Glancing at the Wall Street Journal and then at the Hill Newspaper, it's hard to believe some people in Congress are professional career politicians...or maybe it isn't. Maybe it's just the difference between bipartisanship and buypartisanship.
Here's the front page of the Wall Street Journal today on the national consensus against our current lobbyist-written, job-killing, wage-cutting trade policies:
"By a nearly two-to-one margin, Republican voters believe free trade is bad for the U.S. economy, a shift in opinion that mirrors Democratic views and suggests trade deals could face high hurdles under a new president...In a March 2007 WSJ/NBC poll, before recent scandals involving tainted imports, 54% of Democratic voters said free-trade agreements have hurt the U.S., compared with 21% who said they have helped...While rank-and-file Democrats have long blasted the impact of trade on American jobs, slipping support among Republicans represents a fresh warning sign for free-market conservatives."
Now here's the Hill Newspaper trumpeting a speech by Democratic Majority Leader Steny Hoyer to an assembled group of corporate lobbyists last night:
"House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday night that he was committed to building bipartisan support behind trade agreements with Colombia and South Korea that are dividing his caucus."
So to review - as polls continue to show bipartisan opposition to sellout trade deals among the general public, the Democratic House Majority Leader is working to build bipartisan support for sellout trade deals inside the U.S. Congress.
This is the difference between bipartisanship out in America, and "bipartisanship" inside the Washington Beltway. Out in America, it means consensus among citizens, in Washington it means consensus among lobbyists and the politicians those lobbyists buy. Call it Buypartisanship.
P.S. Stay tuned for my weekly nationally syndicated newspaper column out tomorrow on this topic and how it our government is now, rather viciously, trying to ram this buypartisanship down the throat of one of the oldest and most stable democracies in the Western Hemisphere.
Cross-posted from Working Assets
Thank you.
Steny Hoyer needs to go.
We always hear about all the cheap goods/services we have thanks to the double whammy of outsourcing & insourcing.
And while I'm dubious of just how much we *actually* save, no one points out that the a lot of the supposed savings come in the form of *non-essential* goods and services.
Ok, so we can buy cheaper flat screens, MP3 Players and the list goes on and on.
Meanwhile real wages and benefits are stagnant at best and going down at worst with rising inflation for the things we *actually* need (gas, food, etc).
Although as I've said before, does anyone actually know how much we save by outsourcing/insourcing labor? Is there any research that clearly shows that as consumers, we save X number of dollars on average?
I'm guessing no, primarily because I don't think we ARE saving that much money, if we're saving anything at all.
Most corporations (like Nike) kept prices at about the same level even *after* shipping labor to some third world country and passed those savings onto (drumroll) CEO's and the other top brass along with a few more bucks for their shareholders.
Meanwhile the spin is that we're supposed to be THANKFUL for being able to accumulate a bunch of "cheap" electronics and other non-essential goods and services.
Why should we ask/FORCE corporations to pay American workers $30 an hour for assembly line jobs when billions of people who are starving will do the same job for $30 a week?
Admit it....you (and I) believe Americans are more important than the rest of the world's citizens. We "deserve" a high standard of living than they do! We're all racists...we care more about our fellow countrymen than we do about, well, ANY other nation's citizens.
I admit that freely, and I sleep fine. But too many others...ESPECIALLY the so-called "progressives" and liberals...don't have the balls to call it what it is. They pretend they're looking out for foreign workers when they complain that $2.00 an hour for, say, skilled tech support workers in India who work 6 days a week & have no pensions.
Of course, they ignore the fact that we train them (they now have marketable skills for life) & that alternative jobs pay $1.00 an hour & they couldn't even get those jobs because unemployment was so high.
Anti free-traders don't care about foreign workers one iota...they only care about American workers...and that's RACIST!!!
But I don't understand the dichotomy of the far left...I don't get why you have people like Sirota complaining about FREE trade and jobs getting shipped overseas, at the the same time you have liberals clammoring for third world debt relief & helping out our fellow humans on the ever-shrinking Spaceship Earth.
You can't have it both ways!!! Either you say "screw the world, America & Americans are our only concern", or you say "Indian/Chinese/Mexican/Phillipino/Thai/Slovakinan/etc. workers and families deserve a higher standard of living as much as we do...let's help build global prosperity, as it will ultimately benefit us all".
At least I admit I'm torn on this and a bit hypocritical...but I don't think you'll see Dave & his ilk own up to being, well, culturally prejudiced, when he says things like "NAFTA is bad". That's the same as saying "Screw Mexico...we need to save American jobs!".
They then claim that Free Trade isn't created & promoted to help others, but only to line the pockets of the greedy corporations & overseas workers suffer in third-world conditions that shock our western sensibilities.
SO WHAT...the new jobs always pay a LOT more than the others...they're NEW jobs that didn't exist. They raise the standard of living in the region, creating $$ to improve education, healthcare & infrasstructure.
They're better than NOT HAVING THOSE JOBS!!
Again, I do not fall on the hippie side of this arguement; I support Unions, buy American when I can and want jobs to stay here.
But I am always bemused when so-called 'liberals' like Dave support those ideals on one hand while bitching about how the evil capitalists ignore the plight world's poor & starving masses.
In my view, trade agreements are not evil. Americans are manipulated in their thinking much more easily here than in other countries where I've lived, and this is a case in point. I'm usually disappointed in the simplistic propaganda-like language in most leftist analyses of economic issues.
Free trade is not an altruistic policy - to start, it benefits anyone who has money that they are not spending immediately on consumer goods. Every pension benefits from trade agreements, every mutual fund, etc. And there are other benefits to Americans, many of them long term and difficult to explain to people who have little knowledge of economics. The fact that it builds economies elsewhere, which also benefits us longterm, is a bonus.
However, there are also longstanding problems with some areas of our trade policy and these need to be addressed.
Painting this situation as black and white is a disservice to Americans. We're not all stupid, buy many of us don't have time to research this and rely on "experts" to tell us the truth.
Americans are subjected to every aspect of their lives being used as a political football. It's a toxic environment.
The problem is that just because somebody votes for a particular candidate, writes for a particular newspaper or blog, or is registered for a particular party - that does not mean we can automatically know with certainty what their positions are on every issue.
Don't you get SICK of hearing things like, "those liberals, they're going to get us killed by ....", or, "every Republican is a greed-mongering ..."???
I know I do, and I think it's a major reason we have been unable to effectively handle issues that are complex and require input from both sides. Issues such as "free trade" fall into this category. So, while I personally feel that free trade agreements are hopelessly slanted to the benefit of large, multinational corporations, I also put the standard of living and health and safety of average American workers ahead of those in any other country. Is that contradictory in your mind? OK, so be it. But those principles are why I, and many others don't think losing jobs and becoming a pure "service economy" is necessarily a good thing for this country. Wage parity will ulitmately hurt the middle class in the US - period. Yes, dramatic increases in wages are currently being experienced in countries like India, China, Vietnam. Good for them. (You see, our partnership with Mexico only worked so long as they were the cheapest source of labor. As soon as they demanded a higher standard of living - where did all the manufacturing jobs go?)
When the Republicans and Democrats have sold America out altogether, ... where do they intend to live, ... where they will feel safe from the rest of us they have betrayed?