Foreign Policy In Focus

Cross-posted from the Dissent Magazine blog Arguing the World.

With recent revelations about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, it is now safe to say that President Obama has surpassed George W. Bush as a champion of the flawed and offensive ideology of corporate globalization.

This argument requires some explanation. Here’s the backstory: As the Bush administration commenced in the early 2000s, many argued that his foreign policy represented a continuation of the Clinton-era approach to promoting “free trade” neoliberalism overseas. However, I contended that, especially after the launch of the Iraq war in 2003, the unilateralist bullying of the neocons represented a split from past practice.

No doubt, big arms and big oil had their needs met by the Bush agenda. But his administration was wary of multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the World Bank, which were central instruments of U.S. policy under Clinton. The Bush approach relied on our-way-or-the-highway, coalition-of-the-willing hard power. This made a significant portion of corporate America uncomfortable, especially businesses trying to navigate and expand in foreign markets. It also left the soft-power agenda of “free trade” in an uncertain state.

This was essentially the thesis of my 2008 book, How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy. Around the time the book came out, I wrote:

In October 2007...the Wall Street Journal reported that the [Republican] party could be facing a brand crisis as “[s]ome business leaders are drifting away from the party because of the war in Iraq, the growing federal debt and a conservative social agenda they don’t share.”

When it comes to corporate responses to [Bush’s] Global War on Terror, we mostly hear about the likes of Halliburton and Blackwater—companies directly implicated in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and with the mentality of looters. Such firms have done their best to score quick profits from the military machine. However, there was always a faction of realist, business-oriented Republicans who opposed the invasion from the start, in part because they believed it would negatively impact the U.S. economy. As the [Bush administration’s] adventure in Iraq has descended into the morass, the ranks of corporate complainers have only grown.

The “free trade” elite have become particularly upset about the administration’s focus on go-it-alone nationalism and its disregard for multilateral means of securing influence. This belligerent approach to foreign affairs, they believe, has thwarted the advance of corporate globalization. In an April 2006 column in the Washington Post, globalist cheerleader Sebastian Mallaby laid blame for “why globalization has stalled” at the feet of the Bush administration. The White House, Mallaby charged, was unwilling to invest any political capital in the IMF, the World Bank, or the WTO....Frustrated by Bush’s failures, many in the business elite want to return to the softer empire of corporate globalization and, increasingly, they are looking to the Democrats to navigate this return.

My concern back then was that a Democrat (either Obama or Hillary Clinton) would be elected to office and then abandon the overt militarism and “imperial globalization” of the Bush administration, but embrace a subtler, more multilateralist “free trade” neoliberalism—reclaiming the agenda of corporate globalization. I would have been pleased if this prediction had proved wrong. Sadly, Obama has provided irrefutable evidence that he has boarded the corporate globalist bandwagon.

At the end of the administration’s first year, I gave Obama a “B” for trade policy on a report card for Foreign Policy In Focus. While there was some rumbling about resurrecting stalled bilateral trade deals with Korea, Panama, and Colombia, the administration hadn’t done much to push things forward. Things were quiet. And given the kind of trade deals that Washington has brokered in the last couple decades, no news is good news in this arena.

Unfortunately, by 2011, the administration was pushing these so-called “free trade” deals hard. It succeeded in passing them through Congress and then signing them into law last fall.

Obama’s trade policy grade was plummeting, but new information shows things to be even worse. In the past month the president has officially failed out of “fair trade” class. On June 13, Public Citizen released a leaked document showing that the TPP—a trade agreement being negotiated between the United States and eight Pacific countries under considerable secrecy—is shaping up to be as bad as NAFTA or worse.

Public Citizen wrote in a press release:

Although the TPP has been branded a “trade” agreement, the leaked text of the pact’s Investment Chapter shows that the TPP would:

—Limit how U.S. federal and state officials could regulate foreign firms operating within U.S. boundaries, with requirements to provide them greater rights than domestic firms;

—Extend the incentives for U.S. firms to offshore investment and jobs to lower-wage countries;

—Establish a two-track legal system that gives foreign firms new rights to skirt U.S. courts and laws, directly sue the U.S. government before foreign tribunals and demand compensation for financial, health, environmental, land use and other laws they claim undermine their TPP privileges; and

—Allow foreign firms to demand compensation for the costs of complying with U.S. financial or environmental regulations that apply equally to domestic and foreign firms.

