Why Is GOP Front Group "Club For Growth" Defending China’s Interests Against Those Of Domestic U.S. Manufacturers?

America’s manufacturing advocates have repeatedly criticized Beijing for deliberately undervaluing its currency, in violation of world trade law. This currency undervaluation helps to artificially lower the cost of China’s exports, while also taxing U.S. products entering the Chinese market.

Anger over the currency issue has occasionally flared into heated action on Capitol Hill. In 2005, the U.S. Senate approved a procedural vote to hold China accountable for its currency peg. And in 2011, the Senate actually passed a bill to make currency undervaluation actionable under U.S. trade law. At the same time, a majority of the House co-sponsored a similar bill, including 64 Republicans. The House bill ultimately languished when Boehner, who owes his Speakership to dark money from China funneled to shady Republican PACs through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, refused to allow a floor vote.

The call for action on China continues to grow, however, due to the overwhelming support of the American people. In the current Congress, bipartisan currency legislation has been reintroduced in both houses.

Unfortunately, the Club for Growth, a “pro-growth” lobbying group led by former Indiana wingnut congressman Chris Chocola, actively seeks to block legislative action on China. Ironically, Chocola has come under fire for his contradictory stance on China’s currency peg. In 2005, Chocola introduced a bill in the House, the China Act, that would have imposed tariffs on China if it tried to manipulate its currency. It was an effort that undoubtedly proved popular among manufacturers and factory workers in Chocola’s home district. But as the current president of the free-market-leaning Club for Growth, Chocola has made a dramatic-- and blatantly unprincipled-- reversal.

In a recent alert to the House of Representatives, Chocola’s Club cautioned right-wing House members to “not co-sponsor the protectionist Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act (HR 1276).” Additionally, the alert warned that “Members who co-sponsor this bill will receive negative points on the Club's 2013 Congressional Scorecard.”

All of this is a far cry from Chocola’s prior Congressional effort of “making sure China plays by the rules.”

The question is why the Club for Growth is so wrong on China, and so oblivious to the irony of their stated position? Simply put, they are out-of-step with the American public in three contradictory ways:

First, while the Club is a pro-business and anti-tax group, their objection to action on China’s currency manipulation means that they are in fact supporting a hidden tax on U.S. producers. This is because China’s currency manipulation artificially inflates the cost of U.S. exports to the Chinese market, while also artificially lowering the cost of China’s exports to the U.S. market. Thus, the Club is pro-tax on U.S. manufacturers but anti-tax on Chinese manufacturers.

Second, national polling finds that an overwhelming majority of U.S. voters (including 68% of Republican voters) support action to combat China’s predatory trade practices, which they see as hurting U.S. job growth. A 2012 study by the Economic Policy Institute found that China’s currency manipulation and other predatory practices have led to growing U.S. trade deficits that resulted in the loss of 2.7 million U.S. jobs between 2001-2011. Thus, the Club for Growth is forestalling job creation by serving as a de facto pro-China lobby. Essentially, they are both out-of-touch with Republican voters and also holding Capitol Hill Republicans hostage on the jobs issue.

Third, Americans are also concerned about national security concerns related to China. Of note is a recent report by retired U.S. Army Brigadier General John Adams that found the U.S. now depends on China for such key military hardware as Hellfire missile propellant, the lanthanum metal used in night-vision goggles, and the high-tech magnets required to manufacture military-grade Humvees, Apache helicopters, and Virginia-class submarines. Thus, groups like the Club for Growth that advocate for open trade with China on “free market” principles are operating in a policy vacuum, one that does not take into account national security concerns.

It’s very telling that when the Club for Growth issued its alert to the House, and tried to warn Members not to support a currency bill, they never actually mentioned “China” in their text. That’s because no one wants to be seen as supporting or defending China. But that’s really what the Club for Growth is doing. The monthly trade figures came out yesterday, and our trade deficit with China climbed by $3.8 billion in May. The U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED) talks start on Monday in Washington.

