"Free Trade Agreements" Used to Help American Workers … Now They Hurt Them
Trump and Sanders have whipped up a lot of popular support by opposing “free trade” agreements.
But it’s not just politics and populism … mainstream experts are starting to reconsider their blind adherence to the dogma that more globalization and bigger free trade agreement are always good.
UC Berkeley Economics professor Robert Reich – Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor – wrote last month:
Suppose that by enacting a particular law we’d increase the U.S. Gross Domestic Product. But almost all that growth would go to the richest 1 percent.
The rest of us could buy some products cheaper than before. But those gains would be offset by losses of jobs and wages.
This is pretty much what “free trade” has brought us over the last two decades.
I used to believe in trade agreements. That was before the wages of most Americans stagnated and a relative few at the top captured just about all the economic gains.
Recent trade agreements have been wins for big corporations and Wall Street, along with their executives and major shareholders.
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But those deals haven’t been wins for most Americans.
The fact is, trade agreements are no longer really about trade.
Indeed, while it’s falsely called a “trade agreement”, only 5 out of 29 of the Trans Pacific Partnership’s chapters have anything to do with trade. And conservatives point out that even the 5 chapters on trade do not promote free trade.
Reich continues:
Worldwide tariffs are already low. Big American corporations no longer make many products in the United States for export abroad.
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Google, Apple, Uber, Facebook, Walmart, McDonalds, Microsoft, and Pfizer, for example, are making huge profits all over the world.
But those profits don’t depend on American labor – apart from a tiny group of managers, designers, and researchers in the U.S.
To the extent big American-based corporations any longer make stuff for export, they make most of it abroad and then export it from there, for sale all over the world – including for sale back here in the United States.
The Apple iPhone is assembled in China from components made in Japan, Singapore, and a half-dozen other locales. The only things coming from the U.S. are designs and instructions from a handful of engineers and managers in California.
Apple even stows most of its profits outside the U.S. so it doesn’t have to pay American taxes on them. [Background.]
This is why big American companies are less interested than they once were in opening other countries to goods exported from the United States and made by American workers.
They’re more interested in making sure other countries don’t run off with their patented designs and trademarks. Or restrict where they can put and shift their profits.
Source: "Free Trade Agreements" Used to Help American Workers … Now They Hurt Them
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