2015/06/18 – 

Washington got weird this month.  House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) blew his top when House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) helped destroy a trade deal he personally backed, along with President Barack Obama and the rest of the GOP leadership.  Democrats opposing a trade deal isn’t the weird part — it’s how they opposed it that made the news.

Few Mississippians really know what the Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) deal is all about, and that’s just the way corporate CEOs want it.  The U.S. and other nations have historically used tariffs and economic penalties to encourage American manufacturing and protect jobs.  Over the last 40 years, however, CEOs and wealthy business owners have been paying Washington politicians millions of dollars to ditch those tariffs and economic penalties by enacting international trade deals, which allow the CEOs to take away your $10-an-hour textile manufacturing job and give it to a young woman in Vietnam who will do the same work for $150 a month.  The company then passes along all that money it saved from offshoring American jobs to its CEOs and company stockholders.

It’s a great deal for CEOs and stockholders, but it stinks for you.  In fact, whole Mississippi towns have been decimated by the closing of manufacturing companies over the last four decades, thanks to earlier trade deals like NAFTA and CAFTA.  What’s left in the aftermath are ghost towns and poverty here and very wealthy CEOs in New York and California.

Congress and the president both know this, of course.  That’s why they created the woefully inadequate Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program for workers dislocated by those trade deals. The TAA program allows you to qualify for some government services if you can prove that your job was taken away by Congress’ apparent eagerness to send your job to another country.

The new TPA deal now making news is actually a fast-track measure designed to help the president and corporate-friendly politicians ram through a new Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with 12 low-wage Pacific rim nations.  This new partnership would allow any president — Democrat or Republican — to quietly submit new trade pacts to Congress for an expedited, up-or-down vote without any amendments to water down their potential damage.  Critics point out that the president and corporate officials have refused to release TPP language to the public, allegedly because it sounds very much like a job-killer.

To his credit, President Obama said he will not sign a new TPA deal without the passing of a new TAA to offset the inevitable job losses TPA will bring, so House Democrats did everything they could to kill TAA — even though they have historically supported it.

The Republican-dominated Senate had already passed TPA.  The House needed to pass both provisions for the overall measure to get to the president’s desk.  Although the Republican-dominated House was quick to pass TPA, Republicans have never been willing to support any money or job training for trade-deal-dislocated workers — so all Democrats had to do to torpedo TPA was play on Republicans’ inherent cruelty and eagerness to kill TAA.

“There’s no legislative history of a majority of Republicans ever supporting trade assistance,” said Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, who voted with Republicans to kill TAA specifically so it would take down its malignant sister agreement.  “You saw, basically, a Democratic Party, with the exception of a few outliers, opposing TAA.  That doesn’t happen very often, because Democrats don’t like people being unemployed, and tend to favor TAA.”

At one point during the TAA roll call, House Republicans had only 93 members voting ‘yes’. They needed at least 178 to pass it.  Once it became clear that TAA was doomed, seven more GOPs switched and voted ‘no,’ because no self-respecting member of the GOP can be seen caring for dislocated American workers.  Hypothetically, Republicans could pass TAA all by themselves — they do have 246 members in the House, after all.  But, again, that would mean looking like you have a heart, and they just can’t do that.

Thompson said he wished the GOP could, at least, try to care.

“NAFTA basically decimated the textile industry in my state,” Thompson said.  “Fruit of the Loom was one of the larger employers in Greenville.  It shut down.  Jockey International Inc. was the largest non-agricultural employer in Humphreys County.  It shut down.  In just about every major community there was some kind of textile-related job that suffered (because of a trade deal).”

A rash of Delta closures in the aftermath of NAFTA actually led to a glut of empty industrial property in that region.  About 75 workers were affected when Nicholson/Cooper Steel ended production of its band-saw product line and handed off the production of its hacksaw product line to factories in Colombia and Mexico.  Three plants in Greenville closed down along with Fruit of the Loom, including Sewell Products, Cooper Tools and Cargill Industries, likely because of reduced tariff imports from cheaper foreign markets.  Immediately preceding those closures, Mississippi lost Wolverine Tube Inc., Cleaver-Brooks, and American legend Schwinn Bicycles.

Hager Hinge Co. also announced soon after NAFTA that it would lay off 115 employees, after finding it was cheaper in the post-NAFTA U.S. to import door hinges than manufacture them at home.  Soon after, Heilig-Meyers Furniture Co. announced it would close its own Greenville store.

It’s obvious why Thompson is angry about TPA.

“These manufacturing jobs didn’t pay the highest wages, but they were stable and they supported families.  And you didn’t need a college degree to work there.  It was a niche kind of opportunity that people built families around and basically invested in the next generation to make it better.  With that stable job you could encourage your children to go to school and better themselves — but we lost all of that, and I was the only one in our state delegation who voted against (those agreements).”

Thompson was apparently the only one voting against TPA, too, since every Mississippi Republican supported it with a June 12 vote.

Source: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/114-2015/h361

Mississippi AFL-CIO President Robert Shaffer, who vehemently opposes trade deals, said pro-job Mississippians keep faithfully re-electing people like Reps. Harper and Palazzo, even though the two have never met a job-killing trade deal they didn’t like.  (Kelly was elected June 2 and sworn in June 9.)  White Mississippians can’t help but vote Republican, Shaffer said, because the GOP is now identified exclusively as a “white party.”

“You just have to throw them a little red meat, and they’ll keep electing these people,” Shaffer said.  “Toss a little race in there with it, and they’ll vote for anything.”

Source: NAACP Writers