There's a Real Audio interview on Bob Borosage's Campaign for America's Future site www.ourfuture.org, in which he gives the following account of labor's strategy.
In the first place, he agrees that China could legally enter the WTO without Congress's approval, but he claims that it originally promised not to, whence the importance of the fight. To this he quickly added that of course it could break its promise, as it had every previous promise it had ever made on trade, which was a big theme of his. But he argued, PNTR was actually more important to China that WTO accession. He said that the main reason China was entering the WTO in the first place was in order to win PNTR, which it wanted in order to reassure American investors that if they built factories in China, American markets would be permanently open to them.
Secondly, he said that if China went back on its word, and entered the WTO without winning PNTR, the anti-PNTR side had lots of lawyers ready to claim that so long as China got NTR, even on an annual renewal basis, there was no basis for it to claim discrimination, and if it did, it would be tied up in WTO court for quite a while. In other words, we could safely deal with that bridge when we came to it.
Overall, if anyone's in the mood to listen to the radio, I thought it was a pretty interesting joint interview. Borosage's rhetoric is overwhelmingly about how China has to be punished for not opening up its markets and continuing to run a trade surplus with the US. But this apparently fierce mercantilism becomes slightly more complex as it becomes clear that his underlying image of US-China trade is that "Chinese" firms are really US firms that have left here to make stuff and sell it back to us. One of the guys I thought at first was a pro-business flack turned out to have a pretty unyieldingly damning first-hand account of Chinese working conditions. And in general, there were some interesting cross-currents. It's an episode of the Diane Rehm show on NPR.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com