Wily
and experienced negotiator that he is, I have to think that Charlie
Rangel believes that sometimes no deal is better than a bad deal. I
hope he keeps that mind as he plunges into talks over a compromise over
so-called “free trade” agreements. Charlie, there is no deal to be made
here, within the framework being discussed. And this issue is one of
the most crucial issues for the future of the Democratic Party.

I have argued here numerous times that there is no such thing as
“free trade.” It is simply a marketing phrase, and, admittedly, one
that has stuck within the minds of the mainstream media–reporters and editorial page editors,
who learned in Economics 101 in college about the virtues of “free
trade.” The truth is that what the public is sold as “free trade” is
nothing more than a set of rules that is primarily, if not entirely,
about protecting capital and investment. There is nothing free about
these deals. I’ve actually read them–they are a bore but try it
sometime: all you will read are essentially page after page of
standards and exceptions and protections for corporate trading.

Which brings us to the current debate. As The New York Times reports today:

When the Democrats swept to victory last fall, after a campaign
fueled partly by attacks on President Bush’s trade policies, trade
deals promoted by the administration seemed doomed in the new Congress.
But that was then.

In the last week, the administration and its Republican allies on
Capitol Hill have signaled a new willingness to work with Democrats to
try to secure their support for three pending trade deals — with
Panama, Peru and Colombia. The focus of their talks has been guarantees
for the rights of workers in countries with which the United States has
negotiated trade accords, including a ban on child labor and forced
labor.

Now, on the face of it, this should be good news. Who wouldn’t want to have the rights of workers protected?

But, the problem is that this is only a small fix to the bigger
problem of the structure of these so-called “free trade” deals. You can
see a little bit of the problem revealed in the story over the debate
about where labor rights should appear in a so-called “free trade”
agreement:

Another issue is whether any guarantees on labor rights would be
incorporated in the body of the three pending trade agreements,
requiring them to be renegotiated, or adopted as a side letter as
Republicans want. Democrats say only embodying them in the negotiated
accords would make them enforceable.

If the labor rights protections end up as side letters, they will be
meaningless–unenforceable and quickly forgotten. That’s how the
Clinton Administration dealt with labor and environmental rights in
NAFTA–a complete disaster for our workers and Mexican workers (the
latter have seen their standard of living plummet–at least the vast
sea of migrant and factory workers). And it should speak volumes that
REPUBLICANS are open to the idea of side letters with labor
rights–that should tell us how weak these side letters truly are.

But the framing of the choices tells us a lot about the ultimate
outcome: even if the labor rights end up as part of the body of the
deals, it would only improve conditions at the margin.

The central problem to so-called “free trade” agreements is
that they start out from the wrong premise: that trade agreements
should be primarily about protecting investment and capital and, then,
only as an afterthought, do the agreements wrestle with how workers and
the environment should be treated.

In the instance of the Columbian so-called “free trade” agreement,
for example, foreign investor rights—-a typical pro-corporate,
so-called “free trade,” measure—-would tighten the grip that large
corporations have on the country’s natural resources and launch a
large-scale plundering of those resources such as timber and minerals.
The so-called “free trade” deal would likely displace hundreds of
thousands of poor rural Colombians from their lands, sending them into
far deeper economic despair—and forcing many of them to work for
paramilitary forces aligned with drug growers–the very groups that
violently displaced them from their lands. The Ministry of Agriculture
and Rural Affairs conducted a study of the effects of the 1990s
economic “liberalization” and concluded that the grand “opening” of the
economy led to a 35 per cent drop in employment. You can be sure that
the proposed so-called “free trade” deal will wreak similar havoc.

The American people get the problem: in the past election, Public Citizen clearly showed
that the new Democratic majority was won in large part because dozens
of candidates ran on a platform of fair trade and opposed to so-called
“free trade.” Yes, Iraq was the main issue but the economic anxiety
facing millions of people across our nation bubbled up as well.

Making deals on so-called “free trade” puts Democrats at great
peril–perhaps not in 2008 but in a longer time frame. If we don’t
oppose the very economic policies that are threatening workers here and
abroad, voters will become disenchanted. I’m not arguing that they
will, then, rush into the Republicans’ arms. But, many will stay home
and become demobilized. The Party can’t afford that–no, our democracy
can’t afford that.

So back to my congressman, Charles Rangel. Rather than make a bad
deal that simply perpetuates so-called “free trade, I would hope that
he and the other leaders of our party decide, once and for all, to end
a destructive mindset that chooses corporate investment and capital
rights over the rights of people to have a fair wage and decent working
conditions. We need a new template for trade based on two principles:

1. The ultimate goal for trade is to improve the lives of communities around the world.

2. If you believe in #1, then, any trade agreement should have at
its core, not as after thoughts and “side letters,” the principals of
democracy, safe and fair-waged work and the preservation of the
environment—for the people of all the countries involved in the deal.
Once those principles are laid down as the underpinning of a trade
deal, then, we ask how do corporations fulfill those goals. Right now,
it’s the exact opposite.