Salon.com > Free Trade

Why China isn’t Ohio’s boogeyman

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 18:48:00 +0000

There's an easy answer to the question of why Barack Obama and Mitt Romney continue to trade jabs over who will be meaner to China over the next four years. It's called Ohio. Free trade does not focus group well in the all-important Midwestern electoral prize. When votes are at stake in Toledo and Cleveland and Akron and Cincinnati, presidential candidates will pander like they've never pandered before.

But there's a deeper discontent at work nationwide that plays into the same dynamic, aptly identified by David Leonhardt in Wednesday's New York Times. For most Americans, our standard of living is stagnating, or in outright decline, and one of the villains is globalization. So when Romney declares that he will label China a "currency manipulator" on "Day One" and Obama touts his record of cracking down on cheap Chinese tires, what the candidates are really doing is blaming the most convenient boogeyman for a profound change in how Americans feel about the future.

Trans-Pacific Partnership: The biggest trade deal you’ve never heard of

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 16:13:00 +0000

If you listened to the debate last night between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on foreign policy, you would have heard a great deal on Israel, Iran and Libya, and a bit on China. The two rivals even touched on education policy, military spending and tax cuts for the wealthy. What you would not have heard was any mention of what could potentially be the most significant foreign and domestic policy initiative of the Obama administration: the Trans-Pacific Partnership. This agreement is a core part of the "Asia pivot" that has occupied the activities of think tanks and policymakers in Washington but remained hidden by the tinsel and confetti of the election. But more than any other policy, the trends the TPP represents could restructure American foreign relations, and potentially the economy itself.

Why isn't trade a part of the election? After all, in 1992, Ross Perot made the last successful third-party run for the presidency, mostly on the strength of his anti-NAFTA rhetoric. Today, however, on the core question of these trade agreements, the parties basically agree. President Barack Obama has pledged to double U.S. exports as a core policy goal, and the Democratic platform lists the TPP as a "historic high-standard agreement" that will help accomplish this. The GOP platform pledges that "a Republican President will complete negotiations for a Trans-Pacific Partnership to open rapidly developing Asian markets to U.S. products." Both party leaders argue that exports are one key to creating high-quality American jobs.

China’s not-so-secret plan for world domination

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

If economist, author, political candidate and now filmmaker Peter Navarro is right – and that’s a big if, on a number of levels – then the long-running conflict between Democrats and Republicans over budget and tax policies is really just a matter of moving the deck chairs around, long after the iceberg ripped the hull open. In Navarro’s view of the world, expressed first in his recent book “Death by China” (co-authored with Greg Autry) and now in a documentary of the same name, the United States’ enormous trade deficit with China and the related disappearance of millions of American manufacturing jobs are the primary causes of our economy’s woes.

NKoreans talk shop with foreigners at trade fair

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 14:23:00 +0000

RASON, North Korea (AP) — Fleets of shiny minivans, Chinese-made bulldozers and dump trucks festooned with red ribbons fill the plaza while toys, clothes and even probiotics digestive capsules are on display inside an exhibition hall.

Walking past the booths and examining the goods are Chinese, North Koreans and even some Europeans, who are exchanging business cards and sharing lively conversations -- North Korea is once again hosting an international trade fair, which opened Monday in Rason in the far northeast, a city seeking to sell itself as friendly to foreigners and a potential hub for international transportation, trade and tourism.

It's a scene not common in the rest of North Korea, where most business is state-run and interaction between foreigners and locals is strictly monitored.

The trade fair is an indication of how keen the insular nation is to attract foreign investment needed to reform its listless economy. Pyongyang has not publicly released detailed economic data for decades, but has made building the economy a focus of government policy since 2009. Rason, however, is one of North Korea's newly revamped special economic zones, governed by a separate set of laws and rules giving local officials more autonomy, and easier to access from the Chinese city of Yanji than from the North Korea capital of Pyongyang.

Fake Olympic outrage

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 16:06:00 +0000

Fake outrage is a little like pornography -- hard to narrowly define, but you know it when you see it. It is the television pundit railing on the supposed "War on Christmas" or the radio host calling a woman a "slut" for the alleged crime of discussing contraception. It is the Democratic partisan pretending to be offended by John McCain's expensive shoes, or the Republican partisan taking umbrage at President Obama for daring to repeat the truism that "if you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help." And when it comes to the 2012 Olympics it is the typical congressional leader criticizing American athletes' uniforms for being made in China.

This has been the big story in the lead-up to the games, as top lawmakers from both parties are pretending to be upset that Team USA's clothing was manufactured far away from home. The operative word, though, is "pretending."

A look at the record shows that many of these lawmakers supported (and continue to support) the tariff-free trade policies that eviscerated the domestic textile industry -- aka the industry that should be making the uniforms. And yet, these same lawmakers preen before the cameras, clad in suits made in factories their votes helped offshore. Gold medalists in fake outrage, they breast-beat about jobs and American pride, correctly betting that few reporters will highlight their phony indignation's inherent deceit.

Free trade’s multinational corporate bonanza

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 20:00:00 +0000

On Friday, more than five years after George W. Bush started pushing for the passage of free trade deals with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama, the agreements finally reached President Obama's desk and were signed into law.

Some sectors of the American economy will benefit from a significant drop in tariff protections across the board, and some will not. But you can throw away all the studies conducted by supporters and opponents pinpointing exactly how many hundreds of thousands of net jobs will be added or lost. Determining the economic impact of trade agreements is fiendishly difficult, and the ideological predispositions of the various parties engaging in the free trade debt are far too fixed to have any confidence in their claims and counterclaims.

But that's not to say we can't declare a winner. If you want to know who benefits most from free trade, all you have to do is look at the list of co-chairs steering the U.S.-Korea FTA Business Council -- the gold-plated blue chip clearinghouse for corporate support of the biggest of the three trade deals, the South Korea FTA. They include: