Punish the CAFTA 15

    Enough. Enough. Enough. If we ever want to make politicians take us seriously when it comes to important laws touching the lives of workers, we must punish the 15 so-called Democrats who voted for the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA)--and punish them hard.

    Not a single one of those cowardly 15 should receive a dime more of labor money. Not a single phone call should be made on their behalf. No labor endorsment should grace their re-election literature. They must pay.

    Not just on behalf of American workers. But, on behalf of the millions of workers who live in Central America for whom this is a bad deal, too. If we're going to talk about global solidarity, this is where we can practice it. If we're going to send letters to the Democratic Party and talk tough, we have to follow through.

    So, here is the roll-call of the 15 so-called Democrats, with their office telephone numbers. Print this list out and send it to everybody on your lists:

Melissa Bean, Illinois (8th District): 202-225-3711

Jim Cooper, Tennessee (5th District): 202-225-4311

Norm Dicks, Washington (6th District): 202-225-5916

Henry Cuellar, Texas (28th District): 202-225-1640

Ruben Hinojosa, Texas (15th District): (202) 225-2531

William Jefferson, Louisiana (2nd District): (202) 225-6636

Jim Matheson, Utah (2nd District): (202) 225-3011

Gregory Meeks, New York (6th District): 202-225-3461

Dennis Moore, Kansas (3rd District): (202) 225-2865

Jim Moran, Virginia (8th District): (202) 225-4376

Solomon Ortiz, Texas (27th District): 202-225-7742

Ike Skelton, Missouri (4th District): 202-225-2876

Vic Snyder, Arkansas (2nd District): 202-225-2506

John Tanner, Tennessee (8th District): (202) 225-4714

Edolphus Towns, New York (10th District: (202) 225-5936

    So, here's how to make it real:

1. Today, on the last day of the AFL-CIO convention, delegates should demand that a new resolution pass which states simply (with all the obvious "whereas" stuff): Resolved, no labor resources, financial or human, shall be expended on behalf of the 15 Democrats who voted for CAFTA.

2. Every CLC and State Federation should, at their very next meeting, pass a similar resolution, send the text to the pathetic so-called Democrat and take out an ad in the local newspaper which includes the text of the resolution and the reasoning behind it.

3. Look for people who stand up for workers. Let's find primary opponents to run against every one of the 15 so-called Democrats--knock off just one or two and watch the party tremble...you want to play in politics, it's time to get rough and bloody some noses.

Comments

[ian kenny]

As to the politics -- why don't regular readers of this blog focus their energies on the real threats to American jobs and prosperity: Bush Administration policies that are specifically meant to decimate the social safety net. Instead of “punishing” Democrats, remember who the real opponent is. We can’t afford to lose one Democratic seat in Congress, when we need to GAIN 20 to retake the majority. And don’t say, it doesn’t matter – they’re no better than a Republican. That’s just plain ridiculous and uninformed. It matters who votes for Speaker and to chair Committees, just like it matters to WIN elections and not self immolate.

[Nukeglow]

It should be no surprise that the oil rich family of Bush would use our tax money to buy and bribe votes to push through another nail in the coffin of the American worker.
Billions paid for a war that can not be won and more American
jobs lost while big business wins.

[Brian]

Shouldn't we also consider praising those 27 republicans who voted against this bill. Part of labor's problems are being so tied to the Dems, that when they stray, we have nowhere else to turn and we get screwed.

[Kate Bronfenbrenner]

These same non-partisan sources believed that NAFTA and other trade agreements would not cause job losses and yet there is extensive scholarly work that shows exactly the opposite occurred. For now the best source to refer you to that uses NAFTA data to show the predicted job loss from CAFTA is the Economic Policy Institute's "Report on Nafta's Cautionary Tale" http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/ib214

[Billy]

CAFTA is Bush's baby, if anyone needs to be punished its BUSH. someone above mentioned Bush has done nothing for our country. he hit the nail on the head, he is screwing the US working man everyway he can, from the price of gas to bankrupsy, will the american worker ever get some relief from this president? his policys arent helping us. he forgives everyone elses debt, he is making so much money for his oil buddys they have no idea what to do with it all, not to mention how much cash his buddys in saudi araibia have made. they support terrorism and as far as i can tell, terror originated from his infidel hating friends in the middle east. Bush's war on terror, seemed to show his good intentions, it seems more like a personal grudge agianst Sadam than an actual plan for peace or war. he ignores the border problem, as a matter of fact he seems to be pushing for a north american continent, merging the US Canada and Mexico, what does Mexico have that we want? more goverment corruption?

