When anti-globalization protesters take to the streets, America�s liberals are cheering them on. For them, globalization helps only large corporations, exploits cheap labor, and rewards lax environmental standards. Led by Democrats like Howard Dean, these liberals increasingly see free trade as driving down wages and sending American jobs overseas. Tapping into a powerful fear among workers, American liberals have declared free trade and open markets dangerous to America, and are calling for retreat.

Yet in this provocative new book, Gresser shows how these American liberals who look to put the brakes on globalization have unwittingly turned their backs on the poor, and have abandoned a tradition heralded by Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Clinton. Instead, they have adopted a view synonymous with a conservative tradition reaching back to Sparta. Looking at the global economy, American liberals have forgotten where they come from, and have little idea how to move forward.

Gresser�s book restores the traditional liberal vision of the global economy and prepares it for the future. First, Gresser traces back the American tradition of liberal internationalism, and shows where it got off track. Second, Gresser reaches into the depths of trade policy for clear examples of how today�s liberals are perpetuating policies that hurt the poor, without protecting American jobs. Third, the book shows how the same policies bring about suffering and instability in the world�s poorest countries. Finally, Gresser looks to the future with liberal ideas to reform America�s trade system, eliminate its bias against the poor, and promote stability and prosperity abroad.

American liberals have an honorable record as optimistic, far-sighted designers of the modern global economy. The liberal internationalism of the 1940s has lasting power because it organizes complex trade, military, and financial policies around simple values, and coherent theories of economics and foreign affairs. Liberals should take pride in this achievement, draw inspiration from it, and build upon it as they think about how to make the modern world a better place when they return to power.

Ed Gresser has served as Director of the Progressive Policy Institute's (PPI) Project on Trade and Global Markets since February, 2001. In this capacity, he writes and speaks on the value of open markets, internationalism and social responsibility in the global economy. Mr. Gresser's major focuses have included investigation of the American tariff system, Trade Promotion Authority and the future U.S. trade negotiating agenda, hemispheric integration, economic relations with China in the wake of WTO membership and Asian affairs, as well as international finance and labor issues. He also developed and oversees PPI's widely praised "Trade Fact of the Week" electronic information service. His research has been covered by such publications as the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, the Far Eastern Economic Review and others, and been cited by the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the IMF and other institutions.

Mr. Gresser joined PPI after ten years of service in the Clinton Administration and as a senior Congressional staffer. As Policy Advisor to U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky from April 1998 through the close of the Clinton Administration, he was the USTR's principal policy advisor, speechwriter and research aide. In a span of three years, Mr. Gresser twice received USTR's prestigious "Special Achievement Award," for first for contribution to the passage of the African Growth and Opportunity Act and Caribbean Basin Initiative enhancement, and second for accomplishment "far above and beyond the call of duty" in the negotiation of China's WTO accession agreement and passage of permanent Normal Trade Relations.

Earlier, as Legislative Assistant and then Policy Director for Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), he played a central role in developing and building broad consensus for a policy of engagement in China which keeps the peace and advances U.S. interests and values by balancing security concerns, open trade, human rights and environmental protection in the volatile U.S. relationship with the world's largest nation. Before joining Baucus' staff, Mr. Gresser worked for the consulting firm Podesta Associates, and as a Legislative Assistant for Congressman Silvio Conte of Massachusetts.

Mr. Gresser graduated from Stanford University with Distinction in Political Science in 1984. He earned a Master's Degree from Columbia University and a Certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union in 1987. He is married to Siriporn Gresser; they have one son.

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From PART TWO:

Six decades later, the businesses who fought Roosevelt and Truman have made peace with the world economy. At least most of them, anyway. A century of press releases from the National Association of Manufacturers trace their evolution, as footprints on the petrified shore of an ancient lake traces the path of a band of hunters.

The group raised money for McKinley a year after its formation in 1896, and organized a battalion of witnesses for the Smoot-Hawley law thirty years later. Another three decades passed, Truman and Eisenhower brought down tariffs, and by 1963 Kennedy found it neither friend nor enemy, but instead a cautious skeptic. By the 1990s the now-venerable group, America's oldest existing business lobby, joined Gray's great-grandchildren in the Farm Bureau, along with the semiconductor wizards, bankers and movie studio chiefs, as a fervent backer of the agreement with China.

Only shreds and patches of the old nationalist lobbies survive. Steel mill executives gather annually to preserve Harding's anti-dumping law. Southern textile mill operators - the collateral descendants of Webster's Massachusetts financiers - cling to tariffs on bras and sweaters. They are dejected and dispossessed among the princes of modern industry, forced to lean upon stronger farm-lobby cousins in time of need.

Broader public attitudes are sophisticated and alloyed. If polling and actual behavior are guides, though, Americans feel positive about their changed world. As shoppers and managers of family budgets, they enthusiastically buy foreign shirts, cars and cheese. As voters they like the WTO about as much as they like the United Nations. Polling finds most Americans hope to see trade agreements bolster labor and environmental standards, believe trade competition puts them at some risk, and consider trade agreements good for the country.

The system's great critics are the liberals whose ancestors built it. Disillusion with the consequences has seeped through the liberal church for decades, like water saturating a bed of limestone. The trade union movement turned against the global economy in the early 1970s. Environmental groups, consumer associations and intellectuals joined them in the 1990s. Our politicians followed them.

Just as the NAM's yellowed press releases record the shift of business and conservative thought, moldy Congressional votes record the liberal migration.

In 1962, John Kennedy brought George Meany to the White House for the press conference which launched his Trade Act. Eight House Democrats in ten backed them. Republicans split, eighty voting for Kennedy's bill and ninety against.

A decade later, the parties reversed themselves. All but 19 House Republicans voted for the law authorizing the Tokyo Round in 1974. The Democratic vote fell by half. After another fifteen years, a vote for authority to finish the Uruguay Round in 1991 mustered 91 Democratic votes, and when Bill Clinton dropped his campaign for fast-track authority in 1997, he counted forty-two.

In 2002 a bare twenty-seven, often in the face of mystified or angry glares from their friends, supported George W. Bush's fast-track bill.

A Generation of Trade Votes
Year Democrats For Democrats Against
1962 218 35
1974 112 121
1991 91 170
1997 42 156
2002 27 190

An earlier generation of liberals imagined peace, equity and opulence. Their modern heirs see only exploitation and loss.

Congressman Frank fears that "countries which invite manufacturers to ignore environmental guidelines, use child labor, and provide terrible working conditions for employees have a competitive advantage." Senator-elect Brown considers the WTO a threat to sovereignty, writing that "the rules of international trade are fundamentally anti-American and undemocratic," and that the organization routinely overturns American laws passed to guarantee safe food and protect the environment. Dr. Dean hints that the global economy threatens democracy.

Clinton's record seems an aberration. For those who like it, it is a bold break with a stale and outdated liberal orthodoxy. Few realize that the orthodoxy is very new.

What is the liberal position today?

There are actually three different critiques. Each points to a different future. Each is at least partially incompatible with the rest, though with liberalism now a minority faith and the Democratic Party out of power, we have not had to think the contradictions through. Each has elements of blurry and sometimes messianic thinking that portend great troubles, though these can be fixed with some hard choices and efforts of will.