Free trade blues: labor-oriented democrats take on the Clintonian triangulators.

• Author: Faux, Jeff

On global economic issues, the newly elected U.S. Congress is likely to be the most populist in decades. At least seven new Senate seats and thirty new House seats that had been represented by strong supporters of deregulated trade and investment are now in the hands of strong critics. The new members, who have given the Democratic Party control of both houses for the first time in twelve years, will dramatically reinforce the growing Congressional dissatisfaction with free trade.

Even before this election, a majority of House Democrats opposed most recent trade agreements, and opposition has grown in the Senate as well. Hillary Clinton, for example, whose husband allied with Republicans to force passage of NAFTA, the WTO, and opening the U.S. market to China, voted against the Central American Free Trade Agreement, after listening to upstate New York voters describe what it was like to have their jobs shipped overseas.

The shifting sentiment reflects voters' growing frustration with wage stagnation, job insecurity, and the downloading of risk from those at the very top of the U.S. wealth pyramid to the rest of Americans. Since the present economic "expansion" began in 2001, the purchasing power of the typical American worker's weekly paycheck has dropped 3 percent. Among working males, real hourly wages are now about where they were in 1973. Meanwhile the salaries and bonuses of those at the top climb into the stratosphere.

Globalization may be only one of the forces that is squeezing working middle-class Americans, but it the one that most dramatizes their feelings of having been betrayed. For years, elites of both political parties promised Americans that global economic integration would make them richer. They were assured that their higher skills, better work ethic, and access to U.S. corporate technology would move them up the global job lad der while workers from low-wage countries would get the vacated jobs at the bottom.

Then, when U.S. corporations began to move production jobs and technology abroad, American workers were told that they were not sufficiently skilled; if they wanted to maintain their living standards they have to become more educated, creative, and harder working. And if they couldn't make it, well at least their children could go to college and prosper.

Now, as their children graduate (often with large debts from financing their education), the rising tide of off-shoring is washing away access to professional...