Macleans: Trump won't put a dent into NAFTA

[mentalfloss]

NAFTA a goner? Don’t bet on it. We’ve heard this before.

Listening to the heated, sometimes ill-informed campaign rhetoric in the U.S., especially from one candidate (do I really need to name the best-known man in the world?), it’s hard to believe that the North American Free Trade Agreement is going to survive. America-first isolationism is on the rise. If there is any doubt, let’s revisit the most blatant examples of the candidate’s anti-NAFTA politicking that threatens to side-swipe the Canadian economy.

“I would immediately call the president of Mexico and the president of Canada to try to amend NAFTA.” The president of Canada? Yes, that’s right. He said that. Another day, he said: “It is absolutely true that NAFTA was a mistake. I know that Hillary, on occasion has said, just this year, that this was a boon to the economy. I think it has been devastating.”

In Ohio, one of the key swing states in the Rust Belt, he really hits this message hard. “I don’t think NAFTA has been good for America—and I never have. I didn’t just start criticizing unfair trade deals like NAFTA because I started running for office. I’m doing it because I’ve seen what happens to a community when the factory closes down and the jobs move overseas.”

So there it is. NAFTA and free trade have targets on their backs. Borders are about to get tighter, right?

Wrong.

This is podium bunkum. None of it is actually true. We know this because these quotes are not from Donald Trump—though he says almost exactly the same things now. They are from Barack Obama, when he ran for the top job back in 2008. Yes, Harvard, even Obama once thought Canada had a president. Eight years have passed and “Prime Minister” Obama—couldn’t resist—has done nothing to NAFTA. He killed the Keystone XL pipeline and there were some spasms of protectionism after his 2008 election, but his anti-trade rhetoric has done a U-turn. Now he’s championing the signing the Trans Pacific Partnership.

Is NAFTA a goner? Don't bet on it. We've heard this before.

 

[Corduroy]

If Hillary Clinton was saying she'd get rid of NAFTA or Jeb Bush or something other Republican nominee in a parallel universe, this article would have point. Politicians say things that seem popular and do nothing about them when in office. We all get that. Donald Trump is doing the exact same thing, but I don't think we can be 100% sure the Trump isn't crazy enough to actually try negotiating NAFTA.

 

[coldstream]

The entire Free Market paradigm, which descended on us with avengeance in the 1970s.. and which includes Free Trade, Monetarism (commodification, denationalization and free markets in currency and credit), deregulation of markets, open investment, regressive taxation, privatization of natural monopolies (as only exist in transportation, energy, utilities, communication).. is teetering on catastrophic collapse. Nothing can save it. NAFTA will be history in a decade.. by way of orderly disassociation.. or by way of global depression, world war and revolution.

 

[Machjo]

The entire Free Market paradigm, which descended on us with avengeance in the 1970s.. and which includes Free Trade, Monetarism (commodification, denationalization and free markets in currency and credit), deregulation of markets, open investment, regressive taxation, privatization of natural monopolies (as only exist in transportation, energy, utilities, communication).. is teetering on catastrophic collapse. Nothing can save it. NAFTA will be history in a decade.. by way of orderly disassociation.. or by way of global depression, world war and revolution.

Our last last bout of serious protectionism had led to WWI. Food for thought.

Perhaps we should choose a Canadian city (the one that's the most anti-free-trade), and give it total power over free-trade. It could freely raise tariffs against other cities or foreign states and fight trade wars all it wants.

I can already predict what would happen. That city would start protecting its industries and suddenly everyone else would retaliate. Oops.

Once its economy is a shambles it would become the most pro-free-trade city in the world. Some have to learn the hard way.

 

[Corduroy]

Our last last bout of serious protectionism had led to WWI. Food for thought.

This is what I remember learning in school, but no one ever explained how protectionism led to war.

 

[Machjo]

This is what I remember learning in school, but no one ever explained how protectionism led to war.

Weak but pertinent reasons are the need to access resources we don't have. Another is if we're all protectionist, we need stronger armed forces to protect what we have and don't want to share. That's the flip side of the previous statement.

Far more serious reasons that multiply the above are a lack of interpersonal relations. Goods don't move themselves. People move goods. This leads to international friendships, marriages, cultural exchanges, etc.

Interdependent states usually don't war with one another. International US-Canadian families protect Canada from US aggression far more than any military force ever could. That's one reason free movement of people is treated as sacrosanct to the EU common market.

 

[Corduroy]

Weak but pertinent reasons are the need to access resources we don't have. Another is if we're all protectionist, we need stronger armed forces to protect what we have and don't want to share. That's the flip side of the previous statement.