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Progressives Break With The Clinton-Bush-Obama Trade Policy Nightmare

Great minds think alike but, alas, we don't have many of those in Congress. Thank God we do have Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in the Senate and Alan Grayson in the House. All three are skeptical-- very skeptical-- about the latest and most atrocious trade bill Corporate America is trying to shove down our throats, with the help of many of their colleagues and... el Presidente. Thursday all those Republicans who obstruct every Obama nomination were stumbling all over each other to vote to confirm the conservative American jobs killer Obama named as U.S. Trade Rep, Michael Froman. Corporate America was popping the champagne bottles. The nomination passed 93-4-1, only Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Joe Manchin and Carl Levin voting against one of Obama's worst picks for anything ever. (Barbara Boxer voted "present.")

Senator Warren spoke at the Constitution Society for Law and Policy this week and told the convention that the far right business lobby, the Chamber of Commerce now owns the Supreme Court. "Take a look at the win rate of the Chamber of Commerce. According to the Constitution Accountability Center, the Chamber moved from a 43 percent win rate during the very conservative Berger Court to a 56 percent win rate under the very conservative Rehnquist court. And now they are at a 70 percent win rate under the Roberts Court. Follow this pro-business trend to its obvious conclusion and you will end up with a Supreme Court that’s a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Chamber of Commerce."

Not more than a few minutes after the vote Thursday, Bernie Sanders tweeted "Today, virtually no piece of legislation can get passed unless it has the ok from corporate America" and posted this video:


Bernie Sanders on the Independent in Politics from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.


The Obama Administration has been very secretive about the newest corporate trade bill it's burdening America with, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. They don't want anyone seeing the bill because it's more evidence that corporate America-- the guys who finance the cushy careers of our political elite-- no longer has any allegiance to America whatsoever, nor to American values or even American prosperity. They don't even see themselves as American but as cosmopolitan transnational citizens of the corporate world. They are international entities committed to the lowest international norms they can find for the sole purpose of maximizing corporate profits and the wealth of the top 1%. These are the traitors to this country, not Edward Snowden, and they should be identified as the secretive, bipartisan, slimy criminals they really are-- along with their Republican and Democratic political handmaidens, be it Boehner, McConnell or Obama. In a letter to his supporters, Congressman Alan Grayson explains how he came to read the toxic treaty... and what it means to 99% of us.

Last month, 10,000 of us submitted comments to the United States Trade Representative (USTR), in which we objected to new so-called free trade agreements. We asked that the government not sell out our democracy to corporate interests.

Because of this pressure, the USTR finally let a member of Congress-- little ole me, Alan Grayson-- actually see the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The TPP is a large, secret trade agreement that is being negotiated with many countries in East Asia and South America.

The TPP is nicknamed “NAFTA on steroids.”  Now that I’ve read it, I can see why. I can’t tell you what’s in the agreement, because the U.S. Trade Representative calls it classified. But I can tell you two things about it.

1)    There is no national security purpose in keeping this text secret.

2)    This agreement hands the sovereignty of our country over to corporate interests.

3)    What they can’t afford to tell the American public is that [the rest of this sentence is classified].

(Well, I did promise to tell you only two things about it.)

I will be fighting this agreement with everything I’ve got. And I know you’ll be there every step of the way.

In other words, an anti-American power grab by corporations with no affinity with this country and no concerns whatsoever about the people who live in this country. “It is easy to understand why this NAFTA-style agreement has been kept secret," said Grayson. The TPP is a disturbing attack on American democracy and sovereignty. It puts corporate interests ahead of American interests.” Grayson has called on the USTR to release the full draft text of the agreement to the public, as it did under the Bush administration in 2001 with the draft text of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americans, the most recent major plurilateral agreement that the U.S. negotiated. “Each and every U.S. citizen should have the opportunity to read this agreement because if it is signed, the TPP will have a dramatic impact on our rights and our freedom,” Grayson added. The treaty will make it possible for corporations to file lawsuits to prevent government actions that they just don’t like, such as health and safety regulations. Similar trade agreements have allowed the World Trade Organization to strike down country-of-origin meat labels, dolphin-safe tuna labels and limits on candy-flavored cigarettes marketed to kids. The TPP is reported to include the same terms. Hope and Change!

