Posted on 05/17/2002 11:00:03 AM PDT by CaptIsaacDavis
In the struggle to pass the Andean Trade Act, which the Bush Administration wants passed because it includes fast-track trade negotiating reauthorization, important principles are at stake. The Senate, which debated various amendments to the enabling bill today, voted in one case on nothing less than the fate of our very economic system -- as Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) pointed out in the gripping debate. Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla) called it "socialistic" (the AP story quoted him incorrectly as saying it was "pre-socialistic") and said "I'm embarrassed how bad this idea is." Curiously, an updated version of the AP story (the one likely to make it into the papers) on this debate deleted the comments by Nickles!!!! Compare...
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020516/ap_on_go_co/congress_trade_47
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020516/ap_on_go_co/congress_trade_46
Sen. Daschle and the Leftist clique running the Senate added provisions to the bill that would create what Sen. Daschle called a "powerful idea" -- a NEW ENTITLEMENT for WAGE INSURANCE. "Powerful idea" is right -- he got it from Marx. It's called wage controls.
Before I get to wage "insurance," the Amendment also expands coverage for training and assistance programs to workers "indirectly" affected by foreign trade. Entitlements are proposed to include coverage of 70% of health care costs -- in perpetuity post-job transition (a back door to socializing health care!!!). Daschle, et. al., know that more than half of all of private commercial activities have an "indirect" foreign trade aspect today -- from the metal stamping companies supplying parts to exporters to restaurants in Silicon Valley and PA mill towns. If this passes into law, socialism will come not in one fell swoop, but gradually over the next decade through the turnover in jobs "affected by foreign trade" and a steady Congressal and Court-driven expansion of the entitlements. We can be certain that the Courts will have a role in defining what constitutes a job affected by foreign trade.
Now for the WAGE INSURANCE bureaucracy that may be created if this monstrosity is approved. Having broadened coverage to potentially tens of millions, a new program under this bill is proposed to have the government pay -- in perpetuity as a permanent entitlement! -- up to 50% of the "income" lost when moving from a higher paying job to a lower paying one. There are NO income limits or needs tests (socialism for everyone)! So, as two opponents pointed out on the floor, even millionaire business owners would qualify to get their $5K -- the provisional "cap" for the "pilot" program. And you don't have to be laid off to qualify! Sen. Gregg cited an example of someone quitting their high tech job to become a golf pro and getting a permanent subsidy of $5k per year (under the "pilot" limit).
The "pilot program" was "funded" to the tune of $50MM -- a figure that Sen. Gregg and others scoffed at. Sen. Daschle and liberal Republican conferees came up with that absurd number by putting a temporary "cap" or max on the entitlement of $5K and estimating the total based on the numbers of people who applied under the old program. Various Republican opponents noted that this is duplicitous, because the entitlements are far "richer" than in the original program, and the base of potential applicants astronomically greater.
As Sen. Gregg pointed out, the wage insurance vote was about creating a new bureaucracy and a principle that Congress and the Courts WILL expand. Sen. Gregg (quoted by AP):"This is a brand new, major entitlement which will expand dramatically. It is not some benign little pilot program." The potential growth is not merely to a few $billion within a few years as one Senator observed, but by my estimate HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS -- when socialists in the Courts get at this.
The actual vote was on an amendment proposed by Sen. Gregg to eliminate the wage insurance program from the bill. Various Senators argued that "it was only $50MM," but Sen. Gregg correctly pointed out that if the numbers were so small why was it "key" to the compromise? Moreover, as Sen. Nickles pointed out, why was this new program literally added at the last second -- and never debated (for some Senators it was news) -- as part of a "compromise" to get the Trade Act to the floor with fast-track reauthorization included?
The vote was about "PRINCIPLE" (Gregg) and setting the stage for the explosive growth of a new entitlement bureaucracy. The vote itself -- to "table" or kill the amendment -- was positioned by defenders of the "compromise," including REPUBLICAN Senators Phil Gramm (R-Tex) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) as necessary to keep fast-track reauthorization alive. Gramm and Grassley were among the 58 who voted to KILL the Gregg amendment. Bizarre and curious, since it was the same Sen. Gramm who said in the course of the debate that if a larger (current "funding") entitlement to workers of defunct and bankrupt companies driven out of business because of trade (the $179MM so-called "steel workers amendment" proposed by John D. Rockefeller (D.W.Va)) was added, he was "off this bill."
