The campaign website statement that Obama and Biden will pressure the World Trade Organization to enforce trade agreements and stop countries from continuing unfair government subsidies to foreign exporters and nontariff barriers on US exports was convenient populist rhetoric that ignored the fact that the US has long been one of the world’s biggest, if not the worst, culprits in engaging in a host of unfair trade practices, including massive government subsidies and nontariff barriers on foreign exports, which have massively hurt developing countries that have been pressured into opening their own markets with disastrous results. Obama’s campaign speeches certainly indicated a willingness to continue American unfair trade practices, including continued protectionism for the large agri-business operations that thrive on taxpayer support. The stated aim to ‘fix NAFTA so that it works for American workers’ is also, as you indicate, a one-sided view that ignores the devastating impact of NAFTA on Mexican workers.

The stated policy aims to end tax breaks for companies that move their operations overseas and to reward companies that maintain or increase the number of full-time workers in the US relative to their foreign operations sound great, but skirt the realities of global trade, which chiefly entails the exchange of goods, services, capital and labour within and between often extraordinarily powerful transnational corporations that use trade as merely one facet of complex and highly fluid global production and distribution processes that enable firms to minimise labour and other costs, and that have a tremendous policy influence on both poor and wealthy countries to protect their interests. Even the non-mainstream media fail to truly understand and highlight these realities in a way that moves the public discourses past outdated and meaningless debates about ‘open markets’ versus ‘protectionism’ or even ‘free trade’ versus ‘fair trade’. Unquestionably, however, until American workers understand that their rights cannot be protected in isolation from the rights of workers around the world, trade policy under the Obama administration is not likely to be profoundly different – although I would love to be proved profoundly wrong.

Despite receiving criticism for not even venturing onto the sidelines of the G20 gathering, Obama’s aloofness seems politically astute in light of the typical hot air generated, particularly regarding trade, with little substance likely forthcoming.