Sojourners Magazine and Sherrod Brown

For those of you who aren't familar with Sojourners, it is a Christian organization founded by Jim Wallis. Wallis is the author of God's Politics: Why the Right is Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It. Sojourners is an organization that talks about issues such as free trade, death penalty, and poverty as well as abortion and gay rights. It publishes a magazine. In its magazine this month is an article on free trade that points out how the mainstream media only pushes one side of the free trade debate, and that is the side the favors globalization. In that article is a favorable reference to Ohio's newly elected Senator Sherrod Brown. You can read the article by clicking on the link in this entry's title.

Report Says 3.2 Million U.S. Manufacturing Jobs Lost

The AP put out a story yesterday, April 20, 2007, about the loss of manufacturing jobs in America. The story points out that 84 percent of Americans in the labor force are employed in service jobs, up from 81 percent in 2000. This loss of manufacturing jobs has put "16 percent of the nation's 379 metropolitan areas are in recession, reflecting primarily the troubles in manufacturing. There have been heavy job losses in a variety of industries from textiles and apparel to paper and furniture."

Most of these manufacturing job losses can be explained by two words: China and Mexico. That is where the jobs are going. These job losses are caused by cheaper labor rates and by the Chinese government keeping its currency artificially low compared to the currency of the United States.

Currently the job losses are being seen in manufacturing, but according to one expert quoted in the article, job losses will soon spread to service jobs. This is from the article: "Princeton economist Alan Blinder, who was vice chairman of the Federal Reserve during the Clinton administration, says the number of jobs at risk of being shipped out of the country could reach 40 million over the next 10 to 20 years. That would be one out of every three service sector jobs that could be at risk."

When you start looking at Democratic candidates for our party's 2008 nomination ask yourself which ones will fight for American workers and which ones won't.

Washington Post Editorial Board: Out of Economic Touch with Working Americans

The Washington Post ran an editorial on 4.4.2007 criticizing Democrats in Congress for opposing free trade deals. The editorial contained this concluding sentence: If the Democrats do not wish to be known for standing against the prosperity brought by globalization, they should pocket the concessions the administration has offered and make some compromises of their own. The question isn't whether globalization has brought prosperity, but how and for whom has it brought prosperity?

In 2003 the Economic Policy Institute did a study on how many jobs had been lost since the adoption of NAFTA. The EPI concluded that NAFTA had displaced production that had the net effect of costing 879,280 American jobs. The study put it this way: Between 1993 and 2002, NAFTA resulted in an increase in exports that created 794,194 jobs, but it displaced production that would have supported 1,673,454 jobs (see figure). Thus, the combined effect of changes in imports and exports as a result of NAFTA was a loss of 879,280 U.S. jobs.

What was true in 2003 is still true today: the rewards from globalization aren't spread throughout the economy equally. There are winners and losers in globalization. Whether you support trade agreements depends on how you see yourself and others like you faring under globalization.

Here's another fact from EPI released this week: Newly released data on income inequality reveal that all of the gains in 2005, the most recent year for data of this type, went to households in the top 10%. Moreover, those even higher up the income scale—say, the top 1% and above—saw the largest gains of all.

Our guess is that the economic elites who support globalization are people who live in the top 10% and most likely the top 1% of American households. People like the owners of the Washington Post. That's why those people support globalization. The Democratic Party, however, represents a lot of people who don't fall into the top 10% of American households. That's why a lot of Democrats oppose globalization.