We Are What We Buy and How We Buy It

NOTE: I'll be on PBS Now tonight discussing this and other issues related to the 2009 elections. Check local listings here and tune in! - D

I write a lot about the importance of fair trade -- specifically, about the significance of making sure our international economic laws do not encourage job outsourcing, labor abuse, environmental degradation and other bad behavior. Often times, these trade issues seem esoteric, abstract, and caught in their a silo that only, say, union workers care about.

But nothing could be further from the truth, as my new newspaper column today shows. Because our economy and environment is so globalized (the former because of technology, the latter because, well, we all live on one planet), trade issues tend to touch everything. They touch health care through the drug importation debate, they touch jobs through the outsourcing debate, they touch financial reform through international regulatory debates, and they touch global warming. Indeed, that last debate over climate change legislation is probably the best example of a bill that at first glance seems totally unrelated to trade, and yet could be rendered almost completely meaningless if it doesn't include real trade reform.

In an article headlined "Climate Bill Hinges On Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown," the Hill newspaper shows the Buckeye State's junior senator explaining exactly why:

Brown wants the Senate to consider imposing tariffs on foreign competitors operating in countries with lax rules for greenhouse gas emissions.

"Carbon dioxide emissions expand if a company closes down in Toledo, Ohio, and moves to Shanghai, where the emissions standards are weaker," he said. Brown describes this phenomenon as "carbon leakage."

I could reiterate what Brown said with an "in other words" paragraph, but I don't even have to. What he's saying makes perfect sense when you take more than five seconds to think past the idiocy of the Punditburo's creation of false choices between supposedly Enlightened Free Trade and allegedly Luddite Protectionism.

It's the same thing for so many issues. We can reform our own domestic laws all we want -- but on so many priorities, if those reforms are not accompanied by trade policy changes, then we aren't making the kinds of strides we need to make. We can have stimulus bills that seem great, but whose resources are unduly spent sending jobs overseas because its Buy America provisions have been gutted. We can have a health care bill that breaks the bank because it doesn't reform the laws that prevent Americans from buying lower-priced prescription drugs. We can have a climate bill that is touted as major progress, but because it is stripped of trade reform, it effectively encourages companies to head overseas and subsequently emit more greenhouse gas than they were when they were here.

You get the point: We ignore the fair trade cause at our peril.

Read the whole column here.

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Comments

[seawolf77]

Freedom is the proverbial carrot that eventually make us beg for the stick. Just ask any conservative. The word ORDER is like an aphrodisiac to them. They are entropy hunters, determined to readicate any chance event. They see a barrel of monkeys and envision a great city of monkeys, Monkeyopolis. Once they use leggo blocks, they can not bring hemselves to take it apart. It is what it is forever. They sit there on their throne watching everything stay exactly the same, smiling malvolently at the fringes of society.

[texastrixie]

The concept of trade as a vehicle to improve the world was the original concept. People in undeveloped countries could produce goods more cheaply because beginning industrialization is always build on cheap labor. BUT, our trade agreements were supposed to enforce fair labor standards, decent working conditions, no child labor, real environmental safety, etc. Some of these ideals actually got written into trade agreements, but seldom were enforced. Trade was supposed to drag countries into the 20th century, not drag the rest of us back to the status of an 1890's textile mill.

By disregarding trade agreement clauses that benefit workers, and not corporations, US trade policy has hurt every person in the world, not just Americans. Yes, we don't make a blessed thing in this country anymore except for bad decisions, but moreover, our trade agreements support, and even encourage essentially the slavery of most workers outside the US. Chinese businessmen actually poisoned their own babies (well, not their OWN babies), for profit. Children in Asia still make clothing and shoes for US corporations for pennies an hour.

[SilviaMaria]

David,

You are so right on this issue. I oppose the trade agreements because they way they are written only benefits the corporation: no gain for workers or the other country.

[racetoinfinity]

If we had had leadership from the ranks of the visionary people (not a small number either) of the 70s who saw that we must think planetarily and act locally for the planet's good, who understood that we had to face limits and grow out of the paradigm of unlimited growth (Carter understood this), who had a holistic view of all aspects of economy and industry with values of well being for workers, the community, the environment, all of our people, not just top managers and executives in business, and understood that we don't want to turn the financial industry from a service to an industry, if we hadn't voted in the reactionary Reagan and Thatcher regimes, and continued them, with small amelioration, but not a fundamental difference in free market/free trade ideology, with the neoliberals Clinton and now Obama, we wouldn't be facing these 11th hour crises now.

[SilviaMaria]

Free market/free trade ideology of Milton Friedman. We should put Milton Friedman to rest and bring back Keynes.

[unemployedprogressive]

A great point David.

I recently contributed a small sum of money to one of the charities that I feel good about supporting (World Wildlife Fund). They rewarded me with a membership gift that was made in China. Here is an organization that exists to improve the degradation of the environment and they support some manufacturer in China?? I don't get it and apparently neither do they.