Free trade is an acrimonious issue. The sides are so polarized that they cannot stop fighting with each other, even when their are issues in which the anti-globalization movement and free-trade government and companies might agree on (John Audley et al., NAFTA's promises and realities.) Yesterday's democratic debate, held in Iowa, did little to make me feel that there is any depth to anti-globalization arguments.

I should start at my entry point. I watched the repeat broadcast of the debate after seeing some commentary. Chris Matthews had on a commentator from Telemundo. He was asked what issues swayed Latino voters to one candidate or another. The commentator said that while two of the candidates were drawing the interest of Latinos, the democratic candidates were not addressing free trade in ways that would interest them. Simply put, Latinos were more likely to have relatives in developing countries whose lives would be affected by changes to trade laws. My reading of this comment (with lots of my own interpretation): the candidates are not engaged in the greater issues of globalization. They are satisfied with placing controls on agreements (standards of production, whether they be the equivalent of US labor and environmental protections or not). The candidates concern is limited to the outsourcing of work and the migration of capital. I do not think that the candidates care about the problem of development in developing countries.

I don't see how their policies don't add up to protectionism by other means. The democrats make the assumption that the advantages of overseas production arise from the miserable conditions that foreign workers live in: they will accept poor wages and working environments because they are trapped in misery. In my opinion, putting excessive standards on the developing economies will trap them: they would become more dependent on foreign capital in order to introduce the advanced industries necessitated by environmental standards.

Democrats make the assumption that the independence of US is at stake. This is overdrawn. No one has yet asked whether the jobs in manufacturing that have been lost are recoverable. US is well on the way to a service economy without globalization. The "loss of jobs/flooding of stores with Chines goods" paradigm is not something that democrats share. It is not even something that they just share with social conservatives like Gary Bauer (thanks for the reference, Christoph). Even government are afraid of this: the imbalanced trade agreements that governments make and the subsidies that they grant to domestic producers are designed to prevent the onslaught of cheaply-made imports.(Audley et al) This is a concern for the Free Trade argument, one that has led to problems for developing economies. WTO had, in fact, become a form of protection for advanced countries.

Basically, democrats have reworked the anti-free trade argument into a nationalist one. The broader implications of globalization are barely touched upon. There is no attention to the needs of developing economies. Why should this be important? Poverty, instability, and lack of opportunity form the basis for dissatisfaction in third-world countries. It should form a part of out foreign and security policies that will allow some measure of prevention.

I have excepted the statement of the individual candidates. I have not made any judgements on a single candidate--my analysis is meant to deal with the DNC as a whole. I am certain that I will say more about this in the future.

• GEPHARDT: Tom, this issue [NAFTA] brings me to something that you asked General Clark, and that is how are we going to reconnect with a wide variety of Americans on values grounds, because that's really what we're talking about when we talk about religion. ... And let me talk about health care and trade, because I think you can take it on your values. What I'm trying to do is to say to the American people, all the American people -- whether they're in business or labor, whether they're wealthy or poor middle class -- that health care for everybody is a moral issue. It is immoral, in my view, and I think in most Democrats' view and probably even a lot of Republicans' views, to have people out there without health insurance. We have got to solve this problem. It's also immoral to have a race to the bottom, to have companies go to Mexico or China to get the cheapest possible labor they can get. It's exploitation of human beings. I've been in these villages. I've seen the people. They live in worse conditions than most farm animals in Iowa. It's wrong and we've got to change it. I will be a president who will unite people in this country around moral values to change things for the better.


• DEAN: Many people supported NAFTA early on. I did. Tom Harkin did. We thought that it was going to bring more jobs to this country. It turned out that wasn't the case. It turned out that what we've done in our rush to globalization, which we're not going to undo, is globalize the rights of multinational corporations, but we haven't globalized the worker protections that were put in place by the trade union movement in this country over 100 years ago. The solution to global trade I don't believe is to get rid of the WTO and NAFTA. I think the solution to global trade is to demand as a condition of free trade that we have workers' rights, labor rights, human rights and environmental standards in every single trade agreement that we have. That way we will bring that proper balance, which we discovered in America over 100 years ago, between labor, investment and capital investment. We have to have treaties that include human rights and environmental rights and labor rights, and then we really will have fair trade, which we do not now have. [Later in the segment] I just want to make a quick point about ethanol, which I think has been lost here. This is not an issue of what we are subsidizing for ethanol. If you put 10 percent ethanol in every gas tank in America, you would reduce the entire world oil output by 2 percent. That's a huge number. Right now you can't get peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians because our oil money goes to the Saudis, who then spend it on terrorist groups and on teaching small children to hate Americans, Christians and Jews. We might have a president who would be willing to stand up to the Saudis if we weren't so dependent on foreign oil. I think ethanol is essential to America. And I think this business about subsidies, I understand the -- Senator McCain's dislike of subsidies for anything. Think how much we subsidize the oil and gas business. Why can't we do that for American farmers instead of Saudi sheiks?


