Our allies at Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch posted a revealing piece on U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk’s recent visit to Seattle to meet with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) trade ministers and business executives. Not wanting to defame the U.S. position as the harbinger of all-things-commerce, Kirk somehow suggested that our state had not been touched by the economically destructive effects of NAFTA, like the experience of the mid-west. Dodging questions on the relationship between trade and “protectionist” agricultural subsidies that inflate the dominance of a few multinationals, while hurting farmers at home and abroad, Kirk appears to be the spokesperson for the derailing of the administration’s campaign promises to revisit and revise the failed free trade model of unhinged deregulation.
