Liberals Gone Neo! (pt. 1)

While The Agitator holds no brief for the doctrine of American Exceptionalism,  this point is beyond dispute:

The notion of “American exceptionalism” became widely applied in the context of efforts to account for the weakness of working-class radicalism in the United States. The major question subsumed in the concept became why the United States is the only industrialized country which does not have a significant socialist movement or Labor party. That riddle has bedeviled socialist theorists since the late nineteenth century.   Lipset

With the lack of a meaningful Labor or Socialist Party, the political representation of America’s working class has for generations fallen by default to America’s party of “everyone else”, the Democrats.  From the time of the New Deal, the “liberal” wing of the Democratic party acquired some small tinges of a social democratic program, forged on the basis of an alliance with the once-powerful business unions of the AFL-CIO.  As the place of the AFL-CIO in American society and its workforce has waned, so has the influence of working class interests.  This month marks something in a watershed in the decline of working class influence in America.  Two deals, secretly negotiated with the leadership of Democratic liberals who once epitomized that small social democratic influence, saw the interests of American workers sold short.  The liberal lions have emerged in their new majority as staunch neoliberals.

“I’d ignore a lot of people that really was just wasting my time…”

Thus spake Congressman Charles Rangel, the Democrat who has represented Harlem in the US House for nearly 35 years, of the labor, small business, justice and environmental groups that had sought his assistance in blocking a proposed set of “free trade” agreements:

Rangel was the lead Democratic negotiator in talks with the Bush administration and Republican lawmakers aimed at clearing the way for approval of free trade pacts with Peru  and Panama and easing the path for pacts with Colombia and South Korea.

Rangel has stressed his desire to restore bipartisan support for trade through an “American” trade policy, rather than a Republican or Democratic one.

In the interview, Rangel offered no apology for the deal that was struck and said the only thing he would do differently was to reach it “much faster. I’d ignore a lot of people that really was just wasting my time, and didn’t intend to support it all.”   Alertnet

Congressman Rangel, why should labor and social justice organizations support these free trade deals?  Why should American workers believe these pacts are in our interests?  Why is it a waste of your time to listen to representatives of the many Americans who have good reason to believe they will be negatively impacted by such agreements?  Even a research fellow at the US Business and Industry Council has frankly acknowledged this:

Free trade agreements have done wonders for exports. The problem is that the country’s biggest export has become jobs, a leading opponent of the open trade deals is telling Mainers this week.
Alan Tonelson, a research fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council Educational Foundation, said the trade agreements should be called “outsourcing agreements,” because that’s their practical effect…

He said the U.S. free trade agreement with Mexico is a good example of why the deals are bad for the United States.
Tonelson said Mexico’s economy is about 3 percent the size of the U.S. economy. Mexico also has higher unemployment rates, keeping wages low, and most Mexicans have much less disposable income than Americans.
So it doesn’t really benefit U.S. companies to gain open access to the Mexican market, since eliminating tariffs isn’t likely to bring huge increases in sales, he said. By contrast, taking away the tariffs from the U.S. market opens up a huge mass of potential customers, with money, for Mexican businesses…

Tonelson believes the most successful export from the United States under NAFTA has been the plants and factories that make products.
U.S. manufacturers can set up factories in Mexico, he said, hire workers for pennies on the dollar compared to U.S. labor, and be relatively unfettered by the lax — or nonexistent — labor and environmental laws south of the border. Then they can simply ship the products back to the primary market in the United States.
“There were a zillion arguments made” in support of the agreements, Tonelson said. “The notion that it will be a major engine of growth for the U.S. economy is just not true.”
Taking a longer view, the situation is dangerous, Tonelson said. Manufacturing jobs are among the best paying jobs in the country, and the service sector jobs that replace them generally pay less and offer fewer benefits.
“We’re moving toward a place where consumption can’t possibly keep up,” Tonelson said, and the loss of manufacturing capability overseas reduces the level of investment and the gains in productivity for a company’s operations that stay in the United States.

On the other side of the equation, NAFTA has been an even harsher blow to Mexico’s masses of working poor, particularly in the rural areas:

[What] has become painfully clear in Mexico is that free trade — most famously NAFTA — has failed to lift the country out of poverty.

Starting with Miguel de la Madrid, president from 1982 to 1988, a succession of Ivy League-educated presidents bet on a formula intended to create prosperity for all. They advocated opening Mexico’s markets, making government smaller, and decreasing its involvement in agriculture and industry.

“There was heavy reliance on a rising tide carrying all boats,” said Guerra, who served as spokesman for two presidents in the 1990s. “Well, free-market policies have done nothing to alleviate poverty.”

Instead, such policies have helped the upper classes and widened the divide between rich and poor. Studies show that the richest 10 percent now control about half of the country’s financial and real estate assets. Most of those who are extremely poor live in rural areas. Government figures show that more than 40 percent of Mexicans in rural areas earn less than $1.40 a day, unable even to feed themselves decently. As a result, people are bailing out of the countryside as if it were a ship on fire.

Mexico’s rural population is less than half the size it was in the 1950s. Government surveys show that between 400 and 600 people a day are packing up fleeing to cities or to the United States.

Alberto Gomez, an influential farmers’ leader who recently organized a march on the capital by tens of thousands of farmers, said the situation was desperate. “We don’t want to come to the city and we don’t want to emigrate to the United States. But people have no money,” said Gomez, head of the 180,000-member National Union of Agriculture Organizations.

Gomez and many politicians blame much of their problem on NAFTA, which they say bankrupted Mexican farmers who cannot compete with their heavily subsidized, more technologically advanced U.S. counterparts. While a boon to the maquiladoras, or factory workers, and a blessing to certain bigger farmers, NAFTA has inflicted more pain on already ailing small farmers, most economists and analysts here agree.   globalpolicy.org

<><>Anti-Trade Deal Panamanian workers  (May 1, 2007 )

 

Faced with complete destitution as a result of NAFTA, rural Mexicans are as a great tide doing just what Alberto Gomez says they don’t want to do, move into the cities, or emigrate to America.   (The new immigration law will be Part 2 of Liberals Gone Neo!)

Rangel, Pelosi, and the rest of the famous (neo)liberal Democrats argue that this time there will be strict and enforceable labor provisions, and there appear to be some elements.  But there’s also a catch:

A commitment to basic labor standards – including bans on child labor and forced labor and guarantees of the right to organize – will be written into pending and future trade agreements. Trading partners will be required to enforce their own environmental laws. The administration will be responsible for monitoring compliance.

 

Why, oh why, Congressman Rangel, are we supposed to trust you on this deal if you’re willing to trust the Bush administration to protect workers’ rights?  We know better than that by now.  And so do you.

 

The neoliberal project in Latin America is increasingly in tatters.   A range of new economic policies and blocs have emerged from the austerity programs and debt peonage that was imposed on much of the region by international lenders, the IMF and World Bank.  Venezuela, having paid off all its IMF and World Bank loans, has now officially pulled out of these institutions which serve as the main enforcement arms of global neoliberalism in the developing world.  Fast tracking trade deals with Peru, Panama and Colombia becomes more pressing for capital as they are the largest remaining Latin American economies neither in a “free trade” pact with the US or members of Mercosur or ALBA.  Bushco is racing to build a firewall to quarantine the spread of non-neoliberal and anti-neoliberal economic alliances in the region.

 

When it comes to the corporate agenda, the two Washington parties are one big happy neoliberal family.  Considering the interests of the rest of us is, in comparison,  just wasting their time.