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John Nichols: Madisonian helps Dems 'get it' on trade

John Nichols  —  8/21/2008 9:31 am

There is no truer statement in the platform Democrats will approve next week in Denver than this one: "Over the last few decades, fundamental changes in the way we work and live have trapped too many American families between an economy that's gone global and a government that's gone AWOL."

The key term is "over the last few decades."

It was not just the Bush administration that trapped too many American families in the nightmare of shuttered factories, abandoned communities and downsized dreams that is the ugly legacy of trade policies that favor Wall Street over Main Street.

Bill Clinton gave us the North American Free Trade Agreement, American entry into the World Trade Organization and permanent normalization of trade relations with China. And Al Gore and John Kerry refused to engage in serious debates with George Bush over trade policy in 2000 and 2004, a miscalculation that led millions of voters to question whether there was any real difference between the Democratic and Republican parties when it came to the most fundamental of economic questions.

When Barack Obama delivered his seminal speech on trade policy at the General Motors plant in Janesville six days before Wisconsin's February primary, he signaled a new direction for Democrats.

"We are not standing on the brink of recession due to forces beyond our control. ... It was a failure of leadership and imagination in Washington -- the culmination of decades of decisions that were made or put off without regard to the realities of a global economy and the growing inequality it's produced," Obama said. "It's a Washington where decades of trade deals like NAFTA and China have been signed with plenty of protections for corporations and their profits, but none for our environment or our workers who've seen factories shut their doors and millions of jobs disappear."

Obama did not get all the way to a fair-trade agenda, with its emphasis on protecting workers, farmers and the environment while creating broad prosperity, as opposed to the free-trade agenda's emphasis on rewarding investors and protecting the bottom lines of multinational corporations. But he moved in the right direction.

After he secured the nomination, however, Obama wavered. He gave an interview to Fortune magazine in which he distanced himself from the populism of his primary campaigning -- "sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified" -- and seemed to suggest that the corporate community ought not take too seriously his talk about protecting workers and the environment.

That made the deliberations of the Democratic Platform Committee all the more consequential. Would the party's agenda reflect the Obama who spoke in Janesville in February or the Obama who spoke with Fortune in June?

As it happens, the document Democrats will approve in Denver next week is more in tune with Janesville than Wall Street, thanks in no small measure to Madisonian Andy Gussert.

Gussert, a veteran Wisconsin politico and activist, now heads the national Citizens Trade Campaign, a coalition of environmental, labor, consumer, family farm and religious groups organized to campaign for environmentally and socially responsible trade policies.

Before the Wisconsin primary, Gussert and the unions with which he works pressed Obama and his rival, Hillary Clinton, to answer steadily tougher and more precise questions about NAFTA, China trade and agreements that are now being negotiated. The process got Obama on record and created a base from which to pressure platform writers.

No, Gussert and the CTC did not get everything they wanted. But they did get the best statement yet from a Democratic Party that has often wavered on trade issues.

Declaring against agreements that favor "the few rather than the many," the draft platform argues, "Trade policy must be an integral part of an overall national economic strategy that delivers on the promise of good jobs at home and shared prosperity abroad."

"We need tougher negotiators on our side of the table -- to strike bargains that are good not just for Wall Street, but also for Main Street. We will negotiate free-trade agreements that open markets to U.S. exports and include enforceable international labor and environmental standards; we pledge to enforce those standards consistently and fairly," the platform continues. "We will not negotiate free-trade agreements that stop the government from protecting the environment, food safety or the health of its citizens, give greater rights to foreign investors than to U.S. investors, require the privatization of our vital public services, or prevent developing country governments from adopting humanitarian licensing policies to improve access to lifesaving medications. We will stand firm against agreements that fail to live up to these important benchmarks."

That may not be all the change we need, but it is change we can believe in -- for the Democratic Party, the nation and a world that needs a dramatically more humane and responsible approach to the process of globalization that will define the 21st century.

John Nichols is associate editor of The Capital Times.

John Nichols  —  8/21/2008 9:31 am