By whom?
By candidate Barack Obama.
In February, 2008, Obama was on his way to defeating Hillary Clinton in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. The pair would square off in Wisconsin. Obama was determined to win on the basis of superior economic stances. So he went to a General Motors plant in Janesville, a community that had already suffered more than its share of downsizing, outsourcing and offshoring. (Janesville would suffer even more when, in the waning days of George W. Bush's presidency, GM initiated the closure of the plant where Obama spoke.)
"We are not standing on the brink of recession due to forces beyond our control," Obama told the assembled workers. "It was a failure of leadership and imagination in Washington -- the culmination of decades of decisions that were made or put off without regard to the realities of a global economy and the growing inequality it's produced."
Obama traced the roots of that growing inequality to "a Washington where decades of trade deals like NAFTA and China have been signed with plenty of protections for corporations and their profits, but none for our environment or our workers who've seen factories shut their doors and millions of jobs disappear; workers whose right to organize and unionize has been under assault for the last eight years."
Obama made the right connections on that winter day in Wisconsin six years ago, anticipating the pile of studies that tell us free trade is not working. The Peterson Institute for International Economics attributes close to 40 percent of the growth in US wage inequality to trade policies of recent decades. The Economic Policy Institute recently published an analysis headlined: "China trade drives down US wages and benefits and eliminates good jobs for US workers." The US Bureau of Labor Statistics confirms that two-thirds of displaced manufacturing workers who found new jobs in 2012 were hired at substantially lower wages -- with most experiencing a 20 percent or greater cut.
Noting that even supporters of past free-trade pacts now acknowledge the role they have played in widening the gap between rich and poor, Public Citizen Global Trade Watch director Lori Wallach reminds us that "economists of all stripes [now] agree that US trade policy has been one of the major contributors to growing US income inequality."
That's not a new concept. It's the one that Barack Obama talked about when he was winning the confidence of Democrats as a candidate in 2008. He distinguished himself from Hillary Clinton by unequivocally stating that "when I am President, I will not sign another trade agreement unless it has protections for our environment and protections for American workers."
Now Barack Obama is president. And he is trying once more to win the confidence of Americans, to get them engaged in a serious battle to renew what he described in 2008 as...
"...the promise of America -- that our prosperity can and must be the tide that lifts every boat; that we rise or fall as one nation; that our economy is strongest when our middle-class grows and opportunity is spread as widely as possible. And when it's not -- when opportunity is uneven or unequal -- it is our responsibility to restore balance, and fairness, and keep that promise alive for the next generation. That is the responsibility we face right now, and that is the responsibility I intend to meet as President of the United States."
Obama was right six years ago. A president can do a great deal to restore balance and fairness in America -- and around the world. He is taking some important steps, on the minimum wage and a host of other issues. But he has to recognize that he cannot restore balance and fairness by proposing new free-trade deals that extend the worst practices of old free-trade deals. To build the confidence that is necessary, and the coalitions that are possible, Obama should in his State of the Union address have done what he did as a candidate and acknowledge "the realities of a global economy and the growing inequality it's produced."
He didn't quite get there Tuesday night.
This will make it harder to achieve the "year of action" the president is right to say America desperately needs.
Read Next: On the eve of the address: a challenge for Obama's State of the Union.
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