McCain’s Free Trade Stance Comes Under Fire

(CNN/AlterNet)

From CNN’s Lou Dobbs Reports:

Senator McCain today pandering to business special interest groups with his unqualified support for NAFTA, but the senator didn’t deliver his pro-free trade pitch in this country where millions of jobs have been lost as a result of those agreements. Instead he went to Canada to talk to their business elite.

In addition to his enthusiastic support for NAFTA, the senator also voted for all sorts of trade deals. Voting for trade deals with Oman (ph), Singapore, Chile, Vietnam, Central American nations and African nations. And just in case there is any doubt, back in December, Senator McCain said he would seek deals with more countries saying, “I’m the biggest free marketer and free trader you will ever see.”

Senator McCain’s position on free trade and its impact on working people in this country and our middle-class shouldn’t be much of a surprise when we consider just who’s giving the senator economic advice, none other than Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett Packard. She presided over the thousands of layoffs at Hewlett Packard and was ultimately fired herself, but not before she received a $21 million severance package and more than $500,000 in mortgage assistance. And it was Carly Fiorina who defended outsourcing of American middle-class jobs to chief overseas labor markets by saying, “there is no job that is America’s God-given right anymore.”

“Toward a New Washington Consensus on Trade” Via AlterNet:

It’s not that politicians like McCain “need to be educated” about economics, as he admitted. It’s that they do not comprehend how economics impacts international affairs. Behold McCain at a recent town meeting.

“We need our Canadian friends, and we need their continued support in Afghanistan,” he said. “So what do we do? The two Democratic candidates for president say they’re going to unilaterally abrogate NAFTA. How do you think the Canadian people are going to react to that?”

Opinion-makers, think-tankers and other assorted conventional wisdom spewers depict McCain’s thesis as unquestioned truth. They claim that though most Americans oppose our trade policies, the world’s masses love them, and if we change them, we will lose allies.

This rationale justifies the fabled Washington Consensus — the set of right-wing globalization measures currently destabilizing the world economy. And because our politicians’ international curiosity begins and ends with turning French Fries into Freedom Fries, this rationale goes unchallenged in America’s political debate.

Facts, however, are persistent things — facts like the Toronto Star report showing “almost half of all Canadians [believe] NAFTA should be renegotiated,” with 80 percent saying it has done little or nothing for workers. McCain wonders how Canadians will react to NAFTA criticism, but the results are already in: According to polls, they prefer the NAFTA-bashing Barack Obama by a five-to-one margin over the NAFTA-glorifying Arizona senator.

“Canadians believe NAFTA needs serious work,” said Jack Layton, leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party. The likely prime minister candidate told me he wants to reform the pact because it helps corporations overturn laws and because its lack of standards forces workers into a wage-cutting, environment-destroying race to the bottom. Read the complete article.