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The Benign Sounding Trans-Pacific Partnership Is NAFTA On Steroids

Obamabots sometimes waste their time sending me letters asking me to stop exposing negative crap about Obama. Why don't they just write to Obama and ask him to stop generating so much negative crap? When I was deciding the reasons why I wouldn't be voting for Obama in 2012-- which was a big deal to me since it was the first presidential election in my life in which I didn't vote for the Democrat-- one of the many bullet points was his anti-working family trade policies. There were at least a dozen other reasons on the list, but Obama's catastrophic trade policies-- basically the same as Clinton's and both Bushs'-- was enough of a reason to vote against him alone. Megan Wilson interviewed Alan Grayson this week for The Hill about one aspect of Obama's latest folly on trade. Obama's Wall Street allies kicked down $6,376,619 for 2012 (and $16,924,110 in 2008), so about $23 million towards his presidential campaigns. This newest proposal he's making is a big fat wet kiss to these special interests.

The proposed U.S.-EU trade deal includes an investor-state dispute resolution that would enable companies to directly sue foreign governments involved in a treaty. It has been standard fare in trade deals for decades and is intended to hold governments accountable for reneging on contracts or agreements and changing regulations.

“This is one of the tools you could use... to get bad governments to do what they've committed to do,” said William Reinsch, the president of the National Foreign Trade Council, a business trade group dedicated to trade and investment issues that boasts members such as Boeing and Caterpillar.

Opponents have long railed against the trade courts, arguing that giving multinational corporations the ability to directly challenge a foreign government in an international tribunal threatens public and environmental safeguards.

Laws and regulations “reflect the actions of democratic government,” Grayson told The Hill, calling the provision “an organized assault against middle-class Americans and against democracy.”

The cases in the tribunals created by these investor-state disagreements are decided by three attorneys, who public interest groups say shuffle from acting as judges and representing corporations.

Corporations should not “get the right to sue in front of a rigged system where the outcome is preordained,” Grayson said.

...In the letter, Grayson says the investor-state negotiation provisions “undermine sovereignty without significantly increasing trade.”

“These kinds of provisions have been used to undermine country-of-origin meat labels, dolphin-safe tuna labeling requirements, regulation of hydraulic fracking,” he said. “These are not fundamentally questions of trade; why are they governed by so-called ‘trade agreements?’”

...“The issues [Congress] addresses falls into two categories: High-profile issues and low-profile issues,” Grayson said. “Lobbyists are very effective at influencing lawmakers on low-profile issues, like isolating one provision out of a 600-page bill.”

He said he wants to “change the category” of the investor-state dispute resolution by sharing his views.

“If not for this kind of effort, members would be able to support a bill like this because the public wouldn't know about it. ... Lawmakers will know that people will be judging them on this issue.”

Yesterday Grayson wasn't the only one talking about our elite's economy-destroying trade policies. Curtis Ellis explained the significance of the U.S. selling off productive parts of our economy to China in return for cheap manufactured goods and 21st Century trinkets. Curtis used Smithfield's sale to China's Shuanghui Group as the example and he asserts it's even worse than just finding antifreeze and other toxins in our Christmas hams from now on.

Smithfield's sale to Shuanghui is a direct result of our trade deficit with China, which was $295 billion in 2011. We send boatloads of money to China every day in return for the cheap consumer merchandise filling our store shelves and shopping malls. Apologists say we should send China a thank you note for 'everyday low prices,' but we don't need to-- we send them the money they use to buy our productive enterprises.

As long as we continue to run persistent trade deficits with China we'll see more deals like Smithfield and Nexteer, the one-time GM and Delphi steering operation controlled by China's biggest aerospace company. And while the doctrine of shareholder value pretty much shredded the social contract between corporations and the communities in which they operate, the rise of absentee landlords like Shuanghui takes it to the next level, with even less commitment to an American workforce being paid a living wage.

