Free trade, NAFTA, GATT, the WTO — what they all produced is a Magna Carta of the transnational corporation, which looks longingly to the end of nation-states and the arrival of world government. Did the Republican songbirds of globalization not understand this?
Mitt Romney is today the beneficiary of some desperate counsel from alarmed Republicans on how to escape the snare in which he has found himself.
Democrats are charging that Romney was still chairman and CEO of Bain Capital between 1999 and 2002, when the company was advising some of America’s premier outsourcers.
The facts are in dispute. But the evidence seems to be on the side of the Romney camp — that he did not run Bain after he went off to fix the Salt Lake City Olympics. Yet the matter raises a larger question.
What has the Republican Party got against outsourcing?
Did not the Republican Party come to the rescue of NAFTA and GATT when Bill Clinton cried for help in fighting off the wicked protectionists?
Did not the GOP foreign and economic policy elite endorse entry into a World Trade Organization where we have no veto and one vote?
The Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable and National Association of Manufacturers, all GOP allies, proclaim the right of U.S. corporations to move production out of America — to where taxes are lower, regulations lighter and labor cheaper.
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