[george]

Free trade (CAFTA, etc) derives from the theories of David Ricardo, a jewish economic theoretician, like marx, who died around 1823 and was a contemporary of Smith. Ricardo's theories is very shallow and is based on his concept of '
special advantage.
Free trade pits workers of the us against third-world workers who work for a lot less and have a far inferior standard of living. Free trade raises profits since it lowers wages which are a cost of production. simply put, free trade lowers wages and workers' standard of living, particularly the US standard, and raises profits.
Free trade is capitalist class beneficial and very selfish and harms workers.
If the government can't protect workers and serves only capitalists, workers don't need this government. it's time.

[realdeal]

Someone just told me about this site, and I thought I would check it out. Shaun Richman is right: it shows incredible tunnelvision to focus on DR-CAFTA when many of the people you want to "punish" fight for labor (and America) on a range of issues that are essential to the individual and collective economic welfare. Certainly you have the right to pick one issue and draw a line in the sand, but given what is at stake across the board -- defeating Bush comes to mind (and here Kate and Rob have it exactly right) -- and rather than complaining because people saw DR-CAFTA differently, and felt it was important to do something for DR-CAFTA (and felt after much hard thought that this was the way to do it), get to work so you can get the R's out of office.

Texas is wrong. There are significant transition mechanisms in DR-CAFTA. Additional side agreements provided larger sums than ever before in a trade agreement -- hundreds of millions of dollars in fact -- to be directed toward labor rights enforcement and capacity building. For the first time ever the ILO will be inserted on the ground in these countries to monitor labor rights and provide public reports in Spanish and English. This is drawn directly from the Cambodian textile agreement, and is considered cutting edge by organized labor and thinktanks working on labor issues. As such, it will be a floor for future trade agreements. Someone should check this out.

No one is talking about trade adjustment assistance for US workers. Why aren't all you folks calling your reps and telling them that for the US to remain competititve, and for US labor to have jobs, it needs a trained workforce. Why aren't you pressing your members to pass legislation to do that?

Billy, its called "comparative advantage", and I am not sure what his being Jewish has to do with anything. It could be it has some special meaning for you.

And I am curious. What exactly does everyone suggest the DR-CAFTA countries would have done for themselves without the agreement. What economic development strategy were they supposed to pursue?

[teacher's pet]

we're talking mostly about CAFTA here and well we should, but some have made comments about Dems on Social Security being important to working families. That's correct of course, but it ain't a big lift and, more important, iT is hardly enough. let's return to the bankruptcy bill mentioned above, ok? the bill passed time and time again with overwhelming support by both House and Senate Ds. In fact, 2 of the proponents early on were Jim Moran and Steny Hoyer. when the bills first surfaced about 8 years ago, the Ds should have drawn a line in the sand and said "over our dead bodies". they didn't, of course--even with a D president who ultimately vetoed the bill. why is this important? because the financial services industry is doing a tap dance on the middle/working class; THE "COME-DUE" NOTICE WON'T BE PRETTY. and they still do it via 40-year no-interest mortgages etc. and many Ds either
don't get it or don't want to because the party gets so much money from that industry.

[john.halle]

The CAFTA 15 should be seen as presenting an opportunity 1) to show that labor means business when it threatens to retaliate against those capitulate to the corporate agenda on key issues 2) to build the foundation of a third party alternative to a Democratic Party for whom these capitulations are the rule rather than the exception (as we saw with NAFTA and GATT).

So what is needed is not a primary challenge, but a third party challenge, particularly against those whose seats are most vulnerable.

Where is the Labor Party now that we need it?

