Obama on Trade

Letter to the Editor of the Ventura County Star            

 By Jerry Drucker  

 Re: your June 12 article “Democrats make push to kill trade bill”

The minority Democrats won the first phase of the fast-track trade bill by rejecting it.  President Obama, Wall Street and big business wanted that portion of the bill to pass, but the Democrats raised enough votes to stop it.

The unions and many U.S. economists were concerned the fast-track bill, or TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), was just another NAFTA, which killed American workers’ jobs and allowed U.S. manufacturers (80,000 of them) to go offshore to places like China, where workers make 60 cents an hour.

President Obama’s public presentation of the trade bill was from Nike headquarters in the U.S., where he ended his speech by saying there would be 10,000 new jobs added to Nike’sU.S. plant, but didn’t mention that Nike has almost 1 million off-shore workers.  Can we do the math?

Just before President Obama’s first election, he said, “If I’m wrong about something, hold my feet to the fire.”  Looks like the Democrats and the unions gave President Obama his first “hot-foot.”