Taking it to the streets

Monday night saw John Edwards on the Lou Dobbs show, explaining his position on evaluating free trade agreements in light of their impact on working families. Here's the key quotation:

before any trade agreement is presented to the Congress, as president,[sic] we will do, in my administration, evaluation of the impact it's going to have not just on the American economy at large and not statistics, but on communities and jobs. And we will identify where those places are so that everybody who's considering this trade deal, including me as president, will know what impact they're going to have.

Here is where John Edwards shows his very different take on free trade from some of his fellow Democrats. When Bill Clinton pushed so hard for NAFTA, he glibly avoided confronting these concerns that were pressed upon him most forcefully by organized labor. Clinton quite truthfully argued that the agreement's impact on the American economy at large, measured in dollars, would be positive. Yet ever larger profits for a small number of corporations, swallowed up almost entirely by the very wealthy, isn't going to always bring benefits to working Americans.

To give a simple example: Suppose a large automaker closes two plants and outsources 25,000 jobs from Michigan to Mexico. This will have a devastating effect on two small cities, creating a downward cycle of "rust-belt" poverty that will harm the real economic conditions of hundreds of thousands of people. Yet from a purely capitalist standpoint, the "overall impact" might still be positive. Sharply lower labor costs will boost profits and increase shareholder value. A vast new market is now open to a financial services spinoff from the same automaker-- to rip off Mexican credit card consumers in the same way as their gringo neighbors. There's even a large new call center built in Columbus, Ohio where bilingual customer service reps have the opportunity to work for less than a third of the wages once paid by the plant, with little or no benefits. What can you say to the grandchildren of Polish immigrants, who lost their small business in Michigan? "You should be proud of what three generations of your family accomplished, supplying the needs of the high-wage workers in your town. Those customers aren't ever coming back... but if you go back to school and learn Spanish you might find a job for up to $11/hour just a few hundred miles away!"

Neither I nor John Edwards would argue that protectionism is the solution for restoring prosperity to America's working families. Yet with great freedom to trade, comes great responsibilities. It's not unreasonable to demand that any nation granted "most favored" trading status with ours, like China, end the use of forced prison labor in their factories!

The Republicans have striven mightily to drive down the wages and influence of U.S. workers. Edwards calls on corporate interests to recognize the real human costs of unchecked global capitalism. The American people deserve a President who will look a billionaire in the eye, and say "O.K., so you want the government to allow you to throw all these fine people out of work? Don't even dream of getting the agreement you want, before you come up with some serious plans for investing some of the new profits into creating good, new high-paying jobs!"

Edwards and Kucinich seem to be the only two Democratic candidates fully committed to strengthening organized labor. The mainstream media would love to marginalize both of these guys, yet Edwards, at least, seems able to pierce the veil and appeal directly to the voters. I wish him the best of luck!