In the weeks since that leak, it has been reported that Mexico and Canada will both be joining TPP talks, setting the stage for the creation of a behemoth trading bloc. This bloc will operate based on rules backed (and often concocted) by corporate lobbyists.

It didn’t have to be this way. It was not preordained that President Obama would become Corporate-Globalizer-in-Chief. The base of the Democratic Party has aligned itself firmly against the “free trade” agenda—so much so that both Obama and Clinton campaigned in 2008 against the NAFTA model and in favor of a “fair trade” alternative. In fact, going into the 2012 elections, there’s evidence that Obama’s betrayal of earlier vows could be a significant liability among voters and a bitter pill for key constituencies the president needs if his campaign is going to overcome the enthusiasm gap between progressives and the Republican faithful.

Yet instead of taking the chance to redefine American interests in the world as something other than securing profits for U.S. businesses, Obama has allowed an ingrained pro-corporate obsequiousness to permeate the office of the U.S. Trade Representative and the Department of State.

It’s not the unilaterist hubris of the Bush administration. But it’s still a detestable foreign policy—and a sorely missed opportunity for something better.

Mark Engler is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus and author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books, 2008). He can be reached via the website Democracy Uprising. You can follow Mark at his Facebook page.

On Friday, President Obama announced that he is nominating physician and Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim to lead the World Bank. This likely appointment was greeted with approval by many long-time critics of corporate globalization. And it came after an unprecedented level of debate about who should be the institution’s next president.

By tradition, the World Bank president has been a political appointee named by the White House. Europe has agreed to go along with this arrangement, with the tacit agreement that a European, in turn, would be named as director of the International Monetary Fund. As for the rest of the world...well, the IMF and World Bank haven’t traditionally put too much weight on what the global South thinks.

This year things have been a bit different. For the first time, there’s been a concerted—and effective—effort to intervene in the nominating process and prevent a crony coronation. To this end, a variety of developing countries and progressive leaders got behind the candidacy of economist Jeffrey Sachs, who in recent years has refashioned himself as an anti-poverty crusader.

But other critics of the status quo were skeptical of this pick. Although Sachs now tries to highlight his anti-poverty credentials, he was previously known as a neoliberal “doctor shock,” advising on “stabilization” programs in countries such as Bolivia, Poland, and Russia in the 1980s and 90s. This history earned him a place as a leading villain in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.

Sachs has never been big on apologizing. And many followers of Latin American politics, including me, find his lack of remorse for his role in Bolivia to be a big problem. But, in a debate hosted at the Nation (in which John Cavanagh and Robin Broad made the case against Sachs), progressive economist Mark Weisbrot—an outspoken defender of Latin America’s “New Left”—wrote in the nominee’s defense. Weisbrot contended:

"Sachs has a reform agenda for the Bank, including having the Bank focus more on treatment and prevention of infectious diseases, support for small farmers, education and primary health care, and renewable energy (as opposed to fossil fuels). He also has a track record of having fought for debt cancellation, an end to the World Bank’s policies of imposing user fees for primary health care and education, for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (which has saved millions of lives), increased access to essential medicines, and having been outspoken against war and other abuses by the US government."

Weisbrot and others also made a few arguments on the strategic level. First, they contended that Sachs was far preferable to Larry Summers, who was seen prior to the Kim announcement as Obama’s likely pick. (I can hardly argue with them on that point.)

Second, they emphasized that putting forth a credible opposition candidate would throw open what is usually a closed process and pave the way for more progressive candidates in the future. Indeed, as the Sachs nomination gained steam, two candidates from the global South also entered the fray: Colombian José Antonio Ocampo, a former finance minister and UN official, and Nigerian Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, also a finance minister of his country and a former managing director at the World Bank.

In the end, Obama did not nominate Summers. And, ultimately, Jim Yong Kim might be a better pick than anyone for whom critics of the World Bank could have realistically hoped. Kim’s main progressive credential—and it’s a compelling one—is having served as executive director of Partners in Health (PIH), co-founded by Paul Farmer. If you haven’t picked up Tracy Kidder’s excellent book about Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains, there’s no point in delaying any longer. Farmer’s work is remarkable by all accounts and, grounded in liberation theology, it shows a deep preference for the world’s poor against the Washington Consensus.