• KUCINICH: I sure do, because something Governor Dean said belies the facts. And the fact is, Governor -- and you know this full well -- that unless you cancel NAFTA and the WTO, you can never get into that discussion. The only way you can get into the discussion is to cancel NAFTA and the WTO and return to bilateral trade conditioned on workers' rights, human rights and the environment. Because as long as NAFTA is in place, unless you have the approval of Canada and Mexico, you can't modify it. And you know that. So I think that it's important to tell the people of this state and this country where you stand on these trade issues. And, Tom, frankly, unless we cancel NAFTA and the WTO, you'll never be able to address the underlying loss of manufacturing jobs, the 3 million jobs that have been lost since July of 2000. We will never be able to address the nearly $500 billion trade deficit we're looking at. We've got to regain control of our own destiny, and that's what canceling NAFTA and the WTO would do. And that's what I intend to do as my first act in office.


• CLARK: Well, I'm very concerned about exactly what Andy Grove has said, and canceling NAFTA and WTO will not solve the problem. We have to have the right policies to create jobs in America, and to have companies that are hiring in this country stay in this country and not outsource. So here is what I'll do: When I am president, the first thing I will have is $100 billion job creation program. Then we'll go and look at the tax code. We'll take away any incentives for companies that want to outsource or leave the country. And we'll have incentives for companies to create jobs in here. But we need to go beyond all of that. We really need a national goals program. Software was great, the technology and the information revolution was great, but there are a lot of technologies out there. We've got great scientists in this country. We need to set some national goals. We have the mechanisms to do it, put the research money in to basic and applied research and let those inventions and discoveries come out in intellectual property that we can use in this country to create employment. Energy and environmental engineering are two very fertile areas for the growth of American jobs. We want to be ahead of the software revolution. Let them do the software in India; we'll do other things in this country. We can do that. All it takes is leadership.


• MOSELEY BRAUN: Well, there was a reason I was designated "the ethanol queen" when I was in the Senate, and that is that I think that we have not only capacity here, but our trade policies should reflect fair trade and playing on an even basis with our competitors. The fact of the matter is every county subsidizes agriculture. I mean, that's just the reality of it. While have a responsibility to see to it that we don't exploit the production in other areas. The Caribbean, for example, is suffering because they cannot keep up now that they don't have preferential access to our markets. But the fact is that we -- you know, subsidizing agriculture isn't a bad thing so long as we're not dumping our product, but we're using it to good use. That's what ethanol represented, as far as I was concerned: an opportunity to use Illinois corn and Iowa corn to help us get a jump start on the technological revolution that we're going to have to have. I disagree. I'm not prepared to have the software go to India or anything else. I want to put productive capacity back here in the United States. I want to make certain that we get the jump on other parts of the world, in terms of producing a product that the rest of the world wants to buy. And our agriculture is an integral part of maintaining the strength and the health of our economy. And until we have a ratcheting down across the board of subsidies, I would not see us unilaterally disarming in that regard.


• EDWARDS: I supported it to begin with. I think now is the time to start easing off those tariffs. But, Tom, I want to talk about, in a bigger context, the discussion of the last 15 minutes, because the outsourcing of jobs, the loss of manufacturing jobs from trade agreements, what we see happening to family farmers here in America is all part of a bigger picture, which is the extraordinary sea change we've had in middle- class America in the last 20 years. Twenty years ago, middle-class families were saving 10 to 15 percent of their income, they had some financial security, they had a nest egg. Today, we have negative savings: They're in debt, their credit cards are maxed out. They're one financial disaster, one emergency -- one medical emergency from going under. If you're a child in a middle-class family this decade, it is more likely your parents will go into bankruptcy than that your parents will divorce. We have got to strengthen and lift up these middle-class families. I have a plan to do that, to help them buy a home, to help them be able to invest, to help them to be able to save. What we need to do is to create wealth in this country. But unlike George Bush, who only wants to create wealth for this who already have it, we need to create wealth for that vast majority of middle-class Americans who are struggling, having a hard time getting by and who, in fact, are the very engine of this economy; always have been, always will be.


• KERRY: Well, I don't need to be reminded of that, that's for sure. Tom, the answer is no. And the reason is that we haven't done the job of building the infrastructure in the country for the delivery. We haven't done the job of bringing Americans in to really support the marketplace the way we need to. Well, let me come back. I'm for ethanol. And I think it's a very important partial ingredient of the overall mix of alternative and renewable fuels we ought to commit to. And as president, I'll tell you, no young American in uniform ought to ever be held hostage to America's dependency on fossil fuel oil. We need to strike out for energy and dependence, and I will do that. But your former question about trade and about subsidies is critical. The subsidies we have today are an example of what's wrong overall in America. The USDA has become a wholly- owned subsidiary of big agri- business. And they are killing small family farms. They're killing small family communities. And what we need to do is have a president who says no to the energy bill, no to the Medicare-drug company marriage, no to the agri-business, vertical ownership of meat packers and hog lots. We need to protect the ability of our market place to, in fact, work. And Andy Grove is wrong. We do have a plan for science, for investment in education, for the ability to be able to grow our economy and create the jobs in the future. And that's exactly what we need to do, rather than going back to the protectionist days of the 1970s Democratic Party.


• Joseph Lieberman was not at the debate, and he did not address this issue in his Hadball segment.