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<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leo-hindery-jr/where-is-the-2008-barack_b_644173.html">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leo-hindery-jr/where-is-the-2008-barack_b_644173.html</a>
</p>
<h2><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leo-hindery-jr">Leo Hindery, Jr.</a></h2>
<p class="teaserpermalink">Chairman, U.S. Economy/Smart Globalization Initiative at
the New America
FoundationPosted: July 13, 2010 09:30 AM </p>
<p class="teaserpermalink"><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leo-hindery-jr/where-is-the-2008-barack_b_644173.html" title="Permalink">Where Is the 2008 Barack Obama Now on Jobs and Trade?</a> </p>
<p>Although John Edwards had no business running for President in 2008 given
the tawdry marital indiscretions that he was hiding from nearly everyone,
including from his senior campaign team, he nonetheless clearly established the
agenda on jobs (and labor) and trade for all of the Democratic candidates,
especially as it later turned out for then Senator Obama. </p>
<p>Following Edwards' second-place finish in Iowa his other top advisor and I (at the
time, I was serving as his Senior Economic Policy Advisor) compressed into a
single 'manifesto' all of his statements over the prior year on these issues.
For the short remainder of his campaign, he spoke continuously about keeping a
robust number of manufacturing jobs in America, on the order of 20% of
overall employment. He spoke of the need to forge a new partnership between organized
labor and government. He pledged to make passing the Employee Free Choice Act
(EFCA) a major and immediate priority and to passing a ban on hiring permanent
replacement workers for strikers.</p>
<p>Concerning trade and globalization, we espoused investing the resources
required for the U.S.
to keep its competitive edge in the world, and asserted that our global trade
needed to be based on four core principles:</p>
<p>1) First and foremost, America's
trade agreements must provide clear and measurable benefits for <em>American</em>
workers - and then they must be enforced. This means they must include
prohibitions against illegal subsidies, currency manipulation and other trade
abuses. It means they must protect U.S. national security-related
manufacturing essential to our high-tech weaponry and defense.<br>
<br>
2) America's trade policies
must also lift up workers around the world, which is a combined moral, global
economic and critical U.S.
national security imperative. This means that our agreements must also provide
strong protections for the global environment, and that we won't condone
agreements with countries which ignore good governance, where there is violence
against workers, or where workers are denied just wages and basic labor
standards. </p>
<p>3) In negotiating trade agreements "one size does not fit all",
and thus America's trade agreements must account for significant differences in
form of government, the rule of law, the relative maturity of economies, and
common trade and business practices. Emphasis should therefore be placed mostly
on fair and balanced bilateral and regional trade agreements, and not on
multilateral global agreements such as Doha.
</p>
<p>4) Restoring fair and balanced trade with China in all aspects must be a
particular priority. We will do business with China, but we will not be pushed
around or talked to death while they take our markets.</p>
<p><strong>Senator Barack Obama on Jobs and Trade</strong></p>
<p>Five months later, on July 2, 2008, Barack Obama embraced all of these
commitments in a zinger of a speech to the United Steel Workers that I had the
privilege to help write. This speech quickly became Senator Obama's own
manifesto.</p>
<p>After being introduced by Edwards, Senator Obama said:</p>
<p>"Change is a President who welcomes you into the White House; who's
walked with you on that picket line; who doesn't choke on the word 'union'; who
lets unions do what they do best and organize our workers; and who will finally
make EFCA the law of the land.</p>
<p>"Change is knowing that for trade to work for America, it has to work
for all Americans; that we have to stand up to countries that are manipulating
their currency or flooding our markets with subsidized goods; that it's wrong
to have a 'one-size fits all' trade policy that treats countries as different
as China and Mexico as if they were the same; that when workers are mistreated
in sweatshops and labor leaders are threatened or even murdered abroad, it not
only offends our conscience, it hurts our workers too; and that our job ends
not when a trade deal is signed, but when it's enforced.</p>
<p>"Change is ending tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas and
giving them to companies that create good paying jobs here in America; it's
putting people to work...making the materials we need to rebuild America;
it's...creating millions of new jobs - jobs that we want to be good union jobs
- and giving our workers the skills to do them." </p>
<p><strong>SO, WHAT THE HECK HAPPENED FROM JULY 2, 2008 TO JULY 7, 2010?</strong></p>
<p>With every good intention and with one of the most precise 'promise-full'
agendas in the history of American electoral politics, Barack Obama sailed his
new ship of state into the White House in January 2009. And then the "gang
who couldn't (or didn't want to) steer the ship straight" almost
immediately ran his jobs and trade promises aground. </p>
<p>His key economic advisors - Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Cristina Romer and
Rahm Emanuel - must have, in this order, told the new President something like
the following, for how else to explain the fact that over the succeeding
eighteen months the defining commitments he made during his campaign were
either abandoned or largely went for naught:</p>
<p>1) "Pass the economic stimulus package we've designed, Mr. President,
and the official unemployment rate won't get any higher than 8.5%. And because
every earlier administration since 1947 did so, we're also going to keep
