Rough Trade Debate

The day after General Motors confirmed the crisis in American manufacturing by offering early retirement packages to nearly all its remaining US workers, Barack Obama toured one of the Midwest's largest GM plants. The senator from Illinois stood before the assembled United Auto Workers in Janesville, Wisconsin, and presented himself as something radically new: a likely Democratic presidential nominee who understands the role that flawed trade policies have played in the rapid loss of industrial jobs and who wants to make things right.

Unlike Bill Clinton, Al Gore and John Kerry, who in the past four presidential elections carried the banner of the party that is supposed to be on the side of American workers, Obama declared in Janesville that pacts like NAFTA and the permanent normalization of trade relations with China had failed.

"We are not standing on the brink of recession due to forces beyond our control.... It was a failure of leadership and imagination in Washington--the culmination of decades of decisions that were made or put off without regard to the realities of a global economy and the growing inequality it's produced," Obama explained. His speech reframed his approach to economic issues--which had tended to disappoint fair-trade activists, especially after he endorsed, along with Hillary Clinton, the recent Peru Free Trade Agreement. "It's a Washington where decades of trade deals like NAFTA and China have been signed with plenty of protections for corporations and their profits but none for our environment or our workers, who've seen factories shut their doors and millions of jobs disappear."

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