Now that the platform committee has met a  number of times, we should learn what the Democratic Party’s platform will say about trade. I’m told the language may be finalized today. In the meantime, consider a couple of nuggets of information:

   The Citizens Trade Campaign came up with proposed language, which you can see here. At a public platform committee meeting in Cleveland, Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers, testified about future trade policy and asked a series of questions:

“How can we continue to run trade deficits of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, accumulating more than $6 trillion in current account deficits since 1994 – borrowing about $2 billion each and every day and not expect that there will be a price to pay?”

 

“How can we lose more than 3.5 million manufacturing jobs and see more than 40,000 facilities shuttered and ask our citizens to support trade policies that have shipped their jobs overseas?”

 

“How can we refuse to pursue aggressively enough the fight for labor rights in America or overseas and expect that workers in other nations will have the rights necessary to be adequately compensated for their labor and help build a bridge to the middle class?”

 

“How can we watch as other nations – like China — subsidize their producers, dump their products on our markets and refuse to accept our goods in their markets and simply continue to spout ideology while refusing to enforce our own laws?”

 

“How can we let policymakers tell our children that they should work hard and go to college to get one of the ‘jobs of the future’ when those jobs, increasingly, are being done offshore as our nation’s advanced technology trade deficit with China alone amounts to more than $67 billion?’

   When I get the final language, I’ll have it for you with some analysis/thoughts.