Smithfield does more than pack meat-- it's a vertically integrated operation that raises 15 million pigs a year in industrial hog operations that feed its slaughterhouses. If, as analysts say, the Smithfield sale is about supplying pork to China, we can expect a hundred factory farms to bloom and a further crackdown on efforts to regulate them and the toxic waste they produce. Industrial ag sponsors gag laws to criminalize documenting what goes on inside its operations. Now, the hands holding the gag and paying the lobbyists will be Chinese, if that makes any difference.

We don't know if China's abysmal record in food safety will become the benchmark for Smithfield. But it's safe to say that top management is not steeped in a culture of high standards-- just two years ago, Shuanghui was accused of feeding a dangerous additive to pigs destined for human consumption. Don't expect Smithfield's new owners to champion higher standards in the industrial food chain.

The FDA and food safety regulators have been captured by industrial agribusiness (a complex which includes Big Pharma, since factory farms are the largest customers for antibiotics made in China). U.S. government regulators will now be getting their marching orders from Chinese bosses. You could argue this will make little difference considering the lack of patriotic identity in the corporate suites of American-in-name-only companies. But if there's a choice between supplying more hog carcasses to China or preserving the health of Americans, you can be sure the decision will be made in a Shanghai minute.

When government regulators answer to those they are tasked to oversee and those in control are of foreign agency, the situation bears more than a passing resemblance to a banana republic.

The pliant governments of the original banana republics served foreign corporations. Today, our elected representatives prostitute themselves to those who can finance their campaigns and provide lucrative employment upon retirement from public office.

We've been accustomed to the paymasters having American monikers. No more. Now, they could be a state-owned enterprise from Henan, China as well as a private equity firm from Manhattan (or both at the same time).

In this late stage of globalization, stateless corporations with no loyalty to any country call the shots the world over, all nations reduced to virtual banana republics. Arrangements such as the TransPacific Partnership make this understanding explicit as they seek to bring national representative governments to heel under global corporatist rule.

We may not be able to do anything about Smithfield, but to preserve the promise of representative self-government in the USA, we must stop the TransPacific Partnership.

So who in Congress is backing Obama's disastrous TransPacific Partnership scheme that will be so destructive to ordinary working families? Well, basically all the Republicans and the entire Republican wing of the Democratic Party (the New Dems). Actual Democrats-- not the "New," corrupt right-wing iteration-- are opposing the latest corporate bag of tricks.

Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-Chairs Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) and Keith Ellison (D-MN) pointed out last week that "[a]t a time when our efforts should be focused on putting people back to work, the Trans-Pacific Partnership will send American resources and jobs overseas, forcing working families already hurt by the Great Recession to get by on less and less. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a free trade agreement of unprecedented size and scope, easily dwarfing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Since the passage of NAFTA in 1994, U.S trade policy has relied almost exclusively on free-trade agreements to gain foreign access for American businesses. The result has devastated the wages of working Americans, as corporations flee the United States to employ low wage workers abroad. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is NAFTA on steroids. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 5 million Americans have lost manufacturing jobs since the passage of NAFTA. Americans who are unable to go to college lose $3,300 of income every year due to NAFTA-induced trade and offshoring. TPP does not reverse this trend. It will export NAFTA’s failures across the Pacific and put more Americans out of work. There is a reason Washington wants to keep the Trans-Pacific Partnership secret from the American people. This agreement could be the biggest destroyer of American jobs coming out of Washington this year. We should encourage real fair trade, not the destruction of American jobs and communities.”

And last week, Jim McDermott, one of the clearest and strongest progressive voices advocating Fair Trade policies penned an OpEd for Roll Call on the subject of how Big Pharma and it's lobbyists have captured captured the Trans-Pacific Partnership for its own purposes. Those purposes don't bode well for... anyone else, and especially not for poor sick in need of medical care.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is being negotiated right now. It includes 10 countries of the Pacific Rim, including developing countries such as Peru, Malaysia and Vietnam. If the TPP agreement is done right, it will encourage and support American exports and create needed jobs in the United States. The critical intellectual property provisions of the pact should protect inventors and developers of breakthrough innovations, but they cannot be so restrictive that they cost millions of lives in less developed countries.

