A bad deal was made in the name of trade
Updated: 08/04/08 6:37 AM
WASHINGTON — The lady on the phone from Quaker Oats was struggling to deal from a well-worn script with one aspect of the the worst betrayal of the American people by its Congress and the White House.
Where is the cereal made? The box doesn’t say. Thanks to Congress and President Bush it doesn’t have to. There is no effective country-of-origin law for grocery products.
The lady crooned, “it is made in the U. S. A., except when we run out of manufacturing capacity. Then it is made in Canada.”
The China trade is the greater harm. It could have been excused in the 1990s as carelessness when Democratic President Clinton and the Republican Congress opened our country to the great sucking sound from the People’s Republic of China. It now looms as plain treachery.
Line by line, Clinton and the GOP erased every protection our factory workers and entrepeneurs had against China’s low wages, bestial labor practices and aggressive cheating. The China advocate in the Clinton White House was Robert Rubin, once a Wall Street colleague of Bush’s treasury secretary, Henry Paulson.
Rubin now advises Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., the presidential hopeful, on trade.
China’s wide-open raid on American workers and independent factory owners should have been curbed long ago. Evidence of that came last week in a report by the Economic Policy Institute.
In just seven years after the final Clinton-GOP China trade law became effective in 2001, the United States lost 2.3 million jobs to the People’s Republic of China, at least 157,000 from New York State, the institute said.
It’s a major cause of the nation’s 7 percent jobless rate, counting discouraged workers; and of the federal, state and local budget deficits; and of the inability of some Americans to pay their mortgages.
This chaos was created by our own government, which controls the gates on imports. There are only faint stirrings among some Democrats, who now run Congress, to fix it.
The best way is enactment of a bill proposed by Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, S. 3083. The House companion is H. R. 6180. It is backed by the labor movement. Representatives of small-and medium-sized manufacturers like the bill.
Rep. Brian Higgins, D-Buffalo, is a cosponsor. It’s a long, pithy bill that applies labor, environmental, and behaviorial standards to all our trade deals past and future.
“To build wealth we have to trade,” Higgins said, “but we have to be a lot smarter about it and tougher in our negotiations than we have been historically.
“[It creates] a blueprint for negotiating future trade agreements and fixing existing ones so that our trade agreements level the playing field to create jobs and grow our economy.”
Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles E. Schumer, D-N. Y. do not support it. Nor does Obama. Clinton has her own 2007 trade bill, S. 2222, a bland presidential campaign talking point. Schumer claims he didn’t know about Brown’s bill, although Brown’s office in early June asked the backing of all Democrats.
Trade reform is not on the agenda of the Democratic leadership. Accordingly, Rep. Louise M. Slaughter, D-Fairport, who heads the Rules Committee, declined to even discuss H. R. 6180 despite two e-mailed requests.
The main reason for the Democratic leadership’s bashfulness on China’s predatory behavior is that it forces them to choose: Choose between the American people and the campaign contributors who control Washington, Republican and Democratic.
The campaign money comes from globalist U. S. corporations, who lobbied Clinton and the GOP, and now Democrats, for loose unenforced trade codes, and moved the factories and jobs to China.