Far more serious reasons that multiply the above are a lack of interpersonal relations. Goods don't move themselves. People move goods. This leads to international friendships, marriages, cultural exchanges, etc.

Interdependent states usually don't war with one another. International US-Canadian families protect Canada from US aggression far more than any military force ever could. That's one reason free movement of people is treated as sacrosanct to the EU common market.

If your strongest reason is interpersonal relations, then I guess we should work to have a world where heads of state are all related. If the monarchs of Britain, Germany and Russia were cousins instead of total strangers the first world war could have been avoided.

 

[Machjo]

If your strongest reason is interpersonal relations, then I guess we should work to have a world where heads of state are all related. If the monarchs of Britain, Germany and Russia were cousins instead of total strangers the first world war could have been avoided.

Good point. Relations can be toxic in some families. Lol.

 

[Curious Cdn]

I often consider the irony that the Canadisn Left and the American Right both deeply dislike NAFTA. Strange bedfellows.

 

[Mowich]

If the monarchs of Britain, Germany and Russia were cousins instead of total strangers the first world war could have been avoided.

Actually, they were.

The royal descendants of Queen Victoria (Queen of the United Kingdom) and of Christian IX (King of Denmark) currently occupy the thrones of Belgium, Denmark, Luxemburg, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. At the outbreak of the First World War their grandchildren occupied the thrones of Denmark, Greece, Norway, Germany, Romania, Russia, Spain and the United Kingdom. For this, Queen Victoria was nicknamed "the grandmother of Europe" while Christian IX was nicknamed "Father-in-law of Europe". Of the remaining kingdoms of Europe today, only Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands descends neither from Queen Victoria nor Christian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_descendants_of_Queen_Victoria_and_King_Christian_IX

 

[Corduroy]

Actually, they were.

Yeah, I know. That was the joke.

 

[Machjo]

I often consider the irony that the Canadisn Left and the American Right both deeply dislike NAFTA. Strange bedfellows.

The strange thing is, I've always thought of free trade sitting better on the left, workers of the world unite and all that jazz. You'd think right wing nationalist militarists would normally oppose free trade.

For decades it's been the reverse, the left opposing it and the right supporting it. Though it's not the first time even in Canadian history that free trade shifted between the right and the left.

 

[Curious Cdn]

The strange thing is, I've always thought of free trade sitting better on the left, workers of the world unite and all that jazz. You'd think right wing nationalist militarists would normally oppose free trade.

For decades it's been the reverse, the left opposing it and the right supporting it. Though it's not the first time even in Canadian history that free trade shifted between the right and the left.

It's reversed down in the States. Anything that involves furriners is bayad.

 

[mentalfloss]

So funny how Republicans just handed the Democrats the winning talking points on the economy.

 

[coldstream]

Our last last bout of serious protectionism had led to WWI. Food for thought.

Perhaps we should choose a Canadian city (the one that's the most anti-free-trade), and give it total power over free-trade. It could freely raise tariffs against other cities or foreign states and fight trade wars all it wants.

I can already predict what would happen. That city would start protecting its industries and suddenly everyone else would retaliate. Oops.

Once its economy is a shambles it would become the most pro-free-trade city in the world. Some have to learn the hard way.

The last bout of constructive nationalist and dirigiste economic policies lasted from the end of WW2 until the onset of the Free Market paradigm in the early 1970s, specifically with the revocation of the Bretton Woods Agreement which held currency exchange values within narrow, rationally determined ranges. It was a economic system that championed full, fairly compensated employment, equitable sharing of wealth, and integrated national industrial economies and in the West produced the greatest period of industrial development and wealth creation in the history of world.

It's successor defined itself by radical free markets, exploitation of labour nationally and internationally, wild fluctuations of equity and commodity markets, loss of currency sovereignty of nation states. It is an imperial and slave based system, which has led to massive polarization of wealth.. and deindustrialization of first world economies.. replaced by the subsistence wages and the decrepit slums of the Maqilladora Free Trade Zones. The latter look little different than the abandoned Mill Towns of the rust belt, now ridden with crime, gangs, drugs.. Welcome to Detroit... shining model city of the Free Market Economy.

The First World and Developing world are both gouged by a system that benefits only a small oligarchy of billionaires in trade and finance.. and enslaves and impoverishes everyone else.

 

[tay]

Brian Mulroney says that Donald Trump’s proposal to rip up the North American Free Trade Agreement would push more Mexican migrants into the United States at a time when the potential U.S. president is determined to keep them out.

