OBnomix or the Economic Impact of Obama/Biden
Posted in Public Affairs, Money Matters, wordpress, Politics, campaign, election, Biden, Democrats, liberal, disclosure, ethics, obama, Foreign Affairs, Business, WTO, Canada, Mexico on September 25th, 2008 by Stanford Matthews 
Barack Obama’s stated policy on trade offers a classic piece of campaign rhetoric in its first bullet point. It is a common practice used by all campaigners to avoid the obvious problem of guaranteeing accomplishment of any proposed plan offered in exchange for your vote. Obama will fight for fair trade. Obama and Biden will fight for fair trade. They claim they will fight for fair trade policy but this of course promises little. It also is rather vague on what that means. They also claim the CAFTA does not live up to labor and environmental standards but no where detail how the agreement fails or what exactly the standards they support are.
The same follows in their second bullet point on NAFTA. If it was oversold to the American people was that not a job done by Democratic President William Jefferson Clinton? And if it is not an acceptable agreement for American workers and Senators Obama and Biden claim they will make it so, where are the details of what is wrong with it and what they will fix? They will work with leaders of Canada and Mexico to make it work? How do they know that whatever they will propose will be accepted by Canada and Mexico? As with the first bullet point, the second offers no answers, specifics or any sort of detail. Only a vague proposal to do something or fix something without explaining what is wrong..
In the final proposal of bullet point two, Obama and Biden at least use another word in place of ‘fight’. They will ‘pressure’ the WTO to right the wrongs on trade agreement enforcement and barriers to US exports. Obama and Biden pressure will cause the WTO and signatory countries to ‘cave’ to the American will. How’s that working for us so far? You can rest assured that if Obama and Biden were given the opportunity to be President and VP they would state they pressured the WTO and fought for fair trade after a miserable failure at both. Thus honoring their campaign pledge to ‘fight’ and ‘pressure.’ But no solution to their proposal would be forthcoming nor would we really know what it was, specifically.
The third bullet point is quite easy to believe coming from the most liberal Senator in Washington and his most experienced liberal colleague. For a man who claims
he will punish companies who move jobs overseas he is willing to up the ante to the American taxpayer to fund additional programs for ‘displaced’ workers when his ‘American jobs’ policy fails miserably. Right afterwards in bullet point four Obama/Biden think you have fallen asleep and did not notice this is where they say they will punish those who move jobs overseas. If that would really work they would have little reason for the additional displaced worker funding.
The last bullet point in this series is more of the same. Claim you will reward employers for doing what many of them already do. While it is true that many pension and other benefit arrangements at American companies are on the decline or taken over by government guarantees, many companies offer matching funds to 401k plans and a typical insurance coverage based on what is available today. Whatever Obama and Biden would offer would still not likely help the small business owner who is the life blood of the American worker. The large corporations like GM have been met with hard times most likely do to their bets placed on market decisions but have taken an additional toll by caving to organized labor over many years for unreasonable costs for employee compensation and benefits. It was easier to cave than fight the expensive fight and we are now all paying for it. Obama/Biden want to increase the cost to the taxpayer by funding failures of the past and continue them into the future.
On the one hand the American workforce has seen real wages degrade over time. On the other hand emerging nations like China have placed enormous pressure on business to seek cheaper labor abroad. Making villains out of business and creating victims out of workers may be standard procedure for the Democratic party but it provides little in the way of solutions. Perhaps Obama and Biden should focus a little more on what governments do and how they influence the lives of their citizens with the politics, legislation and policies they so casually initiate while sparring with the political opposition. The rest of us have to deal with the results.
The only promise made here beyond ‘fight’ or ‘pressure’ is ‘extending’ a worker assistance program which is Washington-speak for spending more taxpayer dollars. Something that is not hard to believe from the Dems. While they complain about outrageous spending from the GOP in recent years they have no plans to stop it if they are elected. The small omission by both parties when pledging anything in a campaign is that most of it, especially money, requires agreement with Congress to be accomplished. That is not always a deal breaker but the point is there are limitations on what the President and VP can do without the legislative branch although those limits have been tested during the current Administration as well as in others before this one.
Stanford Matthews
MoreWhat.com
from the Obama campaign website:
President Bush is calling on Congress to approve four new international free trade accords he says will strengthen the U.S. economy and create jobs.
The last campaign strategy by John Edwards focused on trade agreements. He has many claims on how he would manage trade agreements. The main thrust seems to fit in with his chosen set of victims. He would oppose any trade agreement that did not meet his opinion on what favors the American worker, American families and possibly the environment.
Based on President Bill Clinton’s position favoring and working to pass NAFTA as well as a large Democratic majority declining to oppose it along party line and a GOP membership largely in favor of it, if you opposed NAFTA in the past and still oppose it now, neither party will be much help.
For the GOP members to largely vote in favor of NAFTA while many conservative voices opposed it may indicate satisfying corporate lobbyists as the reason for supporting it. For Democrats the reason may be the same but to curry favor by voting with the President is another possible reason. Some members on either side of the vote are still members of Congress.
The story featured in this post is an honest assessment by a successful individual and another reference to the flip-flop charge. Mitt Romney explains his current appraisal of agriculture against earlier considerations on flawed government. It relates to an earlier post here on the WTO and UN and their campaigns against the G4 protecting their agricultural interests against price undercutting by third world entrants to global trade. This earlier post agrees with Mitt Romney’s appraisal. There is agreement here with his earlier appraisal in that flawed government policies maintained by various departments in government damaged US agriculture.