Sen. Gramm compared wage insurance as a compromise akin to deciding it was better to "kiss a pig on the mouth" instead of somewhere else. What he failed to distinguish was that a pig is a PIG, no matter what end you're looking at.
The entire point of the exercise by Daschle, et. al., is to get the Bush Administration to back away from this bill by making the "compromise" so unpalatable that even a doctrinaire free trader like President Bush has to retreat and come at this again some other day (post-November). White House press secretary Ari Fleischer was quoted in the AP story arguing that Sen. Rockefeller's "steelworkers' amendment" sent a "troubling signal that the Senate is seeking to undermine the possibility of passage of free trade." No kidding.
What is more disturbing is that the WH and Gramm aren't ready to take a stand on WAGE INSURANCE. Daschle has given the Republican leaders in the Senate and the WH an issue to DESTROY Democrats with in the Fall!!!! "Vote against Wage Insurance and Socialism!"
But, Nooo!!!! They would rather stage manage this fight over the "somewhere else" on the PIG than publicly -- and loudly -- walk away from this despicable "compromise" with socialism out of PRINCIPLE.
If the White House signs off on this swinish "compromise," a transition from social democracy to democratic socialism will be inevitable (The Republic was usurped long ago!). All in the name of so-called "free trade" and the dislocating effects it causes when one is determined to promote pseudo-"free" trade with socialist governments. It takes one to trade with one!
Laissez-faire "free trade" of the sort our current president appears to hold dear is a concept and world view much broader than foreign trade conducted with national interests at heart -- that is, in the latter case, with select partners intended to accumulate wealth and access to necessary resources. Indeed, I would argue that there are two schools of thought among "free traders" -- nationalist (rooted in Adam Smith's original thinking and 200 years of American prosperity) and globalist. Globalist "free" trade promotes a vision of open and broad-based commerce intended to create "interdependence" with almost any country not at war with us or with voting blocks of expats within the US determined to prevent it. The more pernicious and tyrannical zealots of globalist free trade dare to advance the notion that sovereign choices about how and who we trade with should be "regulated" by international organizations. However, "free" trade can only be truly "free" when it is with similarly free peoples with shared values and interests, and committed to fair and open competition. Doctrinaire "globalist" free-traders, who love their junkets to communist China and socialist Mexico, talk constantly about promoting "free market" values in places like China through trade. However, some are so zealous or selfish that they are intellectually blind to the reality that in order to achieve marginal ideological advances overseas they must also create sometimes severe economic dislocations at home -- which work to PROMOTE socialism in the United States (from subsidies to farmers to this welfare program for "trade affected" workers). In the Andean Trade Act, that relationship is, as one Senator put it, the "key" to the "compromise." Trade with socialists and compromise with socialism.
Article by James F. Burke
"Socialist Hell" is correct...this legislation makes "Living Wage" legislation look like child's play!! Yet another great example why you can never compromise with the Collectivist RATS...they'll always--ALWAYS--ask for more!!
SHEEEEEESH...MUD
What in the hell is THAT?
Is this some kind of a JOKE?
It'd be the second joke I've read here in the past 15 minutes if it is; &, I gotta tell ya -- I ain't laughing.
Lookit; when everything's said & done?
Do we really want to do business with the 'Rats if it means this kind of crap?
...let's not; &, say we did.
Exactly!! Between now and November, Dubyuh and the GOPers need to quit compromising and draw some lines in the sand to differentiate the Right from the RATS...then take the argument to the Leftist scumbags during the mid-term campaigns.
FReegards...MUD
Ughhh kimosabee; you got da color right.
"You got a mouse in your pocket?"
mercy-me.
*Unusually* surly today; aren't we?
(Awwww yer just pissed 'cuz they told ya to stick your CC deduction where the sun don't shine...eh? ;^) )
Frankly?
I'm somewhat surprised seeing you're still 'round here & not in a low earth orbit.
...courtesy of FR's catapult?
Oh of course; those things.
Well that's different, then.
I'd thought this thing might've been named in honor of a famous & well known gay congressional Page named *Ande*.
Maybe one who died of AIDS?
Actually?
I should've known better; since, the conspicuous absence of an apostrophe is quite glaring.
...just goes to show there's a lot more to a name than ya might think at first glance.
What...& make 'em mad?
Or worse yet; hurt their feelings?
...sayyyyyy what are you, some kind of troublemaker or somthing?
Sen Gramm from Texas summed it up pretty well earlier this week on the AMDMT debate I will try to find it in the cong. record if you like, and post it here...
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