Weissman writes: "When Donald Trump announced that he would kill the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on his first day as president, and would take steps to negotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), many progressives breathed a huge sigh of relief."
Bernie Sanders. (photo: AP)
29 November 16
hen Donald Trump announced that he would kill the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on his first day as president, and would take steps to negotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), many progressives breathed a huge sigh of relief. Bernie Sanders had campaigned fiercely against the TPP, which the Obama administration had negotiated out of public view with the direct participation of Wall Street, multinational corporations, and their high-priced lawyers. Bernie even forced Hillary Clinton to speak out against the treaty. So, will Trump now represent our interests on international trade and related issues?
Not until pigs learn to fly. Trump is an economic nationalist, a characteristically short-sighted species. Threatening to impose high tariffs, or taxes, on goods from Mexico, China, and other countries to force them to do what he wants, he fails to see the obvious. Unless he backs down, these countries will retaliate by slapping similar tariffs on goods made in the United States. The ensuing trade wars would hurt everyone, not least the American workers whose jobs Trump claims he wants to safeguard.
Trump’s trade wars could also encourage shooting wars, especially with Beijing. The Middle Kingdom’s overblown nationalist claims to much of the South China Sea already clash dangerously with those of smaller Asian nations, strongly abetted by Washington’s age-old mantra to freedom of the seas. Warring over trade will only fuel the flames throughout the area.
TPP and the other multilateral trade agreements lower certain tariffs and other barriers to trade, which may – or may not – be a good thing. It depends on who wins from the increased trade and who loses. In the case of NAFTA, which Bill Clinton used Republican votes to push through Congress, many corporations benefited enormously by moving their operations to Mexico in what 1992 presidential candidate Ross Perot called a “giant sucking sound.” The American workers at those corporations lost their jobs, and the Midwestern communities in which many of them lived too often became ghost towns.
For all their claims to promote “free trade,” the treaties also have provisions that remain frankly protectionist. Some of these provisions give over-extended protection to patents and other intellectual property rights, erecting a huge restraint of trade worth billions to Big Pharma, US media conglomerates, and Silicon Valley. Trump, the economic nationalist, has said little or nothing about all this. Would his renegotiations or his own “free trade agreements” keep them in place or even expand them?
Trump also has a long history of using Chinese labor to produce his branded products. Would he now ban such outsourcing?
As on almost every other issue, Trump favors lowering corporate tax rates, which ? he says – is the way to compete with China and keep jobs in the United States. Compare that to Bernie Sanders, who wants to make the wealthy, Wall Street, and large corporations pay more taxes to create American jobs through government-funded infrastructure projects.
Like most progressives, Bernie Sanders has for years stood against “unfettered free trade,” whether in TPP, NAFTA, or the World Trade Organization (WTO). “It is not a good deal for American workers,” he explained in Congress in 2000. “American workers should not be asked to compete against desperate people in China who are forced to work at starvation wages, who cannot form free trade unions, who do not even have the legal right to stand up and criticize their government.”
“I believe in fair trade which works for the middle class and working families, not just large multinational corporations,” he added in his campaign against Hillary Clinton.
“I was on the picket line in opposition to NAFTA. We heard people tell us how many jobs would be created. I didn't believe that for a second because I understood what the function of NAFTA, CAFTA, PNTR with China, and the TPP is, it's to say to American workers, hey, you are now competing against people in Vietnam who make 56 cents an hour minimum wage.”
Protecting American workers must be the bottom line for progressives. But if we need to remove unwanted barriers to trade, we should ask ourselves the obvious question: Can we carefully construct social and economic measures to ensure that the benefits of increased trade go overwhelmingly to those who lose their jobs and benefits because of increased competition from lower waged workers?
Trump would call such measures Socialistic. They are, as in the kind of Democratic Socialism Bernie favors and needs to talk more about. Our Revolution has a world of educating to do.
Equally important, much of America’s current unemployment and under-employment come less from outsourcing jobs overseas than from robots, other automation, and the computerized manipulation of information. Why not expand Socialist protection of workers to include these as well?
Under Trump, none of this will be possible. But when he falls flat, as he will, we have a whole world to win.
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he divides his time between writing and Boycott Trump’s America, at www.facebook.com/btanow.
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