Kim has been lower-profile than Farmer. But there are some good signs that he will bring a very different perspective to the job of World Bank president than his predecessors. One is the fact that Kim is now drawing heat from the right for writing in a 2000 book, Dying for Growth, that “the quest for growth in GDP and corporate profits has in fact worsened the lives of millions of women and men.”

Then again, the Wall Street Journal writes, “Over Dr. Kim’s three years at Dartmouth he has proved to be higher education’s Paul Ryan. He decisively resolved the school’s financial problems that he inherited on taking office—with real budget cuts, over the objections of the faculty.”

I called up Mark Weisbrot to talk more about the Kim nomination, about the debate around Sachs, and about what difference having a new World Bank president might make. Some edited excerpts from our conversation follow:

Engler: Are you happy with the nomination of Jim Yung Kim?

Weisbrot: Yes, I think it’s great. To have somebody who cares about health issues is completely different. Look at the past eleven presidents. They’re all bankers, war criminals—not the kind of people I’d want to run my restaurant.

Engler: By “war criminals,” you’re referring to…

Weisbrot: McNamara and Wolfowitz. I don’t know if Wolfowitz is technically a war criminal, but he was one of the architects of the Iraq War. Can you imagine? This is what annoys me when leftists complain about Sachs.

Engler: I’m one of those people who complains about Sachs. True, he’s not as bad as Larry Summers. But I was surprised to see you get behind him.

Weisbrot: Well, do you ever vote in elections?

Engler: Sure…

Weisbrot: I respect the position that the World Bank should just be abolished. I think that’s an argument that people can make. But if you’re going to have a World Bank, there’s more of a difference between Sachs and anybody that Obama was going to appoint than there is between, I don’t know, [former Brazilian President] Lula [da Silva] and his predecessor. There’s a huge difference between Sachs and Summers. That’s what I go by.

Engler: Especially as someone who watches Latin America, as you do as well, I’ve felt that Sachs is inadequately repentant for his past.

Weisbrot: I really don’t care about his immortal soul. That’s for the Pope to judge or whoever else wants to judge that. That’s not my job.

Engler: How much of a difference do you think the World Bank president makes?

Weisbrot: That’s an interesting question. We don’t know because we’ve never had a president there who was anything but a crony. We’ll see what he can change. He has a bully pulpit too if that’s something he wants to use. That’s something I think Sachs would have used a lot, and it would have been hard to fire him. I don’t know if Kim is going to do it.

Engler: What are some of the things that you see a more independent World Bank president promoting, using this bully pulpit?

Weisbrot: The Bank publishes Global Economic Prospects, and they comment on the world economy. So the World Bank president could speak out on the big economic questions that the G20 is dealing with: how to handle the next global economic crisis; how to handle the European crisis, because it affects the developing world. They could speak out on spending priorities for the Bank itself.

But if Kim wants to change anything, he’s going to have to fight. He’s still going to have the Bank’s board [of directors] to deal with. And that board is dominated by the United States and its allies.

It’s not just a question of votes. It’s the fact that developing countries don’t fight. They just don’t fight within the IMF and World Bank the way they do within the World Trade Organization (WTO). In the WTO they form blocks, they fight, and they win. And they’re going to have to get used to doing the same thing in these two institutions.

I think that was a positive part of developing countries supporting Sachs. There were about a dozen of them by the end. That made a difference. I’m not sure the other nominations would have happened if Sachs hadn’t gone in there first. He was the one who busted up the normal process.

Engler: In your mind, what would be a desirable set of spending priorities for the Bank?

Weisbrot: I want them to do more about the things that they can do, like disease prevention and treatment. Kim will do that. And if he does nothing else, that’s still a huge improvement. I think [people at the Bank] can do more in education. They can do more to support small-scale agriculture.

But once you get into their economics, their economics are usually bad. One of the Financial Times reporters today asked me, “What if Kim doesn’t know that much about development economics?”

I said, “I don’t think that’s a handicap. I don’t think the Bank should be involved in that anyways. Let them do what they can do, because they usually get the economics wrong.”

Mark Engler is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus and author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books, 2008). He can be reached via the website Democracy Uprising. 

Cross-posted from the Dissent Magazine blog Arguing the World.

Did the attacks of 9/11 end the movement against corporate globalization?

