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Nobody wants it except the
Corporate and Government elites |
The presidential primary campaigns of both political parties have
exposed widespread voter anger over U.S. global trade policies. In
response, hardly a day has recently gone by without the New York Times,
the Washington Post and other defenders of the status quo lecturing
their readers on why unregulated foreign trade is good for them.
The ultimate conclusion is always the same – that voters should leave
complicated issues like this to those intellectually better qualified
to deal with them. So much for democracy.
Trade experts, according to Binyamin Appelbaum of the Times have been
“surprised” at the popular discontent
over this issue. Their surprise only shows how disconnected the elite
and the policy class that supports it is from the way most people
actually experience the national economy.
The United States has always been a trading nation. But until the
1994 North American Trade Agreement, trade policy was primarily an
instrument to support domestic economic welfare and development.
Starting with NAFTA, pushed through not by a Republican president,
but by the Bill Clinton in 1994, it became a series of deals in which
profit opportunities for American investors were opened up elsewhere in
the world in exchange for opening up U.S. labor markets to fierce
foreign competition.
As Jorge Castañeda, who later became Mexico’s foreign minister, put
it, NAFTA was “an agreement for the rich and powerful in the United
States, Mexico and Canada, an agreement effectively excluding ordinary
people in all three societies.”
For 20 years, leaders of both parties have assured Americans that
each new NAFTA-style deal would bring more jobs and higher wages for
workers, and trade surpluses for their country. It was, they were told,
an iron law of economics.
What actually followed were outsourced jobs, wage declines, shrunken
opportunities and rising trade deficits. The result has been a dramatic
weakening of the bargaining power of American workers.
So it should come as no surprise when the large parts of the U.S.
workforce now conclude that these trade deals may have had something to
do with the redistribution of income from their pockets to the bank
accounts of the top 1% who own and manage large multinational
corporations.
Read more: U.S. Trade Policy: Populist Anger or Out-of-Touch Elites? - The Globalist
