Imbroglio in the Democratic Caucus

I recently viewed President Barrack Obama’s discussion with the Democratic Caucus at the White House blog and I noticed some disorientating and perplexing political and interpersonal contradictions imbued in his responses, his actions, and his policies.

 Politics as usual? 

 He said as president he must deal with a lot of criticism—some of it probably unfair and that he just doesn’t listen to it—he doesn’t read the blogs, he doesn’t watch the news. And he asked his caucus not to either.  Now, I don’t want to take this out of context—he was certainly, I think, referring to the neo-con media, the conservatives, the Tea-baggers and the KKK, but at the same time he champions net-neutrality, transparent democracy, initiates You-tube forums and online discussions with the President—himself—and posts videos on his Whitehouse blog and mentions time and time again how we should all listen to each other, and he professes to listen to the people in an effort to open democracy and bring government back to the people, but then implies that there is nothing worthwhile in the blogosphere or in the independent media for that matter.  So is he listening or isn’t he?  

 There are plenty of his supporters in the blogosphere who in all fairness just want to dialogue on some issues with their President, and supporters who have honest reasonable criticism of some policies coming out of his administration, supporters who have doubts about some of the non-policies coming out of Washington, who question local governments, who praise local governments and want to share a good idea that they think the Federal Government should emulate.  There are many supporters who are desperate for all that ‘change’ mired in petty politics.  There is such a thing as constructive criticism.  And there are plenty of good positive ideas in the blogosphere that deserve consideration.  So when he makes a statement like that I think its fair to assume some people will it take out of context or try to put it into some other context.        

 And when Senator Arlen Specter asked about American jobs vanishing and re-appearing in China President Obama had a clipped dismissive response.  Specter spoke of the incredible imbalance in trade deficit between China and the US, about China’s violations of the WTO treaties—China offsetting trade with huge subsidies for essentially all their domestic and export industries, inconsistencies, labor rights.  He said:

We have lost 2.3 million jobs as a result of the trade imbalance with China between 2001 and 2007… We have China violating international law with subsidies and dumping — really, a form of international banditry.  They take our money and then they lend it back to us and own now a big part of the United States.

And then he asked a two part question:

  The first part of my question is, would you support more effective remedies to allow injured parties — unions which lose jobs, companies which lose profits — by endorsing a judicial remedy, if not in U.S. courts perhaps in an international court, and eliminate the aspect of having the ITC decisions overruled by the President — done four times in 2003 to 2005, at a cost of a tremendous number of jobs on the basis of the national interest.  And if we have an issue on the national interest, let the nation pay for it, as opposed to the steel industry or the United Steel Workers.

 And the second part of the question, related, is when China got into the World Trade Organization, a matter that 15 of us in this body opposed, there were bilateral treaties.  And China has not lived up to its obligations to have its markets open to us, but take our markets and take our jobs.  Would you support an effort to revise, perhaps even revoke, those — that bilateral treaty, which gives China such an unfair trade advantage?

 Obama addressed some of the realities—and I’m paraphrasing, ‘We need China’ he says, ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea to isolate ourselves from China.  China is an enormous market with a lot of consumers. We need to take advantage of that. The rest of the world will be selling goods to China and it would be a bad idea to get left behind.’

Arlen, I would not be in favor of revoking the trade relationships that we’ve established with China.  I have shown myself during the course of this year more than willing to enforce our trade agreements in a much more serious way.  And at times I’ve been criticized for it.  There was a case involving foreign tires that were being sent in here, and I said this was an example of where we’ve got to put our foot down and show that we’re serious about enforcement.  And it caused the usual fuss at the international level, but it was the right thing to do.

 Having said that, I also believe that our future is going to be tied up with our ability to sell products all around the world, and China is going to be one of our biggest markets, and Asia is going to be one of our biggest markets.  And for us to close ourselves off from that market would be a mistake.

 The point you’re making, Arlen, which is the right one, is it’s got to be reciprocal.  So if we have established agreements in which both sides are supposed to open up their markets, we do so and then the other side is imposing a whole set of non-tariff barriers in place, that’s a problem.  And it has to be squarely confronted.

 So the approach that we’re taking is to try to get much tougher about enforcement of existing rules, putting constant pressure on China and other countries to open up their markets in reciprocal ways. 

One of the challenges that we’ve got to address internationally is currency rates and how they match up to make sure that our goods are not artificially inflated in price and their goods are artificially deflated in price.  That puts us at a huge competitive disadvantage.

But what I don’t want to do is for us as a country, or as a party, to shy away from the prospects of international competition, because I think we’ve got the best workers on Earth, we’ve got the most innovative products on Earth, and if we are able to compete on an even playing field, nobody can beat us.  And by the way, that will create jobs here in the United States.