At the beginning of TPP negotiations two years ago, for reasons that are unclear, the U.S. asked the other 10 countries to accept new and very rigid intellectual property measures that would greatly limit availability of the affordable generic medicines that the success of U.S.-supported global health programs require. For example, more than 98 percent of HIV/AIDS medicines used to fight AIDS in Africa are generics, mostly made in Asia.

The United States is currently party to many international agreements that include strong intellectual property protections. These agreements protect innovation, including 20-year patents on new drugs, but they also allow enough flexibility for poorer countries to respond to public health needs with accessible, low-cost drugs. We worked hard to get these rules in place and they are working well.

But the U.S.’ current TPP proposal on medicines upends the present well-structured balance by extending monopoly protections much further. It would force people in developing countries to wait longer for affordable medicines, if they can access them at all. It would extend patents beyond the current 20-year norm and block national regulators from using existing clinical trial data to approve the production of generic or “bio-similar” drugs.

Alarmingly, the proposal also outlaws “pre-grant opposition” that allows doctors and patients to provide information to their governments about patents they believe do not meet national rules, an important democratic safeguard. The proposal also requires the patenting of new versions of old medicines, even when the new versions offer no additional therapeutic benefits. It even requires patenting of surgical, therapeutic and diagnostic methods, which not only is unethical but also could increase medical liability and the cost of practice.

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"Free" Trade-- Another Way For Conservatives To Undermine Democracy

In the closing to his brilliant book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies About The Economy, Joshua Holland takes on the misleading notion of 'free trade' by pointing out that "Just because politicians say they believe in open markets and free trade between nations doesn’t make it true. In reality, they believe in 'free trade' until someone else gets a comparative advantage, and then their hypocrisy emerges and they become fierce protectionists."

Most people still believe that discussions of “free trade” are about ships full of bananas or ball bearings or whatever, crisscrossing the high seas. Understanding why that’s just a small part of the issue is key to grasping the difference between “free trade” and what these deals we’ve been signing for the last thirty years are really about: a corporate power grab.

Prior to World War II, trade wars were common, and they often led to shooting wars. In the mid-1940s, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was created to avoid those conflicts and foster world peace. Many of its authors were FDR liberals. They had high ideals.

Between 1944 and the mid-1990s, trade negotiations were conducted by dull, (mostly) white guys in business suits, and nobody really gave a damn. Poor countries griped about agricultural subsidies and the rich countries’ protectionism, but they were free to try various development strategies, including those that didn’t adhere to the dictates of “the market.”

During the first decades of the GATT, which governed trade between 1947 and 1995, the United States and “old” Europe had economies based heavily on manufacturing. Today, however, almost all advanced economies share a very similar distribution: about 1 to 2 percent in agriculture, maybe 20 or so percent in manufacturing, and around 80 percent in services.

For approximately the first forty years of the GATT’s existence, its members negotiated reductions in tariffs, quotas, and other traditional forms of market protectionism. They were the manufacturers, and those deals were for the most part negotiated on a level playing field between the world’s advanced economies-- what they call “North-North” negotiations in trade lingo.

People who brand opponents of today’s trade deals “protectionists” might ask themselves why nobody resisted the GATT during those years of slashing tariffs and quotas and the like. The reason is that reducing tariffs is what most people think of when they hear about “opening markets” and freeing up international trade. The controversy began only as “free trade” was gradually redefined to include all manner of domestic policies.

Beginning in the 1970s, two things happened-- or, I should say, two things aside from the oil shock of ’73. In 1979, during the Tokyo round of the GATT, negotiators began to look at “nontariff barriers.” These included onerous customs procedures, mountains of paperwork required to import goods, subsidies for domestic industry, and so on. That shift to “nontariff barriers” coincided with the emergence of the new conservative movement, with its think tanks and front-groups, and the elections of Reagan and Thatcher to head the Western world’s leading political and economic powers.

