The Nasty Truth: Free Trade Agreements May Scuttle Green Jobs Plans

If Barack Obama wins the White House, his administration will face potentially irreconcilable conflicts between his signature proposals -- like transforming the American economy into a 21st century "green-collar" job engine -- and the dictates of the "free trade" regime that both major parties have advanced with unbridled zeal for the past quarter century.

It's a story that's gotten little attention during the campaign. The traditional media have found the time to analyze Sarah Palin's wardrobe in great detail, take a hard look at whether or not the fact that Joe Biden was raised in Scranton, Penn., will win over white folks from the "Heartland" and ponder the all-important question of whether a mainstream, centrist Democrat like Barack Obama is in fact a crypto-Maoist. But they haven't bothered to point out that much of what both the Democratic and Republican nominees are promising on the campaign trail would likely be found "illegal" according to the rulings of shadowy trade tribunals that have the power to impose daunting financial penalties against the U.S. government if it were to stray from the economic orthodoxy known as "neoliberalism."

That's what "free trade" deals are about: limiting by treaty the policy space in which lawmakers can operate. As such, both of the presidential candidates are boxed into a cage of their respective parties' creation. It's the dirty secret of the 2008 campaign.

Recently, AlterNet asked Van Jones, founder of Green For All and author of The Green Collar Economy, about this issue, and he responded with defiance. "I want the WTO to tell us we can't do this," he said, "because then we won't have a WTO. I want the free traders to stand up in front of the world and explain to Americans why some people are going to tell you that you can't have clean energy and you can't have your home retrofitted (with American-made products) because it is more efficient for it to be made in Asia or Germany, that you can't bring Detroit back to build wind turbines. I want the free traders to defend having an overseas body to declare this agenda illegal. I want that fight."

It's a fight that might finally help achieve public awareness about what "free trade" really means. When most people hear the word "trade," they picture ships filled with goods crisscrossing the world's oceans. But the reality is that "free trade" is simply a well-tested euphemism for agreements between governments that limit their ability to intervene in the private sector, ostensibly to unleash the awesome "power of the free market."

They don't just cover trade between countries, but also a host of issues that most ordinary people would consider to be purely domestic matters, as long as they have some tenuous connection with international commerce, no matter how far removed.

Activists from across the developing world have been trying for years to call attention to that reality but have largely been ignored by a media and political establishment devoted to promoting the so-called "Washington Consensus."

Now, with Americans hungry for new approaches to the economy, health care, energy policy and a host of other issues, the "free trade" deals advanced by both Democrats and Republicans over the past 30 years may very well come back to haunt them.

According to a report by the watchdog group Public Citizen (PDF), "Many WTO rules have little or nothing to do with international trade," but every WTO country is still "required to 'ensure the conformity of its laws, regulations and administrative procedures'" with the WTO's orthodoxy. Failing to do so is not a meaningless act of diplomatic defiance; the WTO has an enforcement arm. As the report explains:

Domestic policies that extend beyond the WTO constraints are subject to challenge by other WTO signatory countries -- often at the behest of their affected industries -- before WTO tribunals. Of the 137 cases decided to date at the WTO, challenges to domestic laws have been successful nearly 90 percent of the time, with countries moving to alter their laws as ordered except in a single instance, where a country instead chose to pay indefinite trade sanctions to keep its policy in place.

The report also warns that the Corporate Right might use these "incompatibilities" to attack all sorts of progressive legislation, creating what the authors call "a chilling effect."