Those who move American jobs overseas insist NAFTA/TPP good, Trump bad
The people responsible for exporting hundreds of thousands of American manufacturing jobs to brutal sweatshops in countries like China – which often employ child labor – have been taking to the public airwaves on platforms like NPR to protest President Trump’s latest round of trade tasks.
Judging by their rhetoric, if President Trump keeps it up, the boardrooms of tax-dodging, child-exploiting, multi-national, multi-billion dollar corporations may soon supplant Chinese factories on the worldwide list of top purchasers of suicide netting.
Foxconn factories in Shenzhen, China, which apparently employ suicide netting rather than bathroom breaks as a worker-retention strategy. (Twitter/ Ogmin)
Indeed, there is little that reveals the truth about how the leadership of the Democratic party sold out its former bread and butter constituency of American blue-collar workers while turning a blind eye to human rights violations abroad than its stance on the “screw-you” economics of “free” trade. For example, former President Bill Clinton negotiated and signed the original NAFTA treaty with the nearly-unanimous backing of Ivy League economists who ridiculed those who dared to disagree with their rosy fiscal predictions that it would create tens of thousands of well-paying jobs in the U.S.
In short order, NAFTA was hailed as one of the cornerstone accomplishments of the Clinton presidency.
However, the reality of the last two decades has seen well over a hundred thousand manufacturing jobs leave America for Mexico, benefiting producers through reduced labor costs while decimating blue-collar towns and cities in the U.S.
Former President Bill Clinton signs the original North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993. (Public Domain)
Yet apparently not even that stark truth in the widespread discrediting of the liberal economic theories of the 1990’s deterred former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from changing her tune to support the now-defunct Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) treaty once the special interests got to her with their checkbooks before the 2016 election. Many of the same economists and job exporters who loved NAFTA were practically salivating over the TPP before President Trump derailed that runaway train:
And now, they’re crying wolf on the latest trade announcement from the White House – an increase in tariffs on China enacted in reaction to retaliatory import dues the Asian nation recently established on American agriculture. President Trump has long criticized how the U.S. has dealt with China, allowing it to manipulate its currency in an anti-competitive manner. As a candidate, Trump promised on the campaign trail to aggressively meet those challenges rather than continue a trade policy stance he characterized as weak.
Meanwhile, with elections coming up, many Democrats are still wondering how so many blue-collar workers can support a billionaire president who’s proud to say that he’s never changed a diaper. However, maybe they support Trump because they’re smarter than the Dems give them credit for and they aren’t looking for a leader to whom they can relate, but rather for one, who like them – and unlike the Democrats of recent memory – gets the irony:
FreeMartyG (CC by 2.0)
Prior to publication, Nike did not immediately return a request for comment as to the stance of its new spokesperson, former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, on the international exploitation of child labor by multi-national companies which lobby for “free” trade agreements to improve their bottom line – like Nike.
The author, Marty Gottesfeld, is a political prisoner of the Obama administration. You can learn more and donate to help him at FreeMartyG.com.