Now, once they started to look at nontariff barriers, it was inevitable that somewhere along the line, someone in those think tanks would say, “We can call all of those environmental laws and food-safety regulations nontariff barriers, too!”

With that mind-set, in 1994, after years of negotiations, the GATT culminated in the creation of the WTO, which had enforcement powers unlike any other multilateral organization. Its rules hadn’t been written by FDR liberals, but by the Reagan-Thatcher Big Business conservatives in the corporate jets circling Washington.

For too many of them, the new “free trade” framework provided a back door through which they could advance a broader agenda. They could push a set of treaties that pressured-- and, in many instances, legally compelled-- domestic legislatures to conform to the prevailing economic theories known as the “Washington Consensus” (whenever anyone calls something a “consensus,” it probably isn’t even close). And the definition of “nontariff barrier” continued to expand.

(In the meantime, since the early days of the GATT, dozens of countries, many of them newly liberated from the clutches of European colonialism, had been added-- and most were poor and had inadequate infrastructure and very different economic distributions. Many relied on agriculture not only for food, but also as a significant source of employment. Early on, the developed countries promised to start cutting agricultural subsidies and giving those developing countries a level playing field for agriculture, but so far they just haven’t gotten around to it yet.)

In addition, they began to look not only at the flow of goods across borders, but also at services. This brings us to a really key point: there’s a massive pile of cash just sitting out there in the functions that governments commonly perform: from education to sanitation and everything in between. According to Tony Clarke of the Polaris Institute, a Canadian NGO, the total estimated value of the world’s service sector, including public services, is between $15 trillion and $20 trillion. That’s a honeypot.

By the time we arrived at the “Singapore Round” in 1996, there was an aggressive push to (1) enact a broad set of “investor protections” that made a variety of laws-- some protecting the public interest-- subject to the WTO’s dispute-resolution process and (2) allow countries (or even private companies) to exert pressure on other governments to privatize their public services.

Organized labor, community activists, environmentalists, food security specialists, farmers, and many other groups started to see these rules as a significant threat to their work. They gathered to greet the ministers a few years later in Seattle-- the famous “teamsters and turtles” coalition-- which led to the infamous “Battle in Seattle” (actually a brutal police riot). Since that time, the fight has really been about how deep into the realm of domestic policy various trade agreements should reach.

Pressuring countries to adhere to the economic policies of the “Washington Consensus,” whether they’re popular or not, is job number one for the big multinationals, because a majority of governments on the planet today are, to varying degrees, democratic. And democracy is a huge challenge to many of the big multinationals’ interests. Workers’ movements, environmentalists, pesky public interest groups, and, above all, voters exert various degrees of influence on those elected representatives.

Trade treaties constrain legislatures to remain true to the prevailing orthodoxy. Most folks don’t know this, but when state lawmakers draw up new legislation, they often drop a line to the office of the U.S. Trade Representative to make sure their bills comply with our trade commitments.

Other countries acting on behalf of their biggest corporations can challenge laws that aren’t “WTO legal.” These aren’t about widgets being shipped from here to there; the range of what falls under the catchall “free trade” is astounding. A few of the more notorious decisions include:

• A Massachusetts law preventing state and local governments from doing business with the brutal dictatorship in Burma was overturned by domestic courts after a WTO challenge.

• An EU policy that gave preferential tariffs to small banana exporters in Europe’s former colonies was successfully challenged by the United States after lobbying by the Chiquita banana company.

• Venezuela, backed by Brazil, successfully challenged provisions of the United States’ Clean Air Act that kept fuels with higher levels of pollutants out of the market.

The WTO has an enforceable arbitration process, but it isn’t always necessary to lodge a formal grievance. Because the vast majority of challenges to various domestic laws have been upheld, merely the threat of bringing a case is usually enough to make governments rethink their legislation. This is common when it comes to health, environmental, and food safety laws. In the first ten years of WTO arbitration panels’ operation, all but two such challenges brought before them prevailed.

