My disappointment with Congressional Republicans and the Bush administration in domestic policy and appropriations has reached epic proportions with the complete election year sell-out on agriculture subsidies. This bloated embarrassment is enough to make the most cynical Washington political hack blush and makes the French look like agricultural free trade champions by comparison. Gone is any semblance of the revolutionary spirit of 1994, which produced the Freedom to Farm Act of 1996. We’ve now come full circle back to the dependency of the post-Depression years. Taken together with the steel import tariff increases in March, we have further damaged our free trade credibility and moral leadership. As David Sanger of the New York Times has noted, all the wrong messages are being sent and we’re abdicating our world trade leadership with a protectionist, “America first” mentality that convinces many that we are rigging the benefits of globalization to our benefit alone.
Daniel Yergin has written that one of the powerful lessons he learned in making the recent TV series “Commanding Heights” is about the power of world trade to reduce poverty, and that at the top of the policy agenda should be improving the access of developing countries to the markets of industrial countries. How can we now go to our allies in the industrial West with a straight face and talk of free trade, open markets, and breaking down the barriers of government subsidy and protectionism? More importantly, how can we admonish our own citizens to practice deferred gratification, self-reliance, personal responsibility, and wartime fiscal discipline when the corporate welfare machine is out of control? This is a huge price to pay for a couple of Senate seats, with repercussions far beyond the next election.
