Wash Post: The Good, Bad & Ugly on CAFTA

The Washington Post fronts a story about the House wrangling over the Central American Free Trade Agreement(CAFTA) – and the piece offers us a smorgasbord of what's wrong with the Beltway culture.

First and foremost, we get the regular comments from faux "centrists" (aka. corporatists) who say voting against the agreement will hurt the party. For instance, former Christian Coalition official Marshall Wittmann, who now hilariously purports to speak for Democrats, says Democrats previously "used pro-trade positions to show moderate voters and business interests they are willing to stand up to their labor union backers..." There is no mention that those party leaders also helped undermine the party's ability to attract votes from working class districts - many of the same districts that have turned red over the last decade. And there is no mention that polls show Americans overwhelmingly want politicians to stop ramming corporate-written trade deals down our country's throat.

Then we get DLC CEO Al From, who – as usual – uses the most hyperbolically inflammatory and dishonest language possible to undermine Democrats (he has made a career in Washington's cocktail party circuit doing this kind of thing). He claims that being against corporate-written trade deals that sell out American workers will make "hard to assume national leadership" because it will mean Democrats have "a protectionist bent." That's his trick – anyone who opposes a trade deal because it includes no labor, human rights or environmental standards is "protectionist" – even though our country has already shown that you can actually craft trade deals with those provisions in them, if politicians decide not to just shill for Big Business.

We also get a fat juicy quote from former Democratic Rep. Dave McCurdy who says that voting against sellout trade deals somehow means Democrats are "retreat[ing] from global engagement." But we should expect that kind of hyperbole from a person who traded in his congressional career to go lobby for an industry trade group.

Finally, and possibly most disturbingly, the Washington Post makes almost no mention of why more and more Americans are opposing deals like CAFTA – namely, because these deals have resulted in massive outsourcing, a huge trade deficit, stagnating wages, and all sorts of other downward pressure on quality of life (aka. health care/pension benefits) for ordinary workers. It's the issue no one in the insulated Washington Establishment wants to talk about – because Washington is run by the Big Money that is reaped by these trade deals.

There is a silver-lining in this story that, granted, only gets a fleeting mention. But it is important: "House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) privately warned Democrats last month that a vote for CAFTA is a vote to stay in the minority." This is terrific – it shows that at least some top Democrats fundamentally understand how important it is for the party to reassert itself as the true party of the working/middle-class.

But it still is troubling that the mainstream media analyzes these important economic matters in the divorced-from-reality terms that Big Money interests like the DLC and corporate lobbying groups use. The real story is much more clear: both rank-and-file Democrats – and more and more Republicans – are hearing from ordinary people back home that they don't want America's economy sold out to the highest bidder. True, that might make bought-and-sold politicians uncomfortable. And yes, people who make their living in D.C. off of corporate funded think tanks/lobby shops may not like this. But the American heartland is not going to be fooled by their "free" malarkey any longer.

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