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Kerry on the Record: NAFTA Joins in the Flip-Flop Parade Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.comEditor's note: This is Part 11 in a series revealing the Democratic front-runner's track record on the important issues of the day.
Part 1: POWs and MIAs
As late as December, when reporters asked if there was any issue on which he was prepared to disagree with Democratic interest groups, Kerry replied with uncharacteristic simplicity and brevity: “Trade.” But popular opinion in the U.S. has grown increasingly protectionist, especially in the labor movement, a key Democrat constituency, and Kerry has characteristically moved on. In a recent interview with BusinessWeek, Kerry was asked about Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan’s worries about the protectionist rhetoric being voiced in the election year. Kerry answered: “The consensus [for free trade] has been fraying. The backlash is not only coming from American workers but from companies, too. Look at Boeing. It has been fleeced by Airbus’ subsidy structure, and we didn’t do anything about it. “Or look at intellectual-property laws. We have companies getting clobbered by China’s [piracy]. You need to keep the consensus for trade alive. But you keep it alive by making sure everybody is being helped by it, and that’s not what’s happening.” When Craig Gilbert of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel asked whether -- given the loss of jobs of the last few years -- Kerry would again vote for NAFTA and permanent normal trade relations with China, Kerry uneasily began a discussion of the need for enforceable environmental and labor standards in all future trade agreements. When Gilbert pressed if the senator regretted his votes, Kerry answered, “I regret the way that they haven’t been enforced, sure.” Nowadays, Kerry, who has voted for every free trade deal that has come down the pike, calls for a softer “fair trade” rather than “free trade.” On the candidate’s Web site: “John Kerry will also order an immediate 120-day review of all existing trade agreements to ensure that our trade partners are living up to their labor and environment obligations.” The bottom line for Kerry is that an anti-trade message might be a winner in November. A recent University of Maryland poll, for example, purported to show that support for free trade has fallen sharply among Americans making over $100,000 per year. What's on the Record? But Kerry on the record indicates no such history of the senator from Massachusetts qualifying his staunch stand on free trade:
Under the agreement, Canada and especially Mexico have a longer time to change their tariffs and restrictions than the U.S. does. Mandatory restriction for the purchase of only American-made goods by certain U.S. Government agencies is abolished in order to provide an atmosphere of competition from both Mexico and Canada in this market. The agreement contains some 900 pages of one-size-fits-all rules to which each nation was required to conform all of its domestic laws, regardless of whether voters and their democratically-elected representatives had previously rejected the very same policies in Congress, state legislatures or city councils.
Conclude a new round of trade liberalization under the auspices of the World Trade Organization; open the WTO, the World Bank, and International Monetary Fund to wider participation and scrutiny; strengthen the International Labor Organization’s power to enforce core labor rights, including the right of free association; and launch a new series of multinational treaties to protect the world environment.
Kerry’s softening on free trade has led President Bush to refer to his opponent as “isolationist.” Veto in the Works Kerry, however, is standing fast in his new role as overseer of unrestrained free trade: “I would not support the Free Trade of the Americas Act or the Central American Free Trade Act until they have stronger standards in them. If they sent them to my desk, I’d veto them.” Meanwhile as we pass the tenth anniversary of NAFTA, the debate remains fierce as to whether it has or can live up to its promise to create hundreds of thousands of new high-wage U.S. jobs, raise living standards in the U.S., Mexico and Canada, improve environmental conditions, and transform Mexico from a poor developing country into a lucrative market for U.S. exports. Opponents still maintain that NAFTA has launched a race-to-the-bottom in wages, destroyed hundreds of thousands of good U.S. jobs, undermined democratic control of domestic policy-making, and threatened health, environmental and food safety standards. Keen on ensuring under the various agreements good labor conditions for foreign workers and environmental protection, Kerry always seems to sidestep any meaningful discussion as to the issue of American jobs as affected by the agreement. For example, when asked recently about the flow of U.S. jobs offshore, he answered with the non-response: “We can negotiate a raising of the standards of labor and environment. The U.S. could be the marketer of sustainable development practices, and still open markets for us.” In all fairness, the Bush administration is also treading through the potential minefields of free trade. Bush’ hopes his free-trade message will play well with some voters in California -- an agricultural state with some of the nation's busiest ports. But voters in Midwestern states have lost a slew of industrial jobs in recent years, and Bush has taken criticism from Kerry and other Democrats over the outsourcing of U.S. jobs to China, India and other countries. Unlike Kerry, however, Bush has stayed on message -- extolling the benefits of free trade to consumers and businesses: "We must fight off economic isolationism for the sake of American consumers, American entrepreneurs, and American workers," Bush recently said in a visit to Rain for Rent, a company that leases irrigation equipment to the farm sector.
Editor's note:
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