-a year appropriation, which would have meant that, over the period between 1993 and 2005, the CLC would have had $22 million from the U.S.
But, as Public Citizen found:
In another example of the gap between promised authorizations and actual funds appropriated to such programs, the CLC has only been granted $7.2 million of the $22 million it was authorized to receive from the United States as of 2005, or less than a third of the promised amount.
Here’s what the AFL-CIO found in its 2007 report [the emphasis is mine]:
At its current staffing and inspection levels, it would take federal OSHA 133 years to inspect each workplace under its jurisdiction just once. In seven states (Florida, Delaware, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Maryland, and South Dakota), it would take more than 150 years for OSHA to pay a single visit to each workplace. In 18 states, it would take between 100 and 149 years to visit each workplace once. Inspection frequency is better in states with OSHA-approved plans, yet still far from satisfactory. In these states, it would now take the state OSHA’s a combined 62 years to inspect each worksite under state jurisdiction once.
The current level of federal and state OSHA inspectors provides one inspector for every 63,670 workers. This compares to a benchmark of one labor inspector for every 10,000 workers recommended by the International Labor Organization for industrialized countries. In the states of Arkansas, Florida, Delaware, Nebraska, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, the ratio of inspectors to employees is greater than 1/100,000 workers.
When the AFL-CIO issued its first report "Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect" in 1992, federal OSHA could inspect workplaces under its jurisdiction once every 84 years, compared to once every 133 years at the present time. Since the passage of the OSHAct, the number of workplaces and number of workers under OSHA’s jurisdiction has more than doubled, while at the same time the number of OSHA staff and OSHA inspectors has been reduced. In 1975, federal OSHA had a total of 2,405 staff (inspectors and all other OSHA staff) responsible for the safety and health of 67.8 million workers at more than 3.9 million establishments. In 2005, there were 2,208 federal OSHA staff responsible for the safety and health of more than 131.5 million workers at 8.5 million workplaces.
The 2008 OSHA budget proposed $490 million. Yes, that was a Bush budget. But, even in Democratic Administrations, OSHA has always been underfunded given the task described above. The 2010 Obama budget proposed a $559 million—-a significant increase but still inadequate.
So, think about that for a moment: we have an entirely inadequate system in this country just to watch over safety and health in the workplace, funded at a miniscule 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?
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".
I think some Democrats understand that enforcement is a sham:
For Democratic critics, the Colombia deal has raised the strongest opposition because of continuing concern over physical attacks and threats to union leaders. “I am appalled that the administration is putting forward this action plan as the answer to Colombia’s rampant human rights and labor rights violations,” said Rep. Mike Michaud (D-Maine), who chairs the House Trade Working Group.
A larger group of liberal Democrats—including close Pelosi allies George Miller (D-Calif.), Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.)—last month demanded assurances from Obama that “Colombia’s long track record of repression, violence and murder of labor unionists has truly changed.”
This also makes for terrible politics. I, and others, have argued that one reason Bill Clinton lost the House in 1994 was his embrace of NAFTA (along with the health care debacle). Union members were told, repeatedly and correctly, that NAFTA was a disaster for the middle-class. I think it’s reasonable to argue that a whole bunch of them stayed home in 1994 because they saw a Democratic president putting the metaphorical overseas shipping labels on their jobs, and wages.
Why won’t we see a similar reaction in 2012 if the president insists on pushing so-called "free trade" deals through–at an economic period of much higher unemployment than Democrats faced in 1994. This seems really dumb politically–unless the overriding concern is raising money from corporate-friendly donors.
I hope Richard Trumka holds some of these fools accountable. He’s sending a signal:
This week the head of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., Richard Trumka, warned that the union would include the three trade votes on its influential “scorecard” of members of Congress, subtracting points for free-trade votes.
