The Great Lakes Zephyr - Wind Energy & Hydrogen Journal

Kucinich to Challenge Other Candidates on Trade Policy
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 29, 2004

Jonathan Tasini recently wrote in TomPaine.com:

"Here's a prediction--if the Democrats nominate someone who does not specifically reject so-called free trade, George Bush will be re-elected. Rejecting 'free trade' is a winner because it speaks to the millions of people who see NAFTA and its ilk as a rampaging manifestation of abusive corporate power."

At the January 22, 2004, debate in New Hampshire, Dennis Kucinich won strong applause for his commitment to cancel NAFTA and the WTO, and again for his challenge to all of the other candidates to join him in that position, and to replace NAFTA and the WTO with fair bilateral trade agreements. None of the other candidates accepted the challenge, although Dr. Howard Dean said that South Carolina had lost jobs as a result of NAFTA and the WTO "just as Dennis described."

Dean was and is a supporter of NAFTA. Here's what he said on the topic at the Sep. 4, 2003, debate in New Mexico: "Now, I do not agree with Dennis that we ought to get rid of NAFTA and the WTO. But we do need to understand what makes the European Union work. You can't get into the European Union unless you have exactly the same labor and environmental and human rights standards that you do in all those countries. We ought not to be in the business of having free and open borders with countries that don't have the same environmental, labor and human rights standards. And if you do that, we're going to be able to create manufacturing jobs in America again and they'll stay in America."

Sen. John Kerry voted for NAFTA, voted to extend free trade to the Andean nations, voted to grant China permanent normal trade relations, and voted to renew fast track presidential trade authority. He said at that same New Mexico debate: "No, I think Dennis--I admire what he is saying and I am as strongly committed as he is to those worker rights and to the efforts to raise the level, but it would be disastrous to just cancel it. You have to fix it. You have to have a president who understands how to use the power that we have as the world's biggest marketplace to properly leverage the kind of behavior that we want."

Sen. John Edwards had this to say on the same occasion: "I would also make sure in our trade agreements for some of the same reasons that Dennis just talked about, that we had real environmental protections, real labor protections, prohibitions against child labor and forced labor, so that we give our workers a better chance to compete."

Here is what Dennis Kucinich had said to prompt these remarks from the other candidates: "The following steps need to be taken in order to begin to help the American economy recover. First of all, when you consider that we've lost 2.7 million manufacturing jobs since July of 2000, it's shocking but the United States does not have a manufacturing policy, an economic policy which states that the maintenance of steel, automotive, aerospace and shipping is vital to our national economy and our national security. We will have a policy when I'm president.

"Secondly, we have to do everything we can to secure our manufacturing base, and that means giving a critical examination to those trade agreements that have caused a loss of hundreds of thousands, in some cases millions of jobs, in this economy. As president of the United States, my first act in office, therefore, will be to cancel NAFTA and the WTO and to return to bilateral trade, conditioned on workers' rights, human rights and the environment.

"On Labor Day, I announced a new initiative, a new initiative which will enable the United States to rebuild its cities in the same way that Franklin Roosevelt rebuilt America during the Depression, called a new WPA-type program, rebuild our cities, our streets, our water systems, our sewer systems, new energy systems. It's time to rebuild America. We have the resources to do it, we have to have the will to do it."

Kucinich maintains that fixing NAFTA would be a virtually impossible process and that the only position that amounts to more than rhetoric on protecting jobs and wages is his proposal to cancel NAFTA and replace it with fair trade agreements.

Kucinich, a fourth-term Congressman from Ohio, is a former union member and has received a 98 percent lifetime voting record from the AFL-CIO for voting on behalf of working families.

"When NAFTA was signed in 1994," Kucinich said this week, "it was hailed by the national media and by CEOs for ensuring American 'global competitiveness.' Since then, America's trade deficit has exploded to $418 billion, and NAFTA has cost America 525,000 jobs, most of them in manufacturing. South Carolina has lost 60,000 jobs since NAFTA was signed, and the pace of the layoffs and plant closings has been increasing. Just this past November, South Carolina lost 4,400 jobs, 3,000 of them in rural areas, most of them in manufacturing. South Carolina has lost 6.6 percent of its manufacturing jobs in the last year. Even if the pace doesn't increase, all manufacturing jobs in South Carolina will have been replaced with Wal-Mart jobs and unemployment in about the next 15 years."

Kucinich said that while "corporate chieftains have rhapsodized 'free trade' and moved jobs overseas, a disturbing pattern has emerged for millions of working Americans. Jobs with security and living wages are giving way to part-time work for the minimum wage at giant retailers. Once-vibrant communities are being robbed of wage earners and turned to economic ghost towns. This type of trade is neither free nor fair. American workers are forced to compete with workers in countries with little or no labor or environmental standards."

Kucinich promised to change things, saying "I will make my first act in office beginning the process of repealing NAFTA, withdrawing from the WTO, and replacing them with fair bilateral trade agreements that protect jobs, workers' rights, human rights, and the environment. I will make the United States an upward force on labor standards and stop encouraging a race to the bottom. Other candidates talk about fixing NAFTA, but doing so would be virtually impossible. We can talk about workers' rights or we can act to protect them, and that can only be done by repealing NAFTA."

For more information: http://www.kucinich.us