Tags

Columbia Journalism Review content tagged Free Trade

1. June 3, 2011 01:06 PM

   A Pulled Scoop Shows U.S. Fought to Keep Haitian Wages Down (UPDATED)

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Nation has a scoop—or had, actually—from Wikileaks cables showing that the Obama administration pressured Haiti not to raise its minimum wage to 61 cents an hour, or five bucks a day. The magazine posted the story the other day and has now pulled it, saying it will repost it next Wednesday "To accord with the publishing schedule of Haiti...

   Continue reading
2. April 5, 2011 02:11 PM

   A Triangle Shirtwaist-Like Disaster, Buried By the U.S. Press

   Outsourcing tragedies while paying a sliver of what our workers made 100 years ago

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Consumerist has a fascinating post asking whether we've really eliminated our Triangle Shirtwaist Factory disasters or if we've just outsourced them. It turns out that a sweatshop in Bangladesh that made clothes for The Gap, Abercrombie & Fitch, JC Penney, Target, and others, suffered an eerily Triangle-like disaster just a few months ago: When we noted the 100th anniversary...

   Continue reading
3. August 8, 2012 11:00 AM

   A welcome spotlight on trade deals

   Reuters's Johnston goes to Korea to look at the prospects of a new agreement

   By Ryan Chittum

   In March, the Obama administration implemented a trade agreement with South Korea that it promised, implausibly, would create tens of thousands of jobs to the U.S. While we've had just two monthly trade reports since the agreement went into effect, they're not looking good for the home team, as David Cay Johnston of Reuters is sharp to point out. In...

   Continue reading
4. October 13, 2011 07:17 PM

   Audit Notes: Economic Policy Edition

   By Ryan Chittum

   Ezra Klein, in his long story (which you should read) on why and how Obama's economic policy failed (I should add, at least failed to get the economy out of the much. It did prevent a much worse crisis), reports that McCain's top economic adviser was far more radical than Obama about fixing the housing and debt crisis: In late...

   Continue reading
5. November 12, 2010 03:29 PM

   Audit Notes: Free Trade “Hit,” Taxing Wall Street, Bruce Karatz v. Tron Carter

   By Ryan Chittum

   One thing the financial press doesn't much pretend to be neutral about is "free trade." They love that stuff. See for instance, this Wall Street Journal headline this morning: U.S. Hit By Trade Setback See, some of us—most of us!—don't think the U.S. got "hit" by any "setback" by not making a free-trade pact with South Korea. We always seem...

   Continue reading
6. November 16, 2012 03:08 AM

   Audit Notes: Papacare, Post problem, trade reporting

   Forbes finds Papa John's Obamacare math doesn't add up

   By Ryan Chittum

   Papa John's CEO John Schnatter has been carping for some time that Obamacare will add 10 to 14 cents to the price of a pizza. That sounds like an argument for the health care law rather than against it (a dime extra on a $10 or $15 pizza to insure your pizza delivery guy?) but Papa John, from his 40,000...

   Continue reading
7. September 27, 2011 07:53 PM

   Audit Notes: The Costs of Trade, WSJ Op-Ed Page, Frontier Days

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Wall Street Journal covers an MIT study that found the downsides of trade with China have been worse than previously known (amongst economists, that is. Workers have long understood this): A pattern emerged, with areas where factories were most exposed to Chinese import growth faring worse than the less exposed. Between 2000 and 2007, a community at the 75th...

   Continue reading
8. March 15, 2011 08:30 PM

   Audit Notes: Two Economies, Red-Handed Raj, Life at SXSW

   By Ryan Chittum

   Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post comments on a new study out from an NYU prof that shows how globalization and so-called free trade have opened up a schism between two parts of the U.S. economy. Michael Spence and Sandile Hlatshwayo divided the economy into tradable (manufactured goods, natural resources, financial services, etc.) and non-tradable spheres (teaching, health care, retail,...

   Continue reading
9. August 31, 2012 11:00 AM

   Audit Notes: Wall Street sheriffs, preprints, Globalization and workers

   Supposedly in a "race to investigate, indict, subpoena and fine"

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Wall Street Journal would have you believe Wall Street is running scared from all the financial cops in New York (emphasis mine): For decades, New York has served as home to ambitious prosecutors and regulators eager to make waves that ripple well beyond its boroughs. But the race to investigate, indict, subpoena and fine has reached a new level...

   Continue reading
10. January 25, 2011 07:11 PM

    Ezra Klein’s Flawed Assumptions on Trade With China

    By Ryan Chittum

    Ezra Klein accepts some unfortunate assumptions in his Washington Post column on trade yesterday morning. Let's start with this one: It's not that Chinese companies have never taken an American worker's job; they have. But the Chinese, by and large, are competing with companies in India, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia, because the things those workers make are not, in most...

    Continue reading
11. October 28, 2011 06:33 PM

    Flack-Driven Local Coverage of a Factory Closure Fails

    Fort Smith's Southwest Times Record blows it on a huge loss to the community

    By Ryan Chittum

    Whirpool is laying off more than a thousand employees in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and shipping the work to Mexico and two plants in the U.S. So how does the local paper, the Southwest Times Record, cover the exit of one of its largest employers? With stories that read like they were written by Whirlpool's PR department. Here's the lede from...

    Continue reading
12. January 21, 2011 12:09 PM

    Pearlstein: On China Trade, an Eye for an Eye

    By Ryan Chittum

    Of all the commentary this week on China, none got to the heart of the problem anywhere near as well as Steven Pearlstein did in the Washington Post. American trade policies toward China are a giant WTF—something akin to a boxer agreeing to fight straight while letting his opponent bring weapons into the ring, bribe the judges, and pay off...

    Continue reading
13. January 13, 2011 04:27 PM

    Remapping the Debate on China’s Industrial Policy

    Our rival has one. Where's ours?

    By Ryan Chittum

    Remapping Debate has an interesting piece on how the U.S. finds itself at the mercy of the Chinese for a critical ingredient in a number of important technologies, like hybrid cars, missile tracking systems, and wind turbines, and what that says about our broader trade policies. It gets at one of the core security issues caused by unrestrained free trade:...

    Continue reading
14. April 19, 2011 03:03 PM

    That Giant Sucking Sound

    WSJ: Big companies shed millions of jobs in 2000s while adding millions abroad

    By Ryan Chittum

    The Wall Street Journal has your chart of the day. It shows that U.S.-based multinational corporations added 2.4 million workers overseas from 2000 to 2009, while cutting their U.S. workforce by 2.9 million. These come from a The Wall Street Journal story by the paper's economics editor David Wessel, who got these numbers from Commerce Department stats. To put it...

    Continue reading
15. September 17, 2012 06:50 AM

    The Post goes south on NAFTA

    The paper ignores or glosses over Mexico trade's effects on the US

    By Ryan Chittum

    The Washington Post rah-rah story on trade with Mexico last week left out key context for its American readers. The Post writes that Mexicans are buying lots of American-made stuff thanks to NAFTA, a growing middle class, and retailers like Costco. But the paper does all it can to avoid talking about the flipside of that coin: That Americans are...

    Continue reading