Reprinted by permission of Ray Abernathy. Ray's website is available at: http://www.rayabernathy.com
After a brief hiatus, FLBP is back with a new look, a new hook and a new book (Here and There, Now and Then: Short Stories by J. Ray Abernathy). But it’s the same old, same old story from Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson and GOP gonnabe-nominee John McCain: One wants to continue George Bush’s fealty to the failed trade policies of the last 30 years, the other wants to escalate Bush’s tax giveaways to big corpora and the upper class.
Many years ago, I met Robert Samuelson in person. A client and I were touring major media offices promoting the novel notion that privatizing Social Security might not be such a good idea. One of Samuelson’s colleagues (fortunately, I’ve forgotten his name) exploded in anger after we made our pitch and Samuelson proved himself at least a gentleman when he admonished his friend to pipe down and be civil. At the conclusion of the brief meeting, Samuelson asked, “Where are all you neo-New Dealers coming from?” We responded that we were almost old enough, thank you, to be origino-New Dealers, and that turning our only national old-age insurance system over to the stock market was about as nutty as risking the U.S. Treasury in a game of Keno. Samuelson was wrong then about Social Security and he’s wrong now about free trade and the Columbia Free Trade Agreement now.
In his column this morning, Marching Backward on Trade, Samuelson condemns the “Democratic-controlled House’s decision to set aside the free-trade agreement negotiated with Colombia by the Bush administration.” He defends his position with long-discredited economic hyperbole, and calls the House’s decision to suspend trade promotion authority “particularly perverse,” while failing to recognize the intrinsic perversity of TPA, commonly known as “fast-track,” which prevents Congress from negotiating with the President or making changes in the deal. It’s either thumbs up, or thumbs down, with no discussion. But Samuelson’s chief intellectual flop lies in his failure to note that Colombia FTA is more about murder than markets, and that workers in Colombia are likely to gain as much from this trade agreement as workers in Mexico gained from NAFTA, which was a shove further down the economic ladder.
First the murders. In a statement issued on April 7, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney filled the gap left by Samuelson, saying, “The Bush administration has scuttled the progress towards a new consensus with its willingness to turn a blind eye to rampant human rights atrocities — all for a trade agreement that even administration economists anticipate will be of little consequence. Today’s agreement makes a complete mockery of the labor protections that were negotiated and incorporated into the trade agreement, and would be violated from day one.” What Sweeney was talking about were the murders of some 2,500 union leaders and members in Colombia since 1986, 39 last year and continuing at the rate of one per week this year with only pathetic attempts by Colombian President Alvaro Uribe to staunch the killings or prosecute the killers.
“In Colombia,” Sweeney said, “joining a union or advocating for workers’ rights can be a de facto death sentence.”
The likely benefit for Columbian workers? While Clinton pollster Mark Penn was trying to stuff his overflowing pockets with $300,000 in Colombian cash in early April, Benedicto Martinez Orozco, the co-president of a union in Mexico, was telling a steelworkers’ union symposium in Pittsburgh what the North American Free Trade Agreement has done to workers in his country. As reported in an article by reporter Ann Belser in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Mr. Martinez told how businesses in Mexico found they couldn’t compete with the big companies that roared into his country after NAFTA was signed. “In the first two years, thousands of middle-sized businesses closed, and that left thousands more workers without jobs,” Mr. Martinez said through an interpreter. “Bigger companies bought up businesses and we started to see the concentration of industries.” According to Belser’s story, Mr. Martinez went on to say that many people became very rich, while now, 14 years later, about half the population of his country is either underemployed or unemployed. He said that in just the last six years, wages have gone down 60 percent and that while the minimum wage is 51 pesos, between $4.50 and $5 a day, a kilogram of meat, which is about 2 pounds, costs 70 pesos.
Samuelson and the crackpot right-wingers he champions succeeded in passing NAFTA and dozens of other free trade agreements that have turned globalization into a dirty word. But thank God they failed to turn Social Security into a giant 401K. Can you imagine what would be happening now? The stock market churning lower and lower, thousands of senior citizens in Arizona trying to leap from the roofs of their one-story ranch houses, with the Senator from their state observing they had to take more responsibility and find higher leaping points if they wanted to succeed in their mission?
After that segue, I should quit. But McCain needs to be skewered for the sophomoric “economic plan” he released yesterday. According to the brilliant young analysts who run the Wonk Room over at American Progress, the plan is another great example of McCain being more Bush than Bush.
According to the Wonk Room, the centerpieces of John McCain’s economic plan remains his $1.7 trillion corporate tax cut. He also makes Bush’s $2 trillion dollar tax cut permanent. Thus, he is proposing a tax cut that’s twice as large as and far more regressive than the Bush tax cut he opposed in 2001.
John McCain’s “gas tax holiday” expires this Labor Day (worth noting that he won’t be president this summer and unable to enact this). However, there’s no expiration for his huge tax cuts for big corporations, including nearly $4 billion to the biggest oil companies and nearly $2 billion a year to the biggest insurance companies.
McCain’s plan would cost $285 billion. His campaign claims to offer $131 billion in savings — $155 billion goes unpaid for. Moreover, his savings appear to be largely bogus. For example, he claims $60 billion in savings from eliminating earmarks, but earmarks only totaled $18 billion last year.
For the full report from the Wonk Room, visit: http://thinkprogress.org/wonkroom
And now for the new look, hook and book (notice now I kept this discretely last). My “Writers Desk” had to be chopped up and fed into the fireplace where good ideas go to die: In six months, nobody tried to help me pen the world’s first blogged beach book (who would have guessed?). From here on out, From the Left Bank also is going to display a more wicked attitude towards deserving people and institutions (like the team of incredibly slow, lazy hulks now masquerading as the Washington Nationals). I will also post more frequently, pick up work from other bloggers, and accept submissions from readers who send them directly to me at ray.abernathy@gmail.com. And here’s a threat: if the new short story collection doesn’t sell at least 200 copies during this first week, then I’m going to start GIVING IT AWAY and undermining the entire publishing industry. That will force my friend New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse to cut the price of his first book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, which officially went on sale today after three years of work. Steve says he was chagrined to discover that thebigsqueeze.com had already been taken by a dating service and that bigsqueeze.com belongs to an orange grower in Florida, so you can get all the details by visiting him at www.stevengreenhouse.com