[James]

The U.S. has endured 30 years of ever increasing trade defecits and deindustrialization. We are gradually becoming a third world country as we export our capital as well as our manufacturing ability to asia. CAFTA is just another bad trade deal along the lines of NAFTA which our elites impose on us. How can our standard of living survive if we export over 700 billion a year of capital to our mercantalist unfair trading partners? The arsenal of democracy which saved us in WW II is being dismantled and shipped to China. Free trade has created a potential monster and competitor in China. Whatever we save on cheap goods from China is given back in higher oil prices because China now demands so much more oil.
America has and is being betrayed by corrupt elites who do not care about preserving our standard of living. These elites are willing to sacrifice our long term stability for short term economic efficiency. What will happen to Ameerica for exqample if we lose our auto industry? The only thing America seems able to make nowadays is deficits. We are in serious danger of becoming a colony of our trading partners, particulary those in asia if the staus quo persists. One more negative regarding CAFTA that no one has mentioned; it is possible we signed away our soveriegnty in the CAFTA agreement as we may now be forced to change some of our domestic laws to meet international regulations. In other words Bush and company are turning over our government over to international bueracrats.

[Charles Barley]

There seems to be two strains of thought here. First position is to unilaterally reject CAFTA and other free trade agreements as anti-worker. The other camp is somewhat pro-free trade, while assailing CAFTA for being void of labor and other human rights standards.

In some regards, the question of "free trade" is not an "accept or reject" the concept, since it's neither free nor really defined (i.e. what forms can "free trade" take?). I post to you for comment- Should the labor movement's campaign on CAFTA and other free trade agreements be "anti-free trade" or a "campaign for labor and other human rights standards in trade agreements"?

And, on a final note, I'm happy to hear about the Firefighters involvement in these fights, but, come on, it's not like we didn't see CAFTA coming!

[realdeal]

Charles, you are being far too thoughtful on your questions. Everyone has a stick and is looking for someone to punish. No time to think about questions that get to the heart of the matter. Like if it is a campaign for labor and other human rights in trade agreements (and I think it is), how do you best achieve that? Not only in our domestic politics, but with our trading partners?

[commenter]

My House Member is a Republican that gets less than a 20% rating from the AFL-CIO.

Yet Labor gave him $65,500 for the 2004 race.

He voted for CAFTA & NAFTA & most favored for China.

Oh yea, he co-sponsored the removal of overtime.

[D Flinchum]

I find it fascinating that so many can understand that exporting good jobs to cheap labor countries as in CAFTA is an anti-worker race-to-the-bottom elite winner-take-all game but these same folks can't seem to understand that importing cheap labor into the US to fill jobs here as in McCain-Kennedy is the same game. US - and foreign - workers are being sold out either way. Wise up.

[realdeal]

what is the solution D Flinchum? Quit whining and come up with a bullet point strategy for the US to follow.

[Charles Barley]

Good point, realdeal. I've been to most of the anti-globalization protests, pre 9-11, and found the same tension. Half the activists at FTAA were there to reject the agreement, and the other half were there to fight to include their progressive cause considered in the trade pact. We all got a good whif of tear gas.

My point with raising this issue is that I agree with you- solutions and plans are great. I hate reactionary whinning. However, it's this tension over goals which divides us- we bash "free trade" or we focus our efforts politically at getting a seat at the table to redirect the debate. What the solution is, I don't know. But I can tell you that a good starting point would be a year-round political campaign focused on not necessarily delivering political votes en masse (Bloc Labor), but educating our Union workers to vote with authority and knowledge, which will carry over to their churches, community centers, allied civic groups. We can tell our Union brothers and sisters to vote against the CAFTA 15, but it means little unless they know why.

[Marcus]

My idea is a bumper sticker that says "Democrats Sell Out."

BTW the alternative, the solution on globalization, and much more, is participatory economics (see www.parecon.org or Michael Albert's book, Parecon: Life After Capitalism).

[GeneP.]

