Obama Champions Free Trade, Hillary Clinton champions protecting American jobs

Financial Times (London, England)

March 4, 2008 Tuesday
London Edition 1

Obama's free-trade credentials beat Clinton's

BYLINE: By JAGDISH BHAGWATI

W hile Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are locked in combat for the Democrats' presidential nomination, commentary on the front-running Mr Obama's policy agenda, especially on trade, has become faintly ludicrous.

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Mr Obama has specifics and they differ in important respects from those offered by Mrs Clinton.

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The only question is: of the two, which is likely to be friendlier as president to the cause of multilateral free trade? Careful scrutiny suggests that the odds are in favour of Mr Obama.

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The Democrats have also had to face the problem that the antiwar groups that have helped lift the party's fortunes also overlap often with anti-globalisation and hence anti-trade groups.

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Besides, with the protectionist influence of John Edwards a factor, Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton were pushed into denigration of freer trade.

Yet at least five reasons make Mr Obama a less disturbing prospect.

First, Mrs Clinton, in an infamous interview with the FT, responded to a question on support for the Doha round with the need for a pause, whereas Mr Obama has not done so. Second, whereas Mr Obama's economist is Austan Goolsbee, a brilliant Massachusetts Institute of Technology PhD at Chicago Business School and a valuable source of free-trade advice over almost a decade, Mrs Clinton's campaign boasts no professional economist of high repute. Instead, her trade advisers are reputed to be largely from the prounion, anti-globalisation Economic Policy Institute and the AFL-CIO union federation.

Third, Mr Obama's main union support comes from the Service Employees International Union and the Teamsters, neither of which is protectionist: the SEIU's membership is in the non-traded sector and, except on the issue of Mexican trucks coming into the US, Teamsters do well as trade expands.

By contrast, Mrs Clinton's support comes heavily from the AFL-CIO, which holds strong anti-trade views. This matters because the IOUs you sign during campaigns provide a straitjacket that can restrict your policy options.

Fourth, while Mr Obama's anti-Nafta rhetoric is disturbingly protectionist, as is Mrs Clinton's, remember that this is also strategic."

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The writer is university professor, economics and

Maybe she could've used her extreme influence as first lady to convince Bill not to sign NAFTA.

NAFTA destroyed American manufacturing. Period.

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I remember her debate answer. Something about Al Gore.

Give me a break.

That worked so well for Giuliani.

Jagdish Bhagwati (1934-) is a prominent economist noted for his defence of free trade against the critics of globalisation. He is Arthur Lehman Professor of Economics, and professor of political science at Columbia University.

In 2000, he was signatory to American Enterprise Institute (AEI)-coordinated amicus briefing with Supreme Court to contend that the Environmental Protection Agency should, contrary to a prior ruling, be allowed to take into account the costs of regulations when setting environmental standards.

Anti-anti-Sweatshops.................( Notice the Orwellian term?)

In July 2000, Bhagwati together with some other "free trader" economists (Alan Deardorff, Robert Stern, T.N. Srinivasan, Robert E. Baldwin, and Arvind Panagariya) set up Academic Consortium on International Trade or ACIT, to counter criticism of "sweatshops" on US campuses. The group doesn't present itself as "pro-sweatshop", but rather as "free trade" and "anti-anti-sweatshop".

Remarkable aspect of most of these economists is that they haven't read the key books and articles by globalization critics like Naomi Klein. They also narrow the terms of the debate as positing it as one between "free trade" vs. "anti-free-trade", while these are not the issues raised by the sweatshop critics. ACIT is a clear "free trade" lobby group, and they have not been constituted to have a dialog or debate with the critics of sweatshops or globalization.


http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jagdish_Bhagwati

;(

Look at where playing politics with trade has gotten us in the past 50 years. How many actual and potential trading partners have had their economies ruined and their governments laid to waste as a result of uneducated political gamesmanship on this issue (look at Haiti, if you need an example).

I have watched the manufacturing base and the standard of living of the US slide for 30 years, not accounting for cheap flat screen TVs and so forth, of course. Ridiculous mistakes in trade reverberate across the globe and through generations. Will both of these candidates get it wrong? Probably. As will McCain.

I have some hope that Obama will be less prone to back-room deals enriching the cronies, contributors and hangers-on that "experience" tends to supply.