ignoring the real unemployment figure even though for the first time since then
there are as many <em>uncounted</em> unemployed Americans (15 million) as there
are counted ones (15 million)."</p>
<p>2) "We know you emphatically promised workers that EFCA would be one of
the first things your new administration would tackle, but we're not going to
do so. It isn't as if the Republicans in Congress are going to take up this
mantle."</p>
<p>3) "Larry is giving a speech today [June 19, 2009] to the Foresight
Symposium which is going to largely define our job creation efforts on your
behalf during your first term. He plans to say that essentially a job is a job
and that America's loss of manufacturing exports and jobs can be made up with
exports of 'software, movies, medicine, university degrees, and management
consulting and law firm services', which of course defies reality and
contradicts every speech you gave during the Campaign in proud towns like
Dayton and Flint. </p>
<p>4) "Even though the issue of America having an industrial policy and
trade policies that mirror the mercantilist practices of our major trading
partners came up repeatedly during your campaign, we want you instead to
repeatedly say that the combination of green energy technologies, exported
services, and new free trade agreements or FTAs will sufficiently revitalize
the American economy."</p>
<p>5) "Despite your even more explicit promise about immediate and
complete reform of our trading with China,
we want you to effectively ignore China's massive illegal subsidies
and its abusive labor and environmental practices. Instead, let's wait 18
months, all the way until June 2010, and then get China to commit only to a meager 5%
or so annual revaluation of the yuan and to<em> nothing else</em>. Of course,
since the yuan is about 40% undervalued right now, it will take until 2018 for
even this commitment to get the yuan to where it should be <em>today</em>."</p>
<p>6) "We know you promised workers that you would immediately end the
massive 'tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas and give them to
companies that create good paying jobs here in America'. However, the
multinational corporation members of the Business Roundtable, Business Council
and U.S. Chamber of Commerce really hate this idea, so we've decided to heed
their objections instead." </p>
<p>7) "Even though you specifically said that 'one size <em>doesn't</em>
fit all' when it comes to FTAs and that the three Bush-era FTAs pending with
Korea, Panama and Columbia are the bad spawn of the much-discredited NAFTA
agreement, we're going to adopt them anyway, with very few changes." </p>
<p>***********</p>
<p>If Obama's "gang" didn't say and do these things, then how else to
explain the President's obviously well-intentioned but disheartening speech
last Wednesday announcing his Export Council. In this speech he again asserted
that doubling U.S.
gross exports within five years and making a few extremely undersized
investments "in upgrading our critical infrastructure from high-speed rail
to high-speed internet" are sufficiently addressing the massive 22-million
"jobs gap" we need to fill today in order for our workforce to be
fully employed in real terms. </p>
<p>Yet in the President's own words, doubling gross exports will create at most
2 million jobs over five years. And as the United States Business and Industry
Council (USBIC) has repeatedly identified, merely increasing U.S. gross exports
will accomplish no economic good per se. Growth and employment can only result
from increasing U.S. <em>net </em>exports, which the recent rise of America's
trade deficit shows is not happening. </p>
<p>In his speech, the President also obviously ignored his prior words when he
said that the "pending Korean Free Trade Agreement [is] an agreement that
will create new jobs and opportunity for people in both our countries",
while implying the same thing about the Panama and Colombia FTAs, all of
which is untrue. And after completely ignoring China's myriad trade abuses,
except for giving it the slightest slap on the hand for its 40% currency
manipulation which Secretary Geithner just declared to be a "significant
development", how could he then at the end of the speech laud China for
"reopen[ing] their market to American pork and pork products"? </p>
<p>Have any of you ever seen the ecological disasters called 'hog farms', which
we now get to robustly expand in our country while China, in its, gets to manufacture
high-value Apple iPads and export them to the U.S?</p>
<p>Only <em>net exports </em>on the one hand and very large-scale <em>imports
substitution </em>on the other matter, because only large-scale imports
substitution can create <em>millions</em> of new jobs. The only goal now must
be massive job creation of the sort that sustains economic prosperity, for
which an exports strategy is but a single tool. And with China alone responsible for 75% of America's trade deficit in manufactured goods,
the solution is absolutely not going to be found in our exporting more pork
rinds to Beijing.
</p>
<p>We're in the midst of a protracted jobless recovery, Mr. President, and
we're facing an unprecedented "jobs gap" and the high likelihood of a
what's called a "low growth/high unemployment trap". It's past time
for you to declare a full-scale jobs emergency and to demand that Congress get
on board. </p>
<p>And with respect, it's time for you to go back to the July 2008 version of
your Jobs & Trade Manifesto and abandon this half-hearted July 2010 version
which your advisors foisted on you. </p>
<p><em>Leo Hindery, Jr. is Chairman of the US
Economy/Smart Globalization Initiative at the New America Foundation and a member of
the Council on Foreign Relations. Currently an investor in media companies, he
is the former CEO of Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI), Liberty Media and their successor AT&T
Broadband. He also serves on the Board of the Huffington Post Investigative
Fund. </em></p>
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