The United States Chamber of Commerce has always been the most vocal proponent of free trade in America and around the globe. With free trade slowly coming up on the congressional docket, the USCC has ramped up its advocacy of even more free and open trade.

One thing the Chamber of Commerce has on its side, and always will have, is its ability to slight the figures and avoid the repercussions of its promotion. The Chamber will happily announce that, for the most part, the United States enjoys trade surpluses with the majority of its bilateral trade partners.

The United States has 17 different national trading partners in bilateral and multilateral agreements. Our trade volume with each nation increases every year. Of the 17 nations that the U.S. has official explicit trade agreements with, we carry a trade surplus with 12. According to the government’s official figures the U.S. exported $456 billion to these 17 partners in 2008 alone.

That is all the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will tell its members, their employees, or the politicians it actively deceives. The reality however is that those 12 surpluses add up to just $35 billion, while the five deficits add up to $152 billion. The U.S. indeed does carry a dozen surpluses out of 17, but the net trade is still a $117 billion annual hole.

The only developed countries with whom we operate at a surplus are Australia ($11.6 billion in 2008) and Singapore (11.7 billion in 2008). The tiny gains pale in comparison to the $78.3 billion deficit to Canada and the $64.7 billion deficit to Mexico over the exact same time period.

Our explicit free trade agreement partners are also not the only nations with whom the U.S. engages with via “free trade.” According to our WTO agreement the U.S. must give more or less equal treatment to all 152 constituent member states.

Furthermore, thanks to the Chamber of Commerce and the Bush administration, the United States has given permanent favored nation status to China. The trade imbalance with China alone in 2008 was roughly $269 billion. We lost an additional $178 billion to OPEC in that year. The United States lost a cool $840 billion to international trade during 2008 without batting an eye.

Now, the Chamber of Commerce is up to its old tricks yet again.

According to Tom Barkley, writing for Dow Jones Newswires, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is hitting Capitol Hill hard to debunk the notion that trade kills jobs. It is going after congressional staffers and aides, and individual congressmen. It is going after the Office of the United States Trade Representative. It is even going after the White House.

The Chamber is one of the largest, most well-funded, and most instrumental lobbies in American politics. Over the past twenty years it has consistently fallen on the side of lower taxes, less regulation, more open markets and increased “free trade” despite the obvious and overt setbacks that trade liberalization has caused our economy.

Why does a group that says it represents business favor the systematic dismantling of the American economy through deregulation? Because the multinationals who pay the lion’s share can, will and have simply picked up and moved overseas. Of course GE, P&G, JPMorgan Chase, Exxon, and others favor free trade. They don’t care where their headquarters is, they can chase tax breaks and subsidies around the world and back again so long as the people at the top can still get paid.

Meanwhile, the American people continue to be lied to and misled.

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