Bush's New "Bipartisan" Trade Push Masks A Disgusting Agenda

The Wall Street Journal today blares the headline "Bush Reaches Out To Democrats on Trade," with the story at first seeming to show some movement by the White House on critical issues like labor rights. But don't get your hopes up - if you read the piece carefully, what you see is nothing more than a PR offensive - not a policy shift, one likely fueled by the recent genuflecting and apologies by some Democrats to Big Business after the vote on the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).

It takes eight paragraphs of nonsense and spin for the Journal to finally note that despite the rhetoric, the White House still "contend[s] trade agreements shouldn't be used to explicitly set labor standards and should encourage trading partners to enforce their laws without threats of trade sanctions." Right, because low-wage countries who have never enforced such laws are just going to go ahead and do it, with no pressure from the United States, whose market they desperately want access to.

The piece then notes that the White House is pushing a new "free" trade pact with Colombia, Ecuador and Peru that is supposedly going to be different than CAFTA. Yet, the paper then notes that the proposal "has many of the same features that made Cafta so contentious."

What's perhaps most shocking is that two of those nations - Colombia and Peru - have shown a willingness to address some of the serious labor concerns, "even if it means signing onto a pact that would lead to sanctions if they don't enforce domestic protections for child labor, among other things." Yet, "the Bush administration isn't willing to write such terms into a trade agreement." Yes, you read that correctly - our potential trading partners are actually showing some flexibility on issues critical to workers, but America's own government is refusing to take them up on that flexibility.

This last bit really rips off the veneer of the "free" trade rhetoric and shows us what America's trade policy is all about: securing low-wage colonies for Corporate America to base its operations in. The bought-off Bush administration literally does not want labor/human rights/environmental protections in trade deals, even when trading partners are amenable to them, because those protections would mean Corporate America couldn't exploit those countries to the degree it wants to exploit them. America's trade policy, in short, is not about helping the American economy, it's not about creating jobs here at home, and it's not about lifting the developing world out of poverty - it is about cementing a global system of exploitation in the name of corporate profits.

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