In NAFTA and in regional deals such as CAFTA and the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), the business community managed to get what it had tried and failed to achieve in the WTO: the ability of multinationals to cut out the middle man and sue governments directly for the loss of profits resulting from a regulation or a law they consider too “burdensome.” Under those rules, “signatory governments are required to provide extensive rights and privileges to foreign investors,” who are then “empowered to privately enforce these new rights by demanding cash payment from governments” that don’t give them what they want, according to a report by Public Citizen.

The cases are decided behind closed doors in “private tribunals operating outside the nations’ domestic court system”:

The track record of cases demonstrate[s] an array of attacks on public policies and normal governmental activity at all levels of government-- federal, state and local. Even though these NAFTA cases implicate commonplace public policies, the investor-state system is a closed and unaccountable one. Citizens whose policies are being attacked have no avenue of meaningful participation and neither do the state and local officials they elected to represent them. [Domestic] court decisions can be challenged and jury decisions undermined, yet no judge or jury has standing to participate in the private NAFTA tribunals.

These rules shift significant amounts of risk from investors to governments. At the same time, they sharply limit what governments can ask for in return.

The common response to this critique is pretty straightforward: most of the parties to international trade deals such as the WTO are democratic states. Their legislators are elected by the people, and when they enter into a treaty, they’re doing it on behalf of those who put them in office. Hence, democracy is safe, even if democratic governments don’t always have the freedom-- the “policy space”-- to advance their constituents’ interests.

But we have to remember those private jets stacked up over Washington during the run-up to the vote on CAFTA. That trade deal faced stiff public resistance-- one poll taken in the weeks before Congress voted found that three out of four Americans opposed trade agreements that resulted in job losses at home, even if they resulted in cheaper goods and services. And cheaper goods were a central selling point for the deal.

As the vote neared, it looked as if George Bush might have become the first president to fail to get a trade agreement through Congress in forty years. But all of the lobbying might of various business groups came to bear on members of Congress. As the Washington Post reported, “A prominent business leader recently laid it on the line: Business groups are prepared to cut off campaign contributions to House members who oppose the pact. ‘If you [lawmakers] are going to vote against it, it’s going to cost you,’ Thomas J. Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, warned recently during a meeting on Capitol Hill.” Several years later, months before the 2008 presidential elections, Donahue would announce a $60 million war chest dedicated to punishing those whom the Los Angeles Times described as “candidates who target business interests with their rhetoric or policy proposals, including congressional and state-level candidates.” “We plan to build a grass-roots business organization so strong that when it bites you in the butt, you bleed,” Donohue said.

On the eve of the vote, the Bush administration started to cut deals with members of its own party who were resisting the pact. The Los Angeles Times reported, “For more than an hour, lawmakers milled about the House floor and gazed at the electronic scoreboard displaying the vote tally, which showed CAFTA several votes short of the mark.” Nancy Pelosi, then the House minority leader, told the Times, “Right there in front of us, for the world to see, they were twisting arms, making deals, changing votes.” Finally, when the count reached 217 to 215, the vote was gaveled to a close, and the deal had scraped through by a hair.

Yet if the pressure on lawmakers here in the United States was great, it paled in comparison with that brought to bear on leaders of smaller, poorer states such as Costa Rica. Lori Wallach, the director of Public Citizen, noted that “The U.S. ambassador to Costa Rica, Mark Langdale, was slammed with a rare formal denunciation before Costa Rica’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal in August after he waged a lengthy campaign to influence the vote on CAFTA. As part of that [campaign], Langdale employed misleading threats and suggested there would be economic reprisals if CAFTA were rejected.” The Bush administration repeatedly threatened to remove Costa Rica’s trade preferences-- which waived some duties on products it exports to the United States-- if the Costa Rican people rejected CAFTA in a referendum.

This kind of geopolitical arm-twisting is par for the course in venues like the WTO. In 2001, immediately after the attacks of 9/11, U.S. trade representative Robert Zoellick made the case that advancing the Anglo-U.S. model of corporate “free” trade was key to winning the “War on Terror.” At the time, author Naomi Klein wrote, “Zoellick explained that ‘by promoting the WTO’s agenda, these 142 nations can counter the revulsive destructionism of terrorism.’ Open markets, he said, are ‘an antidote’ to the terrorists’ ‘violent rejectionism.’”

