I didn't watch the big speech last night. Along with about 400 odd other Minneapolitans I went to Carmen at the Jeune Lune Theater. I don't imagine too many votes were won or lost for Kerry by people missing out on the speech. Not a lot of swing votes at the opera I imagine ...
But listening to the speech on the radio today [and even more than Matthew Yglesias, I am not the intended audience] today I was struck by the disconnect between the rhetoric about bringing foreign countries into Iraq, and rebuilding our foreign alliances ...
We need a President who has the credibility to bring our allies to our side and share the burden .... that won't happen until we have a president who restores America's respect and leadership -- so we don't have to go it alone in the world.And we need to rebuild our alliances, so we can get the terrorists before they get us.
....
All well and good, but how does it connect to the ideas encapsulated in this section
What does it mean in America today when Dave McCune, a steel worker I met in Canton, Ohio, saw his job sent overseas and the equipment in his factory literally unbolted, crated up, and shipped thousands of miles away along with that job? What does it mean when workers I've met had to train their foreign replacements?Instead, we will reward companies that create and keep good paying jobs where they belong - in the good old U.S.A.
We value an America that exports products, not jobs - and we believe American workers should never have to subsidize the loss of their own job.
Next, we will trade and compete in the world. But our plan calls for a fair playing field - because if you give the American worker a fair playing field, there's nobody in the world the American worker can't compete against.
Perhaps all the hysteria about outsourcing is just campaign palava, but what if it's not? What happens when there's a conflict between international economic policy and "foreign policy" traditionally conceived?
Is Kerry expecting that the countries we're asking to send troops will be countries unaffected by "fair trade" proposals?
And what specific elements of international trade are "unfair"? That wages in some countries are lower than in America? That it will take other countries sometime before workers there are willing to trade higher wages for a lower chance of dying at work, or trade higher wages for a little more of a weekend.
And the notion that good paying jobs belong in the U.S.A, and nowhere else? Won't the prospect of a good job keep young men in Pakistan and Jordan and Iran, to say nothing of Iraq, from "hating America"? Wouldn't it be a better thing if there were good jobs in other countries, so those countries could afford to buy stuff America makes well (and cheaply!)?
To be sure, the benefits from free trade in improving the lot of people in developing countries come relatively slowly, but come they do. There's a real and important difference between countries that grow at 3% a year and countries that grow at 5% a year.
What if the "price" of getting more foreign troops to help in Iraq (say, from Brazil and India) was free trade in agriculture, and the abolition of agricultural subsidies?
Would Kerry, to say nothing of Bush, go for that deal, however implicitly it was put?
[I put "price" in quotes because actually this would be one of those times when the benefits all around would be huge, even if a concentrated and politically powerful U.S. voting bloc was temporarily disadvantaged?]
It's a mystery why the U.S. electorate is still so rhetorically protectionist, when the U.S. economy is still relatively closed, and few people's jobs are actually at risk of being outsourced. In other words, even if you focus just on the job losses free trade is something the U.S. can well afford.
Posted by robe0419 at July 30, 2004 3:21 PM