A number of reflections written for the ten-year anniversary of the attacks have raised this question. And I think it presents some interesting challenges for those of us who think about social movements.

In an essay at Truthout journalist Dan Denvir, a friend and colleague, calls the global justice movement a “political casualty” of the War on Terror. Likewise, in the magazine’s ten-year-anniversary symposium on 9/11, fellow Dissent contributor Bhaskar Sunkara notes, “The attacks on September 11 had an unforeseen consequence for the Left. The ‘anti-globalization’ movement abruptly entered public consciousness after the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle and disappeared just as quickly.”

In their respective essays, Dan and Bhaskar consider the global justice movement as something that effectively existed for less than two years, and then had, in Dan’s words, a “quick and sudden end.” I think there is a kernel of truth to this idea—there is some reason to look at the period between November 1999 and September 2001 as a unique time. Yet this periodization, I would argue, also has some significant limitations. It skews how we think about the legacy and the impact of the movement—as well as its potential for revival.

Let’s start with how that period was indeed a special one—particularly for activists within the United States. As Bhaskar writes, “for a moment, radical politics appeared pregnant with possibility.” Dan elaborates:

A rapid-fire series of mass demonstrations forced secretive financial institutions, corporations (and political parties) to make their case to the American people for the first time in a very long time, and there was a sense of incredible optimism and power. Older activists were amazed to see people back in the streets and I felt like it was an incredible time to be a young activist. We expected major social change and so did everyone else.

I think both writers are correct that anyone involved in global justice activism at the time felt that it was an exciting and exceptional moment. Importantly, it was the first time in which the fickle mainstream media in the United States and Europe paid attention to the protests against corporate globalization as a new and significant force. This attention helped the different groups mobilizing for protests think of themselves as part of a single, collective effort. And it helped create the momentum needed for any mass movement to grow. After 9/11, the mainstream media sent its spotlight elsewhere, and global justice advocates would have to struggle to draw attention to their campaigns.

Dan’s piece is, in large part, a personal reflection about being radicalized as a student activist during this time. And his experience points to another way in which the period immediately prior to 9/11 was distinctive. Young people coming to left politics in the late 1990s and very early 2000s—particularly on campuses in the United States—were likely to be exposed to critiques of neoliberalism, to campaigns targeting multinational corporations as dominant actors on the world stage, and to challenges to the Democratic Party’s acceptance of a new “free trade” orthodoxy. After 9/11, student activists were more likely to be radicalized around a different set of issues—war, torture, and the elimination of civil liberties—and were likely to direct their anger at Bush administration neoconservatives. The dominant tone changed from possibility to despair. As Dan writes:

[T]he anti-globalization was not just a movement against. It was a statement that, as the World Social Forum puts it, Another World Is Possible. The movements that followed were defensive maneuvers against a Bush administration that was truly more dangerous than anything we could have envisioned.

Bhaskar adds, “A common sentiment among those who took part in the [anti-globalization] movement is that of a historical moment cut short.”

In a variety of respects, the beginning of the “War on Terror” created real changes for activists, and I think that noting these is valid. Yet while there were some unique qualities of the period between N30 and 9/11, trying to contain the global justice movement entirely within this timeframe involves replicating some of the mainstream media’s bad habits. Since social movements neither appear as instantaneously nor disappear as abruptly as news reports would regularly seem to suggest, it’s worth taking the longer view.

Those who joined in protests against corporate globalization around the turn of the millennium frequently invoked the slogan, “It didn’t start in Seattle.” Although the November 1999 actions against the World Trade Organization meetings in the Pacific Northwest seemed to the mainstream media to come out of nowhere, protest participants identified with a lineage of activism that had been brewing for years and that was very internationalist in nature. Antecedents included mobilizations against NAFTA and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), the Zapatista uprising in southern Mexico, the rise in the 1990s of anti-sweatshop activism and culture jamming, and numerous protests in the global South against privatization and corporate exploitation. Bhaskar nods to this when he notes, “While the fight for Seattle’s streets caught the media by surprise, it was the result of months of planning and organizing, and underpinned by broader historical shifts.”

Just as there are important reasons to point out that “It did not start in Seattle,” I think there’s value in the argument that “It did not end on 9/11.”

I have written before about the important impact of global justice mobilizations on the trade and development debate. Here I would just add a few notes about timeframe that run contrary to the “ended on 9/11” storyline.