If we just increased our exports to Asia by a percentage point, by a fraction, it would mean hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of jobs here in the United States.  And it’s easily doable.

And that’s why we are going to be putting a much bigger emphasis on export promotion over the next several years.  And that includes, by the way, export promotion not just for large companies but also for medium-size and small companies…

 Trade imbalances have to be squarely confronted, he said, but he didn’t really answer the question.  China has an enormous briar patch of non-tariff trade barriers, including State funded corporations.  In fact, pretty much all of their major companies benefit from state sponsorship and even state-control like China Mobile or Baidu.  And Obama avoided speaking about the giant sucking sound –in the words of Ross Perot—the sound of American jobs going overseas.  And whilst he did address the trade disputes and his efforts to create many new jobs in the Recovery Act—with renewable energy and the upcoming high-speed rail—all of which I think are triumphal steps crucial to our progress, he did not address the reality that manufacturing jobs, IT jobs, and other white collar jobs are vanishing and that when corporations vacate to developing countries they go to reap the awards of cheap labor—a euphemism for slave labor, the complete absence of worker’s rights, and the absence of strong environmental regulation.  

 We should not only be concerned about jobs, competitiveness and American pre-eminence, but also about eco-justice.  While the Chinese government is investing significantly in solar, wind, and even some weatherization of new infrastructure, most buildings’ and homes in China are energy vacuums, and China continues to invest enormously in coal, building five new dirty coal plants a day, while it’s localalized industries blatantly contaminate water systems, soil, and air profusely and without any fear of consequences.  There are none.  At least not in a legal sense.  Rivers run inky black.  The sun is lost in syrupy yellow smog.  Once fertile lands, are scorched, paved over, and flooded with toxic tailings of industry at an ever-growing rate.  And concerned citizens are unjustly jailed, beaten, marginalized, harassed, and even killed by police and hired-thugs.  So most keep quiet and unconcerned.

 President Obama plans to address these issues case by case and that is the only way to do it in a democratic world.  Another kind of man might talk in absolutes.  We know what that leads to.  But I think Obama needs to say this—that free trade is slave trade and cheap labor is slavery—out loud and in public over and over again to make it a reality in the minds of government officials, in the minds of corporate shills and corporate overseers, and in the minds of the people.  He wants to work with China, not against it.  I agree with that, as long we work with China to end slavery, clean-up the environment, cap emissions, and stop supporting genocidal regimes around the world.  And we should set the example, or it’s all meaningless. 

 Slave labor?  We’ve all heard that rhetoric before.  But it’s less rhetorical than ‘cheap labor’.  The fact is, Chinese factory workers, while they can make more money than they can at tilling the land, the meager wages they earn are hardly enough to get by on, and there are no benefits.  In fact sometimes they don’t get paid.  They work 12-18 hour days, six or seven days a week, work in hazardous unsanitary environments and are often mistreated.  But the really sad thing is most of these factory workers never consider their situation; indifferent, ignorant or apathetic, they believe that their lives have improved and they are rising in socio-economic status—though this is mostly unarticulated.  I’m not saying anything most of you don’t know all ready, but we don’t hear elected officials saying it, and we haven’t heard Obama say it.  Free trade is a concept that grew out of the southern United States—out of the slave trade, the Civil War was partly fought over this issue.  The South wanted free trade and was vociferous about it, and the North needed to protect its nascent industry from highly developed European industries in order to compete and to grow.  The South wanted to import everything from abroad—they had no industry and relied on slave labor to produce the few agricultural commodities that fueled their economy.  Ironically, it is true of our past as well as the present and the rhetoric it conveniently covers up—the fact that free trade equals slave trade and cheap labor equals wage-slave and that our industries are abandoning local communities in all 50 states to legally but inhumanely exploit this slavery, and thereby exonerating it. 

 These corporations benefit very few people—it’s not honest to speak of them contributing so much to our economy and our livelihoods if they treat us as cheap and expendable, and if only a small number of boardmembers reap any of the riches gained from outsourcing and off-shoring.  The key issue here is its dishonest, unethical, and I would say resembles something very close to treason, except that it is doing irreparable harm not only to American economy and livelihoods, but also a great deal of injustice and maltreatment is committed on behalf of our fellow travelers in nations all over the world and to the biosphere.  The fact is –it’s not sustainable, whether we are talking about fairness, and equality, human rights, climate change, or pollution.  When we export jobs to China, we export not only our wealth but our morality and therefore our credibility. 