The former Progressive Conservative prime minister told CTV’s Question Period that Trump has “tapped into a well of unhappiness in the United States which surrounds illegal immigration.”

“But the way you deal with that is,” he said, “is to enforce your laws of course, but also to ensure that more wealth is created south of the border.”

Mulroney said that’s already happening, and he credits NAFTA, which he said has created “millions and millions” of jobs across the three-nation bloc since he signed it in 1992.

The former prime minister told Question Period that although Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric “carried him through the Republican primaries, he doesn’t think “something that negative carries you through to the White House.”

Democrat Hillary Clinton has also talked tough about free trade -- as did President Barack Obama, who later went on to propose expanded free trade through the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Mulroney said he “can’t conceive of a situation whereby Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton or anybody else could get away with (ripping up NAFTA),” adding “Congress or the American people wouldn’t allow it.”

Mulroney to Trump: NAFTA has stemmed flow of Mexicans to U.S. | CTV News

 

[mentalfloss]

You're expecting Trump to listen to reason?

 

[tay]

Our expert panel got one thing very wrong. We thought the Democrats were serious about renegotiating NAFTA. If Obama, when he had a strong majority in Congress, had made good on his promise we might not be where we are today.

Although no one at Trump Tower so far has asked me for advice (and I’m not waiting by my phone for a call), I know a little bit about this subject: Eight years ago I helped convene a panel of experts to make recommendations to another president who promised to rewrite NAFTA.

That would have been Barack Obama, who, as a candidate in 2008, was clear on the issue: “NAFTA’s shortcomings were evident when signed and we must now amend the agreement to fix them.”

Alas, as president, he did no such thing, which is of course one of the reasons we find ourselves with a right-wing president who rode popular dissatisfaction with globalization into the White House.

The president-elect seems serious about renegotiating the agreement, so it is worth revisiting some of the concrete reforms our Task Force on North American Trade Policy recommended in our policy report, “The Future of North American Trade Policy: Lessons from NAFTA.” Many accuse progressives of having lots of criticisms but no concrete proposals. Here is a set of concrete proposals to reform NAFTA.

President-elect Trump’s agenda for renegotiating NAFTA looks nothing like our panel’s. And if he gets his way, the results will be a disaster for the working class Americans who gave him their votes.

Our starting point was entirely different from his as well. Rather than treating Mexico as the enemy in a deal that simply sent US jobs south, we followed the more accurate critique Obama made as a candidate for the White House: “While NAFTA gave broad rights to investors, it paid only lip service to the rights of labor and the importance of environmental protection.”

Our experts, from the United States, Canada and Mexico, identified ways in which different parts of the agreement favored multinational firms at the expense of labor and the environment. The panel recommended a wholesale revision of the investment chapter of the deal, which was the first to allow corporations to sue governments over measures that impeded their profits. In other words, long before Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) campaigned against the so-called Investor State Dispute Settlement system as a rigged deal that favored big money over workers, we recommended the special courts be scrapped.

That objectionable provision is now part of the template for US trade agreements, including the seemingly defunct Trans-Pacific Partnership. It is very unlikely President-elect Trump is prepared to remove that provision from NAFTA, though Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) has called on him to do just that.

Nor is he proposing the kind of coordinated set of industrial policies on the part of the NAFTA countries to reverse the collective loss — by the US, Canada and Mexico combined — of 25 percent of their manufacturing base to China and other Asian countries. That is what our task force called for. Such policies could include currency measures to ensure fair pricing, identification of potential high-wage industries in which to invest, strategic government incentives and investment in the early stages of those industries, and some limited protection from import competition.

You don’t hear Trump talking about any such thing — just punitive tariffs, walls and declarations of China as a currency manipulator, which does nothing for jobs going to Mexico and fails to acknowledge our own overvaluation of our currency.

The yawning gap between rhetoric and reality in Trump’s trade proposals may be largest on labor provisions. Any sane review of NAFTA has to recognize that industries fled to Mexico in part because of that country’s low wages and its hostile atmosphere to union organizing. As long as Mexicans’ wages are one-tenth of US manufacturing wages, multinational firms will continue moving south of the border, and the race to the bottom will continue.

That makes the starting point of any NAFTA rewrite worker protections, on all sides of all borders. Those would include protections for the right to organize unions as well as a guarantee of a living wage, decent benefits and safe working conditions. It would involve enforceable sanctions against firms — US and Mexican — that do not comply.

