"State of the Union" -- Obama's Very Big Mistake
by K.N. Davis - Former U.S. Ass’t Secretary of Commerce
As before all Presidential “State Of The Union” speeches, there was much speculation on what proposals Mr. Obama would make, especially on restoring growth and prosperity to America and closing the ever-widening inequality gap between our wealthiest and our struggling working class.
But even though the President often mentions the need to rebuild our domestic industries as our biggest source of new jobs, he has been sending mixed messages by urging adoption of two huge new “free trade” agreements – TPP with 11 low wage Southeast Asia countries and another with the European Common Market. Based on our history with NAFTA and the recent KORUS deal with South Korea, we’ve learned that “free trade” mostly means more access to our rich market and the loss of thousands of U.S. jobs.
So a key question has been: “Will the President explain how he can be pushing these new 'free trade' deals at the same time he says “fixing the economy and creating jobs are my top priorities?" The answer turned out to be “He’ll ignore the facts of our massive trade deficits now running at $600 billion annually due to bad 'free trade' deals and claim that his new deals will create U.S. exports to cut those deficits. But he left out that its 'net exports' that matter, and we’ve run massive 'net imports' in our trade deals."
So, Mr. President, you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool U.S. workers on “free trade" any more. There’s already been widespread opposition to TPP and Fast Track Authority. Your SOU speech was one last chance to be honest with the nation on trade. It was a very big mistake to misuse that chance. There will be sharply increased opposition to you and your false trade promises. You and your top advisers like USTR Michael Froman have only yourselves to blame, as do Wall Street and our multinational CEO’s who focus on growth abroad rather than on preserving and growing our home market!
