President Obama has nominated Republican, New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg to be his Secretary of Commerce, as a replacement for New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who withdrew because of a burgeoning public contracts scandal at home. Like everyone else tasked with the responsibility of overseeing our trade policies, Gregg has been a very consistent supporter of “free trade” and “open borders,” thus showing that Obama’s prior campaign related questioning of NAFTA and other outsourcing pacts may have been the populist ruse that we always anticipated.
The outsourcing of manufacturing and industrial jobs, coupled with the incursion of more cheap labor through our porous borders, has had a most devastating effect over time, first on the economic viability of our middle class, and then on the capacity of our own Nation to provide for its own infrastructure and security needs. While the vast majority of jobs in fact are to be found within small businesses, large scale manufacturing and industry are at the forefront of that ongoing, economic revitalization, that we need to empower said local communities throughout the Nation in which small businesses may thrive. They provide a real inroad into the middle class for persons unemployed, or increasingly underemployed, by the service and consulting based operations normally found in small businesses. There is furthermore no long term future for any Nation, that is too dependant on foreigners, for its energy, infrastructure, and security needs; and outsourcing augments such dependency by diverting investment elsewhere. In return for short term profits, outsourcing fosters the long term sell out of our own labor talent, managerial acumen, and capital to Nations, that do not have our best interests at heart. It replaces productivity at home, and a more viable middle class, with indebtedness as the basis of our supposed “prosperity;” and as we now are seeing with the bailout and “stimulus” packages making the rounds in Washington, an economy based primarily on the transfer of debt from one group to another indeed serves only the interests of socialist governance.
News of the appointment of Senator Gregg has been met with commentary about Obama appointing a “conservative” to the post of Commerce Secretary. We believe that the term cannot be further from the truth. American conservatism historically focuses on securing our national identity in the Declaration of Independence. Certainly, from our beginnings, we have been a Nation of Yankee, Southern, and then later Western traders; ours indeed has been a Nation unafraid of a burgeoning commerce in the world. Nevertheless, until a globalist orientation came to ascendancy in both the Republican and Democrat Parties in the mid-twentieth century, we fostered investment at home, that created the stage for our national interdependence, and disallowed a mass importation of poverty, that would have had the effect of lowering wages and never allowing a middle class to emerge in the first place. Such policies preserve us as independent and strong, a viable Nation among other Nations and in time the great defender of national and personal freedom against the near global fascination with fascism and communism. That is the heart of what it means to be an American conservatism: a revolutionary who promotes progress, including commerce, precisely in sustaining our national sovereignty and middle class way of life. In his quite consistent support for outsourcing and “open borders,” Gregg has shown that he is not in fact a friend of American conservatism. He is a classical liberal; and like many within his camp, he seems undeterred in casting aside the viability of the free, American laborer and homesteader as just another “commodity” to be traded on the world stage. Even a cursory read of the history of the Republican Party, until the ascendancy of globalism in the years just after the Second World War, manifests that politicians like Senator Gregg are hardly “Republican,” in said historical sense of that word, let alone “conservative” in defense of our national independence.
We have reprinted below said short article written by Alan Tonelson of the United States Business and Industry Council (www.americaneconomicalert.org), which highlights how Senator Gregg has been a consistent champion of outsourcing opportunity overseas. We anticipate that future Secretary Gregg will offer more of the same and that as such there will be no friend of the American worker, let alone our really struggling middle class, in the halls of the Commerce Department.
Secretary of Outsourcing, by Alan Tonelson
I knew that Senator Judd Gregg, the New Hampshire Republican widely reported to be President Obama's leading candidate to head the Commerce Department, was a staunch supporter of outsourcing-focused trade policies. But until I checked his record, I had no idea how staunch. And for how long!
Gregg began representing the Granite State in the Senate in 1993 -- the year NAFTA was approved. He began voting with the outsourcers then and he's continued ever since. Most Favored Nation status for China, WTO membeship for the People's Republic, the Uruguay Round world trade agreement, fast track, CAFTA, free trade with sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean Basin, Vietnam, Peru -- you name it on the outsourcers' agenda, and Gregg has been for it.
To put the icing on cake, he's a major Open Borders proponent, too. The only significant exceptions to this dismal record have been support for County-of-Origin labeling for food products, and for economic sanctions against the brutal military junta in Burma.
Even recognizing that President Obama has not exactly been a full-throated critic of these trade policies, the gap between his record and views and those of Gregg's is yawning -- especially on NAFTA and on China.
At the same time, Gregg's nomination would be consistent with Obama's presidential record of appointing strong supporters of outsourcing-focused trade policies to key trade-related positions in his administration -- like U.S. Trade Representative, which will presumably be held by nominee Ron Kirk, and the White House National Economic Council chair and Chief of Staff post, filled by Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel, respectively.
As Mayor of Dallas, Kirk was a backer of NAFTA as well as of breakneck trade expansion with China --though clearly he didn't eat, drink, and sleep trade policy. Summers, a Clinton-era Treasury Secretary, has been a primo globalization cheerleader since Day One. And Emanuel, a key Clinton White House staffer, was assigned to push NAFTA through Congress whatever phony promises had to be made and whatever misleading statements had to be issued.
Of course, Obama will remain The Decider of U.S. trade policy's basic direction. And he's clearly a believer in the strategy of hugging one's rivals tight. But as a result, many of the biggest battles over trade policy's heart and soul might be fought inside his administration. At a time when major changes on this front are urgently needed to get the U.S. economy back on a healthy growth path, that could become a recipe for dangerous delay.
