Mr Latham retorted that it had undermined Australia's free-trade credentials: "Quite frankly, our farmers have been dudded".
Investors, it is argued, don't care about fair-trade credentials and want to see a purely financial fight.
GIVEN President George Bush's oft-stated free-trade credentials, it is ironic that his first big action on the trade front should be grossly protectionist.
That some protest groups accept globalization -- albeit on their own terms -- helps explain why President Clinton, whose free-trade credentials are well established, extended an olive branch to those who led the Seattle demonstrations.
Even as Mr. Bush trumpeted his free-trade credentials to promise job creation, Mr. Kerry pointed to a new study by the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan research group, saying that tax cuts initiated by the White House had not yielded the promised jobs.
But the controls are being threatened by the tradition of trading credentials, even coveted backstage passes for V.I.P. areas.
While his pro-free-trade credentials might have given him a career boost early on, the issue came back to haunt Richardson during his 2008 presidential bid, when NAFTA-bashing was all the rage among Democrats.
Even when this law was reversed, there was, until recently, no federal law that recognised freehold tenure, which meant that the value of Dubai freeholds rested in essence on the country's international trading credentials and good name rather than on enforceable law.
Of course, Mr. Hardt can't trade on credentials like those.
An unshowy performer himself, Smith looked to Prescott to use his trade union credentials to win over the waverers, which the former seaman did with an extraordinary speech.