I wasn't in the least bit surprised. Here's how the game is played -- the reps and senators all go through their usual bullshit before a vote and the last minute the corporations single out those they know can be bribed, which is all of them, and make the necessary payments. Mark my word, if the corporations want something badly enough, they'll used their power and get it every time. The best thing that can happen is that all those bastards in Washington drop dead!

[Michael Wilson]

This is simply a repeat of the first trade agreement sell-out by Dems. Who made 50 years of Bretton-Woods efforts a reality? President Clinton and his Democtatic allies, it's called NAFTA. They all should have been cut off then.

[D Flinchum]

First of all, I'm not "whining" anymore than the other posters here are whining. If I'm whining, then this whole blog is a whine. As someone - maybe even here - recently said, the "first rule of holes" is, once you realize that you are in a hole, stop digging so not passing this bill in and of itself is a start. But since you asked.....

Labor, like consumer products, responds to the market: An abundant supply depresses price, or in this case, wages. It is no accident that the period when the middle class - and the US labor movement - experienced the greatest level of economic progress occurred between 1947 and 1973 while immigration to the US was still relatively low by current standards. Nor is it any surprise that the middle class has experienced economic decline in more recent years after decades of heavy immigration. The economic decline would have been even worse except for the rise of the two-income family as more women entered the work force.

Two critical steps that the US can take are first to actually enforce the laws regarding employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants and to force those employers who bring in legal immigrants to make sincere efforts to hire American workers first - at decent wages. (With the housing boom, why is there ANY unemployment in the building trades?) It is these folks - as JT would say the "true enemies" - who are getting the benefits as they hire cheap labor and then pass the true costs, including health care benefits and depressed wages onto the community at large. Massive importion of cheap labor whose true cost is paid by other workers and the community at large is nothing more than a subsidy to businesses similar to tax exemptions. Ignoring the enforcement of laws against employers of illegal immigrants started under Clinton and escalated under Bush - it's bipartisan. Second we should make border security a real program instead of talking security and then not appropriating the money to make it happen. We may not be able to stop companies from outsourcing but we can and should control whom we allow into the US, for security reasons as well as employment fairness.

McCain-Kennedy is anti-worker in extreme:

The employer must post the job on a Job Bank for 30 days not at prevaling wages before filling it with a guest worker, whom he can recruit abroad almost anywhere in the world at ridiculously low wages - wages so low that they can't survive in the US under decent living standards. Think, for example, 20-30 people crammed into one house with 2 bathrooms or 10-12 people in a 2 bedroom apartment.

Curent illegal workers will be required to pay back taxes before being made "legal" but employers will be exempt from same. How about that for anti-worker, guys?

Meaningful enforcement of rules for employers are simply not there. Employers can control these workers (preventing their pressing health and safety rules, for example, forget about joining a union) by threatening to withold an eventual green card and for that matter by ending their employment altogether. If workers are unemployed for 45 days they must return home else they are here illegally.

This bill will do little to actually stop illegal immigration, believe it or not. Many guest workers will not return home (see above) and many currently illegal workers may decide to remain out of the legal realm. Others will just keep coming, hoping for the best.

Now I realize that SEIU, etc and the AFL-CIO want to modify this bill to make it more worker friendly. Since we just lost CAFTA - with the help of 15 Democrats, some of whom labor has helped tremendously for years, and since both houses of Congress are firmly in Republican hands and since GWB is in the White House for 3 1/2 more years, what chance do you think we have of that?

Bipartisan agreements, such as McCain-Kennedy, to drastically increase immigration levels have had at least as much impact on the economic welfare of the American middle class as the regressive tax laws that the Republicans have enacted. In a recent study, George Borjas, the Harvard economist and Cuban immigrant, concluded that immigration from 1980 to 2000 added significant numbers to the workforce and decreased wages of the typical US worker by 3.7%. The wages of US workers who did not complete high school were decreased by 7.4%. The wages of US college graduates were decreased by 3.6%. In most cases, this decrease in wages was sharpest for workers with between 11 and 25 years of work experience - just when they were likely to be raising and educating their families.

