It was poet and philosopher George Santayana who apparently first observed, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It’s a message that has more relevance with each passing day of historical ignorance, and President Obama is probably the biggest offender.
Consider his plea this week for Congress to pass “free trade” agreements with South Korea, Panama and Colombia, pacts negotiated by the Bush administration to further American business in those countries, without a comparable return. That’s the problem with these so-called “free trade” agreements: We’re sacrificing jobs and our own communities’ well-being for stock dividends and a wealth dump on the very rich, the multinational corporate brokers of these deals.
Most heinous is Colombia, where a marauding class of government-protected (some say “sponsored”) thugs intimidates and kills those who challenge the ruling oligopoly of wealth and privilege, mostly anointed in the drug trade. Some 4,000 trade unionists have died over the past 20 years, nearly 100 a year over the past three years. Many who stand up for their rights are mowed down, and every presidential candidate is complicit.
Yes, organized labor is unanimously opposed to these trade deals, where good jobs are on the line, and they are on the line in every sector. But even more important for the Obama administration to consider is the consensus among working families everywhere – union and nonunion alike – that they are being sold down the river in these not-free trade deals.
That’s a lesson that was totally lost on Bill Clinton in the early years of his first term, when he railroaded the North American Free Trade Agreement through Congress, twisting Democratic arms all along the way. If you look at the polling – who showed up to vote and who didn’t – NAFTA was the single-biggest reason for the Republican sweep of Congress, in which Newt Gingrich got to proclaim the primacy of his “Contract On America.”
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka invoked that crippling Democratic loss, after two years of a Clinton triumph, warning in a speech at the National Press Club in January that the Obama administration risked alienating the very people it needs to win this November, and in November 2012.
We need to renegotiate these trade agreements to ensure they are mutually beneficial, and not just open doors for U.S.-based multinationals to plunder other lands at the expense of our own economy.
What’s good for Exxon Mobil and General Electric is not necessarily good for America.
