>>Unlike the almost pure free trader Clinton, the present candidates range from hard core "fair trade" legislators like Gephardt and Kucinich to just tough pro-labor politicians like Dean, Edwards and Kerry.

Nathan,

When did Gephardt become a "fair" trader? I recall that Gephardt supported NAFTA and the WTO. I don't recall Gephardt being in the forefront of working class issues.

WB

No, Gephardt voted against NAFTA
See http://www.nathannewman.org/EDIN/.trade/.NAFTA/.gephardt.html
(Press conference in 1994 opposing Clinton on NAFTA)

It would be more intellectually honest for the Democrats to blame escalating manufacturing job loss Bush the 43rd's policy of imperial overstretch, not "free trade."

First, as hardly needs pointing out, U.S. integration in the global economy is not governed by principles of "free trade." As anyone who studies the topic with eyes wide open knows, the U.S. is a bigger violator of the various "free trade" protocols to which it belongs than any other state, and Bush the 43rd has doggedly pursued various forms of beggar-thy-neighborism: hiked steel tariffs, renewed farm price supports, increased federal outlays for R&D in the military-industrial and security-industrial complexes, etc.. To speak of the necessity of substituting "fair trade" in place of "free trade" makes the U.S. seem like a hapless victim of predatory foreigners, when in reality it is the biggest and meanest cat in the jungle. Unflattering shades of narcissistic, self-deluded post-911 discourse: "Why do they hate us ?" becomes "Why do they take advantage of us ?"

Second, from a positivistic point of view, what are the leading factors responsible for the rapid acceleration of job loss in backward sectors of U.S. manufacturing (textiles, furniture, etc.) ? Well, on the surface of things, it is because backwards sectors of U.S. manufacturing are precipitously losing domestic market share to Chinese imports. Why are Chinese imports so cheap ? Not only because of very-low-wage Chinese labor super-exploited by Chinese state capitalists and rich country TNC's alike, but also because the yuan, so to speak, is
"undervalued."

Hence it seems that any serious plan to rescue what's left of the U.S.' low-end manufacturing base (supposing we consider this to be a desirable goal) would have to address this issue of the "undervalued" yuan. But Bush the 43rd's policy of trying to prop up flagging U.S. dominance by means of unilateral aggression in geostrategic locales (West and Central Asia, for now) _depends_ upon an "undervalued" yuan. Why ? Because it is China's massive merchandise trade surplus, lubricated by the "undervalued" yuan and invested in U.S. T-bills and other dollar-denominated liquid assets, that is largely underwriting Bush the 43rd's go-for-broke military adventurism. To hold onto their Reagan Democrat and Southern constituencies, the Republican Party may bleat about the revaluation of the yuan, but in fact, they are not truly serious about it, because their whole PNAC program is staked upon the recycling of huge East Asian current account surplues into U.S. government debt notes and corporate stocks and bonds. (And despite Iraq possibly turning into Vietnam, for the short term at least the strategy is working. The balance of payments surplus in China specifically and East Asia generally is getting bigger and bigger, and in lock-step the value of the dollar relative to the euro and the Dow Jones index have been on the rise since March 2003).

Indeed, I would hazard to say that in addition to phony domestic electoral posturing, the main reason the Bush the 43rd Administration (in the person of Treasury Secretary Snow) is publicly putting pressure on China to revalue the dollar-yuan peg is because China has repositioned some small portion of its central bank currency reserves in euro-denominated assets. That is, to the casual observer it appears that the U.S. Treasury is contemplating bringing dumping charges against China unless it revalues the yuan, ostensibly in the name of saving U.S. manufacturing jobs; but what is actually going on behind the scenes is the U.S. Treasury is threatening to cut off China's access to its largest export market unless it stops toying with diversifying its currency reserves.

Thus, to the degree that Democratic Party challengers join in the chorus to have China revalue the yuan, they are actually playing along (wittingly or unwittingly) with a ploy to retain and strengthen the de facto dollar standard, i.e. a ploy to have ordinary Chinese workers and peasants bear the fiscal costs of propping up a desperate and dangerous U.S. hegemony. From my point of view it would be much more progressive for the Democratic Party standard-bearers to advocate first and foremost the winding down of U.S. imperialism -- i.e. curtailing the extravagant overseas military spending that requires at all costs the defense of the de facto dollar standard, including the cost of hollowing out U.S. industrial infrastructure -- rather than pathetically invoking the "yellow peril."

This means gracefully embracing the inevitable end of U.S. hegemony and restructuring the U.S. economy so that it is genuinely "competitive" according to the neo-liberal precepts the U.S. so disingenuously espouses, i.e. no longer free-riding on the seignorage privileges the U.S. has virtually monopolized for some 30 years. Do you think the liberal wing of the U.S. ruling elite is actually prepared to do this ? Actually, I think to some degree Dean's platform resembles this recipe, which is why to my bizarre surprise I find myself tactically embracing his candidacy.