This would stop the race to the bottom, ensuring the agreement instead results in “harmonization upward,” to decrease wage competition by raising all trading partners toward the wage levels and benefits US workers fought for most of the 20th century to win. These were battles waged by unions.

Have you heard anything pro-union from candidate Trump? Of course not. He was infamous for his exploitation of workers at his own projects, especially immigrants.

President-elect Trump must not be allowed to renegotiate NAFTA by scapegoating Mexico and imposing a nationalist version of an anti-worker, pro-corporation trade deal.

A Progressive Agenda for Renegotiating NAFTA

 

[tay]

As NAFTA Hearings Open, More Than 100,000 Petitions Delivered and 50,000 Public Comments Filed Demanding a New Deal to Benefit Working People, Not Just Corporations

Unprecedented Public Response to Administration Request for Comment Spotlights Political Stakes of NAFTA Renegotiation

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The broad coalition that derailed the TPP delivered more than 100,000 petitions demanding that NAFTA be replaced with a deal that benefits working people.

Activists with “Replace NAFTA” signs and T-shirts made the delivery today as witnesses arrived for hearings on NAFTA renegotiation at the U.S. International Trade Commission. This followed the unprecedented submission of more than 50,000 comments to the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) docket on NAFTA talks. (See photos here.)

The dozen groups that alerted members to the opportunity to submit comments were surprised by the overwhelming response, which crashed the USTR’s submission platform. The 16 groups that asked members to sign petitions calling for a transparent negotiating process and a replacement of the NAFTA to stop its ongoing damage of job loss, downward pressure on wages and attacks on environmental and health laws gathered more than 100,000 signatures in several weeks.

“President Trump must live up to his campaign promise and renegotiate a NAFTA that puts working Americans first and moves beyond the failed, corporate-driven agreements of the past. An insular process can only yield insular outcomes. We defeated the TPP because it was drafted in secret by hundreds of corporate advisers, and was packed full of policies that would undermine our laws and protections, while promoting the outsourcing of American jobs and suppression of wages. We, along with the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have signed these petitions, will continue to demand a new, comprehensive approach to trade policy under the Trump administration,” said U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.).

The petition and many of the comments focused on two themes. First, if corporate elites are allowed to dictate how NAFTA is renegotiated, the agreement could become more damaging for working families and the environment. Second, modest tweaks would not stop NAFTA’s ongoing damage, much less deliver on President Donald Trump’s promises for a deal that will create American jobs and raise wages.

Advocating for a NAFTA renegotiation that benefits working people in all three countries, a diverse coalition of consumer, labor and digital organizations coordinated the collection of petition signatures challenging the Trump administration to:

• Make the negotiating process transparent;
• Eliminate NAFTA’s foreign investor protections and investor-state dispute settlement, which promote job offshoring and empower corporations to sue the U.S. government for uncapped sums before tribunals of three corporate lawyers;
• Add tough and strongly enforced labor, wage and environmental standards;
• Ensure imported food, goods and services meet U.S. consumer and environmental standards;
• Cut rules that waive Buy American and Buy Local policies and offshore U.S. tax dollars; and
• Eliminate rules that drive up the price of lifesaving medicines by giving pharmaceutical companies extended monopolies to avoid generic competition.

https://www.citizen.org/media/press...petitions-delivered-and-50000-public-comments

 

[justlooking]

This is what I remember learning in school, but no one ever explained how protectionism led to war.

It's a myth, that's why you never hear the how and why.
Before WW1, Germany and the UK were each other's top 3 trading partners. Didn't stop them from going to war.
Also with Germany and Russia before 1941, lots of large economic cooperation deals, the Soviets were even thinking
about joining the Axis Powers. Didn't stop them either.

Actually, they were.

The royal descendants of Queen Victoria (Queen of the United Kingdom) and of Christian IX (King of Denmark) currently occupy the thrones of Belgium, Denmark, Luxemburg, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. At the outbreak of the First World War their grandchildren occupied the thrones of Denmark, Greece, Norway, Germany, Romania, Russia, Spain and the United Kingdom.

So we can see the two theories don't actually stand up to scrutiny.
Neither trading relationships nor these interpersonal relationships will prevent war.


Until now, we can say that Democratic countries don't war with each other, but that theory may be yet tested.
It is good and proper that most European countries are now 'more or less' democracies, but that hasn't prevented
large scale economic problems from developing.


Regardless of what Macleans says, Canada needs to watch out.
Ignoring it would only make the Trump shock worse.
So far, he is delivering things he promised during the election.