It is time that the adverse effects of our immigration policy on the economic well-being of our working and middle-class citizens got the attention that it deserves, especially since the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act – S 1033 - could considerably increase immigration over the next few years. Regressive tax laws can be repealed in a relatively short period of time. The economic effects of long-term massive immigration cannot be so readily reversed.

[Art Traynor]

i don't understand those who say we should fight to include fair labor standards in these international trade agreements. Its a noble end, but how would it ever be achieved? The US labor movement can't even get fair labor standards here at home (the NLRB election process is increasingly useless and labor law is toothless. The NLRB is set to prohibit/weaken the ability of unions to use voluntary rec.) It seems a pipe-dream to think that we could do for other countries what we can't do for ourselves. In the meantime, i think outright opposition to these trade deals is the only way to go - at least until workers are the ones calling the shots in DC and writing these international deals - and getting to that point seems daunting enough.

On a side note, any Democrat who voted for CAFTA and one or two other anti-worker bills (overtime, bankruptcy, etc.) SHOULD BE TARGETED FOR REMOVAL!! Analogy: Traitors have always been punished more than POWs - they're a bigger threat.

[Mike]

Are you labor folks checking out what is going on here? More than 46 posts, some by political hacks posting under several different names? This is political spin in action baby! The fact that they have bothered to post to this site must mean either that the politicians they work for are really worried about this vote or that those posting are insignificant little interns looking for a forum in which to pretend to be more important than they are. Either way, its pretty lame.

[realdeal]

The parecon stuff is interesting. Dense, but interesting. How do you get it implemented. What is the political strategy?

All the bastards in DC should drop dead. Very constructive. Very thoughtful. And FYI, big corporations aren;t allowed on the House floor nor can they make the deals. The Prez does that, and he does it through promises for roads, bridges, and schools. And Members take it because they make a cost/benefit calculation. My constituents may lose this, but gain this, and so I will get elected. But not everyone followed that logic. Some took nothing and voted their conscience, and it seems to me that if someone stands on principle, you have to admire that, even if you disagree with it. And then you decide whether you support them in the next election, and, more importantly, what the options are if they are not in office.

Interesting insight into immigration (and no, some whine more than others, you have written something constructive), and I think for the most part correct, but it sort of ignores the whole issue of how you stop it. That is the struggle now -- how to come to terms with the reality that the borders are open, and we can do very little about it. McCain has a state where he sees the full impact of what is going on, and has a realization that you are not going to stop it. Which actually raises the question I raised earlier that no one has answered: if the DR-CAFTA countries have no comparative advantage now, and have no base for investment, and are drowning in poverty -- what is the path they have to economic development. Might not DR-CAFTA, with all the side agreements considered (and it seems not a whole lot of folks have read those), throw them a lifeline?

You can assist countries to change labor standards. Read up on the Cambodia textile agreement for starts. Go to the Carnegie Endowment website and look up an article by Sandra Polaski.

[Jack Wood]

I just published your blog post on the CAFTA 15 on the Nye County Democratic Central Committee, Pahrump, Nevada website. Though none of the 15 were from Nevada your blog advocating punishment for elected people that ignore us common voters and shows the method to punish is a lesson for us all to use.

If they screw us, we screw them and let'em know it. I'm tired of being ignored.

I've spent over an hour trying to find a website that identified the 15. I'd love to know how you found out who the 15 were. Email me with how you did it. Thanks

[Charles Barley]

At any rate, one idea is if the AFL used the Solidarity Center the manner it should be, with the assistace of the AFL, the Lula's and Chavez's of this world could organize counter-trade agreements. The AFL could use it's political clout to run domestic interference, enough to allow these agreements to develop without US interference. Bush knew he couldn't get FTAA passed, so he is carving it out piece-by-piece.

Perhaps if the burgeoning left-center movements of Latin America ever banded together, they could force existing corporations to abide by international standards at existing maquilas, especially if there was the threat to nationalize them if they didn't recognize unions, pay living wages, health care, etc. Pipe dream? There are indications it's happening - see Bolivia and it's second largest natural gas reserves in the Western Hemi. What if the long view looked like nationalization of foreign capital? There is a reason why Hugo Chavez broadcasts over national radio his worries about the CIA taking him out.