Barack Obama met with faith-based leaders in Brownsville on Friday, participating in what his campaign called a prayer meeting as part of the senator’s ongoing efforts to show America that a leading Democrat “gets it” about religion and politics.

I wonder if somewhere on his way to Brownsville the leading Dem candidate for president got a prayer of an idea about the importance of trade and commerce in our part of the world as it relates to business ties with Mexico. Obama and his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, have been trying to out do each other over the last week in Ohio in their denunciations of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The two Dem candidates had a wonderful “me too” moment in their last debate, this one in Cleveland, where they both promised to pull this nation out of NAFTA, if necessary, unless Canada and Mexico meet U.S. demands to renegotiate the 15-year-old trade pact.  It remains a mystery as to why Obama and Clinton believe either Mexico or Canada would agree to any such negotiations, or even if a majority of Congress would go along with such a notion.

The three-nation trade agreement has become a handy scapegoat in Ohio for all that ails the state’s economy. With that state and Texas voting on March 4 in two criticial primaries that could decide the Democratic presidential race, Clinton and Obama are fallng over themselves in pandering to the protectionist leanings of Ohio.

Obama had this this gem the other day as reported by the Chicago Tribune.

“In Youngstown, Ohio, I’ve talked to workers who have seen their plants shipped overseas as a consequence of a bad trade deal like NAFTA, literally seeing equipment unbolted from the floors of factories and shipped to China,” Obama said.

Uh, senator, NAFTA involves the U.S., Mexico and Canada. How exactly is NAFTA to blame for the loss of jobs to China? In reality, according to one economist at Cleveland State University, NAFTA is directly responsible for less than 10 percent of the manufacturing jobs Ohio has lost since 2000. The reminder of the job losses are due to the general globalization of industries, the greater efficiencies sparked by the relentless march of improving technologies, and some bad business strategies on the part of some U.S. companies.

“It’s easy to blame the bogeyman (NAFTA), rather than the failed business strategies of Ford, GM, or Chrysler,” said Ned Hill, an economist at Cleveland State, in an story published last week by The Christian Science Monitor.

Here’s getting to the heart of this issue as stated so well in a recent USA Today editorial: “The reality is that NAFTA has relatively little to do with either the overall job losses or job gains. China is a far larger force…as has been the unprecedented and sweeping gains in worker productivity that have allowed U.S. companies to churn out more goods with fewer people.”

There’s lot more. How about the 25 million jobs that have been added to the U.S. economy since NAFTA’s passage? Or the fact that the U.S. unemployment rate has declined from 6.7 percent when NAFTA took effect to today’s 4.9 percent rate. There’s also the matter of trade between Mexico and the U.S. growing from $81 billion to $232 billion over the first 10 years of the trade pact’s existence.

And here’s something you won’t hear from Obama or Clinton. USA Today reports that the supposedly NAFTA-ravaged Ohio has seen a net gain of 900,000 jobs since the trade pact took effect, with new jobs in finance, professional services and health care more than making up for losses in manufacturing.

NAFTA has also helped to save U.S. jobs, according to John Engler, president fo the National Association of Manufacturers. Englier told the Wall Street Journal last week that under NAFTA many U.S. firms “found they could be more globally competitive by putting some manufacturing in Mexico or Canada while retaining high-end production in the U.S.” The bottom line result: “Such flexibility may have saved thousands of U.S. jobs from going abroad,” the Journal reports.

Even for all of the doom and gloom coming from Obama and Clinton about NAFTA and trade in general, data compiled by a Harvard economist shows that the average U.S. blue-collar worker’s wages, when adjusted for inflation, have risen by 11 percent since NAFTA passed.

“Instead of driving pay scales down, it (NAFTA),  appears to have pulled them up,” wrote Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune.

Another Obama gem on trade came when he said in Ohio last week that NAFTA “hasn’t put food on the table” of Ohio families. That’s debatable, but greater volumes of trade and commerce under NAFTA have surely put plenty of food on the tables of South Texas families, not to mention helped to push up household income levels in our area.

Democrats on the national level are still locked into old political scripts in which their party is tied to traditional constituencies in the Rust Belt, ignoring the growth and vitality of states in the Sun Belt and the Southwest. This helps to explain why the Dems have strugged so much in this wide section of America. Obama and Clinton are mouthing more of the same old, same old on economic and trade matters, putting the Rust Belt and the demands of fading labor unions over the emergence of the Southwest and the possibilities of a new day in America.

On matters of trade, Obama ought to follow his promise to tell Americans not what they want to hear, but what they need to hear. That’s what he did when he was running for the U.S. Senate in Illinois in 2004, when “he told Illinois farmers that the U.S. benefits from exports under the World Trade Organization and NAFTA, and he recommended that the U.S. go after more deals like it,” the Wall Street Journal reported last week.

“As an exporting state,” Obama said back then, “Illinois would be hurt by a trade war sparked by tariffs,” which would be “particularly devastating to our agricultural economy.”

Somewhere on the road to Ohio, Obama and her rival Hillary, (whose husband Bill pushed NAFTA through Congress as president), lost their way on trade, and became the same old Democrats, saying the same old things, and promising the same old results, to paraphrase a Barack chant.

Maybe if he is elected president, Obama will not only find religion at meetings of faith, but also get a prayer of an idea how more trade and commerce benefits America.

Joaquin Tijerina, Official Chisme Columnist & Blogger

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 11:40 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.