In his usual, blunt fashion, the Buffalo News’ Doug Turner offered an excellent assessment today of the recent Ohio primary.  Obviously not a fan of either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama, Turner questioned the sincerity of both in their recent anti-NAFTA rhetoric. 

In particular, Turner homed in on what he perceives as Obama’s lack of sincerity on the issue of trade policy and lost jobs: “If [Obama] were going to link Hillary to job flight, and the policies of her husband’s administration, he should have targeted President Clinton’s globalist ambitions in the Asian basin… That’s where the jobs, and entire factories, were shipped in the last eight years.”

The U.S. has lost more than 1.8 million jobs to China since Beijing’s late-2001 entrance to the WTO.  As Turner sees it, the Clinton administration “advanced arrangements that got China into the World Trade Organization, and then provided the needed Democratic votes in a Republican Congress to give Communist China permanent normalized trade relations with the United States.” 

If Obama wanted to hector Clinton, rather than trade jabs on NAFTA he might have chosen a better route to do so by lamenting the ever growing U.S. trade deficit with China, which is one unhappy legacy of the Clinton years.  Unfortunately, he did not, and Turner ascribes it to Obama’s closet “globalist” status.

ManufactureThis doen’t just critique Obama and Clinton on trade policy, however.  As frequently noted, we’re an equal opportunity detractor.  And so it’s worthwhile to note another recent news item—and one that isn’t friendly to John McCain… 

The Seattle Post Intelligencer reported on Friday that Boeing’s failure to win a new $35 billion Air Force contract is viewed as the fault of Senator McCain.  The contract was awarded in part to Airbus’ parent company EADS, which detractors say “ignored American national security interests and would cost U.S. jobs.”

Free Trading McCain has come in for particular scorn on the subject because he “was a major force behind the Air Force decision to ignore the issue of government subsidies to Airbus when the tanker contract was put up for competitive bidding last year.”

Essentially, the tanker contract was given to a low bidder, albeit a foreign firm that is amply subsidized by the EU.

Is this the meaning of fair competition?  McCain seems to think so.  Unfortunately, his rhetoric is inconsistent.  A state-subsidized manufacturer is an inherently protected entity, something that violates the tenets of “Free Trade.”  Voters may want to ask ‘Why does John McCain favor state-subsidized European firms over U.S. jobs?’

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 9:07 pm and is filed under Manufacturing in the U.S., Enforcing Trade Laws. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.