 Why do we accept the disparity between corporate executive wealth and the ever-increasing poverty of the workers and laborers who produce that wealth?  Shouldn’t we get a fair deal?  They constantly extol the virtues of exporting jobs to China for ‘cheap labor’—for cheap humans—and the benefits of that master-slave economic relationship, and expect us to accept it, without ever drawing the plain and simple fact that this is slavery.  And it is sanctioned not only by China, but every industrial nation in the world.  The truth is the owners of these companies would still make huge profits, and still be rich if they paid workers reasonable wages, and gave them free health-care and substantial pensions, even if they paid them considerable sums.  There are co-operative models of business that do exceedingly well, in which all the workers are equal owners.  The Mondragon system in Spain is a model example, and in Michael Moore’s new film Capitalism we are introduced to a cooperative company manufacturing highly-advanced microchips.  Cooperatives are democratic systems, whereas the traditional corporation’s are in fact feudal systems, and totalitarian.  Why do we insist on democracy in our daily public life, but not in our workplace?  It is not compatible with the democratic values we profess to support.  But let’s forget I even mentioned it.  Even if we accept the feudal system it remains a fact that American jobs are going and going fast, and that all the new green jobs we manufacture will not sustain us very long and will not replace the millions of jobs we are creating in China.   

 So the president won’t challenge Free trade directly? 

 Okay, while I agree that we need to trade with all countries to sustain a certain quality of life; we need much more Fair Trade and less of the Status Quo.  Trading products, goods, and services is one thing, but trading jobs is another.  Giving away jobs is something else completely.  All the rhetoric about capitalism lifting people up is meaningless if owners don’t support their workers with handsome wages and benefits or actively improve their quality of life.  Free Trade increases poverty.  In this system we are beasts of burden.

 Perhaps the President misspoke, or more probably, with all the imbroglio of politics and the enormous problems he is charged with it just slipped his mind and came out in a confused heap.  But I don’t think so.  He is smart, and chooses his words carefully.  I think it’s time he addresses this issue by asking corporations first—to start paying benefits and greater shares of the profit to employees, and secondly, demanding it.  If fewer taxes for small business encourage growth, maybe other incentives can be developed for big companies that increase employee benefits dramatically, and for staying home (I think he may be doing some of that now).  

 Now it must be said that I support many of the President’s initiatives.  I did not vote in the elections because I’m neither a Democratic or a Republican and when I asked for an absentee ballot, many times, because I’m in China, I didn’t get one, so my vote was abandoned.  However, I do support the President on many issues, and I believe—belief is an act of faith—and I feel that he is an honest man with integrity, forbearance, honor, commitment, and courage; I believe he’s probably done more for this country in one year or two if you count his campaign than any president in the second half of the twentieth century and more than many prior to America’s default-ascent to power (the world destroyed itself in WWII giving America the opportunity to dominate).  I say that because he has made an effort to open the House to scrutiny, and to talk, and to listen, and to funnel money in the right directions, such as inner city development, mass transit, education, small business, green reform, etc—things that no other administration made a real effort to do.  I’m not saying it’s enough.  It’s not.  But listening to this President I feel a sense of closeness.  I feel like the country is a lot smaller and democratic.  I see him fighting tooth and nail with Democrats in his own party and with obstructionists on the right.  I see him making compromises, which we all have to do in a democracy.  I see a man who has to deal with a corrupt and fascist system of government.  I see a man who has to maneuver through omnipresent, omnipotent corporations.  I see a man who in face of hillbilly racism and a constant barrage of slanderous drivel never slumps his shoulders in defeat or shame but holds his head up, walking tall.  I see a strong man.  I see a man who, if he had the choice, would choose to be President in a direct-democracy instead of this dilapidated and corrupt plutocracy, this threadbare State.  I see a man trying to repair a house without any hammer or nails.  The robber barons have been stealing for fifty years, and more so in the last thirty, and even more so in the last eight.  His tool box is empty.  And he needs us to lend him a hand.  And I see him gathering new tools and using them in innovative ways.  I feel better now about him than I’ve ever felt about any President or government in out history, in my history. 

 Under Bush/Cheney I felt atomized, criminalized, and afraid.  That was an administration, a regime that felt to me terribly powerful—backed by Saudi Arabia, special interests, Big Oil, corporate heritage, and wealth.  They were small minded hostile people with a big agenda.  Bush and Cheney snarled on TV and shut down democracy.  They were far away from me.  Wielding dark powers.  They treated us like peasants—their friends in the banks referred to us as ‘dead peasants’ because they take-out life insurance policies on workers—making human death, and human tragedy profitable.  To banks and big business you are worth more dead than alive.   These evils still exist.  But at least now, I feel like they are problems that exist in a democracy and not the total reality.  Obama talks with the people and to the people but not at them, not over them.  I criticize my President, I challenge him, but I still support him, and even more so than I did before.  He may even get my vote in 2012.  In fact, he probably will.  I wish he chose Dennis Kucinich, Nader or Edwards, or even Ron Paul to be his Vice, or his Secretary of State, or that he brought them into his cabinet, close to his ear.  He didn’t. 

 Business as usual?     

 Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.