Free Trade: Another Big Loser
    By Nancy Snyder
    t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

    Wednesday 15 November 2006

    As the many-faceted analyses continue to be examined in the wake of the 2006 midterm elections that propelled the Democrats to control both the House of Representatives and the Senate, a new factor came into play in campaign strategies: the issue of free trade. Incumbents who did not question the failed economic model of NAFTA that wrecked havoc on their communities found themselves on the losing end of this election. There were seven Senate seats and forty-four House seats that were won by fair trade candidates, and the issue was instrumental in the Democrats' winning in such solid numbers.

    Two days after the election, Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, a non-profit organization located in Washington, DC, that works on an array of globalization and free trade issues and how they impact labor, the environment and economic justice, presented their exhaustive analysis of these historic midterm elections in regard to the candidates' position of fair trade. The study evaporated any lingering doubts that trade was a politically powerful issue. Incumbents who had voted for fair trade, who were largely Democratic, retained all their seats and did not lose to any candidate who supported the NAFTA/CAFTA model of economic prowess at the expense of working people. There were 115 nationwide Congressional races where trade and off-shoring were used as wedge issues. These races had twenty-five hard-hitting television ads that were used in states such as Ohio, North Carolina and Pennsylvania - states that have seen their economic base diminish as their factories have closed and moved out of the country.

    The Democratic challenger to Ohio's Senate seat that was occupied by Republican Mike DeWine, Sherrod Brown (who led the Congressional fight against CAFTA's passage in July 2005), produced a television ad that had him in front of a closed factory and stated, "My opponent supported the trade agreements that cost us these jobs. He says it's just business - I say it's wrong." The ad, along with his opponent's legal troubles tied with the lobbying and bribery scoundrel Jack Abramoff, had Brown winning victory over DeWine.

    Missouri's extremely close Senate race had Democratic challenger Claire McCaskill using the fair trade issue as an important plank in her campaign. She greeted potential voters everywhere in Missouri with her promise to "block the outsourcing of Missouri jobs" and to "fight for fair trade policies."

    Perhaps even more satisfying was the North Carolina's 8th Congressional District: Republican congressman Robin Hayes promised his constituency of North Carolina (whose populace had witnessed the exodus of over 100,000 textile jobs and 70,000 apparel jobs in the years between 1997 and 2002) that he was "flat-out, completely, horizontally opposed" to the Central American Free Trade Agreement and vowed to vote against it. A few days before the CAFTA vote was counted, Hayes reneged on his "nay" vote, voted for the flawed agreement, and was voted out by North Carolinians in favor of Larry Kissell, the Democratic challenger who worked in the mills for twenty-seven years before he became a high school teacher.

    In polls conducted by the New York Times and CNN, it was not just the Iraq War that made voters return to the polls, but economic anxiety was as much a component as the greed and corruption that defined the House and the Senate that took their marching orders from the President Bush and never questioned the effect on their respective constituencies. Free Trade policies were part of the economic equation. Most voters have a nagging fear that their job could be next on the chopping block. And their elected Republic representatives ignored them.

    Nonetheless, there are still a few weeks left in the lame duck Congress, and fair trade activists everywhere are on the alert regarding two proposed Free Trade agreements with Peru and Colombia that the president delayed putting on the Congressional floor for a Fast Track vote - meaning that there would be no amendments allowed that would protect workers' rights or the environment, just a quick thumbs up or thumbs down vote - until after the elections. Now the fates of both Free Trade agreements are uncertain. If the agreements are stalled until the spring 2007, fast track negotiating authority will expire. The president has a very full and ambitious agenda planned for this lame duck session, including a bill that would legalize his illegal wiretapping program and decapitate the law that limits a president's ability to abuse his power in this way. The lame duck Congress may also vote on the US representative to the United Nations, the position currently held by Bush appointee John Bolton. Whatever comes before these lame duck Congressmen and Congresswomen, fair trade activists know they have to remain vigilant until this Congress is formally, and finally, ushered out.