The World Social Forum, which is considered a key institution of the global justice movement, was only in its infancy in 2001. The first global forum, held in January of that year, drew around 12,000 people. In contrast, the first post-9/11 forum back in Porto Alegre, which took place in late January and early February of 2002, drew many times more—somewhere around 60,000 attendees. By the mid-2000s, several incarnations of the World Social Forum brought in as many as 150,000 participants. Such crowds were significantly larger than the one that amassed at the Seattle protests (estimates for which range between about 30,000 and 90,000 people). Although U.S. groups were not dominant at the social forums, they were decently represented.

While focus in the United States did shift to anti-war activism during this time (and away from globalization-focused campaigns), there were efforts to link critiques of corporate power with an analysis of U.S. militarism. Highlighting the connections between movements, the call for a February 15, 2003 global day of action against war in Iraq originated at the November 2002 European Social Forum.

Following 9/11, some meetings of multilateral bodies were relocated to remote or repressive locales (such as Doha) to preclude protests. Nevertheless, activist gatherings continued to form outside G8 and WTO meetings, with notable dissident contingents confronting the latter organization in Cancun in 2003 and in Hong Kong in 2005.

Within the United States, significant protests gathered in Miami around negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)—a protest in many ways comparable to the pre-9/11 protests at the IMF and World Bank on A16, although not nearly as well covered in the press. (Indicative of the ongoing radicalism at the gatherings, I had the pleasure of watching a major U.S. union leader in Miami publicly denounce the city’s security deployment as a “police state“—something you don’t see every day in labor circles.)

The FTAA subsequently collapsed altogether, a major movement victory. Dan notes that this was “thanks in large part to Latin America’s leftward swing.” I agree, and I would contend that this swing was not wholly unconnected to global justice constituencies. (Furthermore, I would disagree with Bhaskar if he suggests that the example of Lula da Silva’s left-leaning government in Brazil necessarily delegitimizes the arguments made by critics of corporate globalization.)

Looking at a single issue central to the anti-corporate globalization movement, we can see debt relief—the demand that countries in the global South should have their international debts eliminated—follow a promising trajectory in the wake of 9/11. The debt relief movement gained momentum through July 2005, when it scored a breakthrough win with an international agreement signed at the Gleneagles, Scotland meeting of the G8. For the occasion, as many as 250,000 protesters (many times the number present in Seattle) marched in favor of eliminating unjust debts.

Now, looking at this activity, one could argue that the global justice movement continued internationally after 9/11 but ceased to exist within the United States. My response there would be that we need to look more carefully at the groups that made up mass mobilizations such as N30 or A16. The global justice movement has long been described as a “movement of movements.” One of the exciting aspects of the gatherings outside WTO or World Bank or FTAA meetings was the ability of a common enemy to bring together a broad range of constituencies—labor, environmentalists, indigenous rights groups, family farmers, anarchists, pro-immigrant advocates, faith-based groups.

The extent to which all of these groups were united into one seamless movement was probably overhyped by hopeful activists in the post-Seattle moment, radicals who might have imagined that long-standing ideological divisions could be overcome and differences in organizational cultures bridged. On the other hand, it would be equally wrong to assume that all cooperation between the diverse constituencies ended promptly upon the launch of the “War on Terror.” Labor, for one, remained far more internationalist in its stances on trade than it had been in the early 1990s and before, and its connection to immigrant rights groups were very relevant when that movement exploded into public view in 2006. Something like “slow food” was a very rare idea in 1999, but movements around food issues have only grown since then, and they continue to make fruitful links with indigenous rights activists and anti-corporate campaigners.

Institutions are important. During their heyday, the global justice activists were criticized for merely hopping from summit to summit, not building local structures. In his essay, Bhaskar rightly criticizes Seattle-era excitement over ad hoc spokes-councils and movement spaces that emerged seemingly spontaneously and left “virtually no trace behind.”

But there’s a certain “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” quality to some of these arguments. During the time activists were able to capture media attention with mass summit actions, their movement was considered viable. When the summit stalking died down, it was taken as evidence of the movement’s demise. Those who took on the difficult task of creating lasting activist vehicles—take, for example, anti-sweatshop organizers’ development of the Worker Rights Consortium, an impressive and largely post-9/11 institution—got little credit for their efforts.

