260 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized BiographyOBAMA STRADDLES ON FREE TRADE SELLOUTS
During the Ohio and Pennsylvania primaries, Obama postured as a sharp critic of free trade
sellouts like NAFTA, CAFTA, and others. At the same time, Obama sent his top economic
controller, Skull and Bones alumnus Austin Goolsbee of the Friedmanite Chicago school, to
reassure the Canadians that Obama was simply bloviating for electoral purposes. Obama has
flipped on this issue literally countless times:
Regarding the North American Free Trade Agreement, Obama recently boasted, “I don’t think
NAFTA has been good for Americans, and I never have.” Yet, Calvin Woodward reviewed
Obama’s record on NAFTA in a February 26, 2008 Associated Press article and found that
comment to be misleading: “In his 2004 Senate campaign, Obama said the US should pursue more
deals such as NAFTA, and argued more broadly that his opponent’s call for tariffs would spark a
trade war. AP reported then that the Illinois senator had spoken of enormous benefits having
accrued to his state from NAFTA, while adding that he also called for more aggressive trade
protections for US workers.”’ (Matt Gonzalez, “The Obama Craze,” Counterpunch)
After Goolsbee’s secret contacts with the Canadians were revealed, Obama indignantly denied
that these talks had taken place. Nevertheless, at the close of the primary season, in June 2008,
Obama told Fortune magazine that he was indeed a friend free trade agreements and a dedicated
apostle of the supremacy of market forces. But, just as in the case of Obama’s warmongering
against Pakistan and other countries, the lemming legions loyal to Barky are epistemologically
incapable of seeing the reality before their eyes, meaning that they are hysterical in the strict sense
of the word.
By now, Obama has learned to recite the standard Democratic Party litany that labor and
environmental guarantees must be included in any future free trade sellouts — as if these trivial and
minimalist requirements would do anything to stop or even slow the destruction of the US economy
by the sinister forces of economic globalization. But when it comes to actually voting for
something concrete in this direction, Obama is as totally impotent and feckless as he usually is:
Putting aside campaign rhetoric, when actually given an opportunity to protect workers from
unfair trade agreements, Obama cast the deciding vote against an amendment to a September
2005 Commerce Appropriations Bill, proposed by North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan, that
would have prohibited US trade negotiators from weakening US laws that provide safeguards
from unfair foreign trade practices. The bill would have been a vital tool to combat the
outsourcing of jobs to foreign workers and would have ended a common corporate practice
known as “pole-vaulting” over regulations, which allows companies doing foreign business to
avoid “right to organize,” “minimum wage,” and other worker protections. (Matt Gonzalez,
“The Obama Craze,” Counterpunch)OBAMA THE WIMP
One of the issues discussed in the Democratic candidates debates in the early part of the primary
season was the need to fight the entrenched powers of Washington in order to make any progress at
all of the People’s agenda. Senator Edwards talked a very good game of fighting, and promised to
fight all the way to the convention, but then suddenly dropped out even before the Super Tuesday
primaries. Senator Clinton promised to fight, and then won wide admiration by actually delivering
on that promise, showing considerable courage in the process. Obama’s method was to take the
capitulation policy of someone like his mentor Tom Daschle, and raise that cowardice and