The United States has become infamous among trade observers for using that kind of rhetorical “linkage” to advance its agenda, but it’s far from unique in that regard. These kinds of power plays are especially evident in negotiations between wealthy states and the developing world, so-called North-South negotiations.

As Aileen Kwa, who analyzed the back-room deals in which trade agreements are formed in great detail, wrote, “In comparison to the United States, the EU is usually more sophisticated in the rhetoric it adopts... it promotes its agenda at the WTO as being ‘in the interests of developing countries.’ This is ironic since developing countries’ assessment[s] of their own interests are the complete opposite.”

The highly developed states use economic blackmail-- threatening poorer countries’ trade preferences and foreign aid accounts-- and blatantly undemocratic methods to overcome the developing world’s concerns about these deals and get them to sign on the bottom line.

In their seminal book Behind the Scenes at the WTO, Kwa and coauthor Fatoumata Jawara cast a bright light on the murky world of international trade negotiations. “Any country whose political system operated as the WTO... [does]-- where... rules were routinely ignored, and people or interested groups routinely used bribery and blackmail to achieve their political ends-- would not only be rightly condemned by the international community as undemocratic and corrupt, it would also face a real and constant threat of revolution,” they wrote.

Crucial meetings are held behind closed doors, excluding participants with critical interests at stake, with no formal record of the discussion. When delegates are, in principle, entitled to attend meetings, they are not informed when or where they are to be held. Meetings are held without translation into the languages of many participants, to discuss documents which are only available in English, and which have been issued only hours before, or even at the meeting itself. Those most familiar with issues (Ambassadors) are sometimes discouraged or prevented from speaking in discussions about them at Ministerial meetings. “Consultations” with Members on key decisions are held one-to-one, in private, with no written record, and the interpretation left to an individual who has a stake in the outcome. Protestations that inconvenient views have been ignored in this process fall on deaf ears. Chairs of committees and facilitators are selected by a small clique, and often have an interest in the issues for which the committee is responsible. The established principle of decision-making by consensus is routinely overridden, and the views of decision-makers are “interpreted” rather than a formal vote being taken... Rules are ignored when they are inconvenient, and a blind eye is turned to blackmail and inducements. The list is endless.

A free-market transaction, remember, has to be free of coercion. All parties have to have access to the same information. By these standards alone, “free trade” is anything but.

There have been plenty of "Free Trade" votes since then, but let's go back and look at the aforemented 217-215 vote on CAFTA in 2005. 27 Republicans just couldn't bring themselves, even with all the concentrated pressure, to vote against the United States. Twenty-seven was enough to have killed the bill. It only passed because 15 Democrats, almost all of them notorious corporate whores, crossed the aisle in the other direction and gave Bush the votes he needed to pass the bill and further wreck the U.S. ecconomy. Almost all of those traitorous Democrats have since been defeated. But here's the list of the ones still serving in Congress:

• Jim Cooper (Blue Dog/New Dem-TN)
• Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)
• Rubén Hinojosa (D-TX)
• Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT)
• Gregory Meeks (New Dem-NY)
• Jim Moran (New Dem-VA)

State Senator Daylin Leach is the Blue America-endorsed candidate for the open congressional seat in northeast Philadelphia/Montgomery County. He's focused like a laser on economic growth and job creation as the only way to lift America out of the economic morass that the ideologically-based conservative Austerity agenda has driven the country into. Leach is a proponent of FAIR Trade, rather than the misnamed coprorate jihad called "Free" Trade. This morning he told us, "'Free' trade is often one of those phrases which is cleverly used to conceal the fact that the opposite of what is being said is what is actually the result. It's like calling a bill gutting environmental regulations the Healthy Skies Initiative, or calling a bill antithetical to what our founders intended when they wrote the Constitution The Patriot Act. Too often 'free trade' takes away our freedom to protect our workers, our environment, and our economic well-being."

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