President Obama's Disingenuous Attack on Outsourcing [View all]

[brentspeak]

While we can all agree that Romney is a slimeball who shouldn't be allowed within a mile of the Oval Office, let's get real about where Obama himself really stands on the issue of American livelihoods moving overseas. (Caveat: Friedersdorf, while pointing out Obama's inconsistencies on the issue, himself seems to something of a globalization cheerleader -- and not one who can provide a convincing rationale to back up his support for it).

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/president-obamas-disingenuous-attack-on-outsourcing/259851/

President Obama's Disingenuous Attack on Outsourcing

Jul 16 2012, 7:30 AM ET
by Conor Friedersdorf, Atlantic staff writer

...

He (Obama) started playing this game (criticizing his opponents' support for job offshoring) during the Democratic primary in 2007, insisting that if elected president he would renegotiate NAFTA. To no one's surprise, he wasn't in office a month before he reneged on that promise. He was pretending to be someone who believed the populist critique of free trade agreements, but like the academic and business elites with whom he staffs his administration, Obama buys into the conventional case for free trade and never wanted to renegotiate NAFTA. He still doesn't, no matter how many times he complains that "Romney's firms shipped jobs to Mexico." In the long run, capital and labor mobility either benefit us or make us no worse off, insofar as global competition cannot be escaped. I tire of Obama pretending his position is different, and feel especially sorry for the voters he's misleading.

snip

And who heads the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness? Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric. "Since Immelt took over GE in 2001, the company has lost 37,000 American jobs, and added 25,000 jobs overseas," Cole Stengler writes in a Huffington Post article titled "Obama Jobs Council Packed With Outsourcing Companies." I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Competition from foreign workers is going to disrupt labor markets for the foreseeable future; a company that foreswore outsourcing would be neither efficient nor viable in the long run. If Obama simply disagreed that would be one thing; instead Obama pretends to think Romney is malign for his indirect complicity in outsourcing years ago, even as he praises and elevates various business elites who are directly responsible for massive outsourcing right now.

snip

Look at what he does and ponder who he is. Were America divided into two economic tribes, the "American protectionists" and the "Acela corridor elites," Obama would belong to the latter. He surrounds himself with guys like Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, who recently said, "There are those today who would resist the process of international integration; that is a prescription for a more contentious and less prosperous world. We should not oppose offshoring or outsourcing." Obama's present strategy is so pernicious because he is misleading the tribe of "American protectionists" into thinking that he shares their populist attitudes. Nonsense. If reelected to another term, he's no more going to stop outsourcing or end offshore bank accounts (though some of Romney's seem shady) than he's going to renegotiate NAFTA. He's going to keep staffing his economic team with establishment elites from Wall Street and Ivy League universities. Any blue-collar populist who votes for Obama is going to be and feel betrayed. They're going to have less faith in politics. Told that a pol shares their perspective, only to find out that they were misled, some of them will wind up radicalized.