The constituent groups of the global justice movement did not disappear. Nor did they lose their ability to come together as a creative, unified, and internationally minded force to challenge corporate power and oligarchic privilege. The landscape of American politics and the state of the global economy have changed plenty in the past ten years. They have changed in ways that do not always favor such unity. But the great potential, and great need for it, remain.

Mark Engler is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus and author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books, 2008). He can be reached via the website Democracy Uprising. You can follow Mark on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Mark-Engler-Democracy-Uprising/117982368212095

Cross-posted from the Dissent Magazine blog Arguing the World.

After a slight scheduling kerfuffle, President Obama is now set to give a major speech on jobs before a joint session of Congress next Thursday, September 8. Commentators have speculated that Obama could “go big” in his proposals to fight unemployment, and there are some solid suggestions on the table for how the government could help put Americans back to work. These include major investment in public infrastructure and changing the tax structure in order to reward businesses for creating U.S. jobs, rather than off-shoring their production abroad.

Unfortunately, Obama is also likely to advance some bad ideas. In his pledge to “to find bipartisan solutions” to the country’s economic problems, the president will almost certainly push several neoliberal “free trade” agreements. Specifically, he is expected to reassert his support for previously stalled trade pacts with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea.

As Lori Wallach argues, “whatever one thinks about the idea of ‘free trade,’ the federal government’s own studies predict that these three deals would increase the U.S. trade deficit—costing more jobs than they create.” Wallach’s organization, Global Trade Watch, has had to regularly correct news reports that uncritically accept false numbers about trade. In a post on why “Trade Does Not Equal Jobs,” even Paul Krugman, normally a trade booster, has argued that claims about the South Korea trade agreement being an engine of job creation are bunk.

The idea that “free trade” is in fact a bipartisan issue is also debatable. It’s true that President Bill Clinton and his generation of “New Democrats” enthusiastically embraced NAFTA and other neoliberal trade deals—and were far more serious about creating hemisphere-wide pacts like the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) than the administration of George W. Bush ever was. (The argument of my 2008 book, How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy, was that a new Democratic president would be likely to repudiate Bush’s unilateralist, America-first brand of “imperial globalization,” but would revert to promoting a friendlier, more multilateral form of “corporate globalization”—different in some respects, but plenty bad in its own right. Obama hasn’t done much to disprove this thesis.)

Yet while Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council led the “free trade” charge in the 1990s, it is not at all clear that this can still be called a “Democratic” position—and thus form part of bipartisan platform. In the past decade, recognizing a strong voter backlash against the neoliberal trade agenda, Democratic elected officials have increasingly embraced a pro-worker, pro-environment “fair trade” agenda. Global Trade Watch has documented that the fair trade platform was effective even in the 2010 midterms, when the Republicans made gains overall. In fact, many conservatives also adopted “fair trade” messaging, expressing skepticism about future trade deals made in the NAFTA mold.

Even Bill Clinton has shown some remorse for his “free trade” advocacy—at least in selected instances. With regard to Haiti, he said in March 2010 that pushing neoliberal policies was “a mistake” that hurt the poor in that country. “I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else,” he explained.

Apart from sentiments in Washington, it is clear that popular opinion would in no way justify pushing trade deals as a matter of broad, “bipartisan” agreement. Citing a November 2010 poll by the Pew Research Center that showed public support for “free trade” at one of its lowest points in over a decade, Dan Denvir recently pointed out at the Guardian that pushing through the stalled “free trade” agreements could well be a liability for Obama at the polls. Todd Tucker has previously made this case in even stronger terms, calling Obama’s support for “free trade” pacts a “political death wish.”

As a presidential candidate, still in a primary fight against Hillary Clinton, Obama recognized that the base of the party was squarely against “free trade” neoliberalism. He called NAFTA “devastating” and “a big mistake” on the campaign trail. Voters in 2012 will have every right to be disgusted by his subsequent “about-face.”

While the more progressive elements of Obama’s jobs agenda will no doubt have trouble getting through a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, passing the trade deals with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea would also be divisive, requiring him to split the Democrats in Congress. The president therefore has a choice: Fight the Republicans on domestic investment, or fight the prevailing sentiments of his own party—in Washington and beyond—on trade.

Mark Engler is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus and author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books, 2008). He can be reached via the website Democracy Uprising.