Don't Buy the Hype: 20 Years of Data Reveals 'Free Trade' Fallacies
1/15/15
In their speeches and commentary, the administration, corporate interests and GOP leadership disregard the real, detrimental impacts that previous fast tracked trade deals...have had on America’s middle class.'
Fast-tracked international trade deals have led to exploding U.S. trade deficits, soaring food imports into the U.S., increased off-shoring of American jobs, and an "unprecedented rise in income inequality," according to new data released Thursday by the watchdog group Public Citizen.
The report, "Prosperity Undermined" (pdf), compiles and analyzes 20 years of trade and economic data to show that the arguments again being made in favor of providing the Obama administration with Fast Track trade authority—effectively handing over extensive new executive powers and delegating away core congressional constitutional authorities—have repeatedly proved false.
As an example, Public Citizen points to the damaging consequences of a 2011 trade deal with Korea, which expanded on the NAFTA model:
Since the Obama administration used Fast Track to push a trade agreement with Korea, the U.S. trade deficit with Korea has grown 50 percent—which equates to 50,000 more American jobs lost. The U.S. had a $3 billion monthly trade deficit with Korea in October 2014—the highest monthly U.S. goods trade deficit with the country on record. After the Korea FTA went into effect, U.S. small businesses’ exports to Korea declined more sharply than large firms’ exports, falling 14 percent.
President Barack Obama is expected to push Fast Track for the corporate-friendly Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which has been negotiated largely in secret—with significant input from Wall Street and big business interests. Even in the face of evidence that prior trade deals are not working, Public Citizen says, Obama has "doubled down on the old model with TPP."
"It’s not surprising that Democrats and Republicans alike are speaking out against Fast Track because it cuts Congress out of shaping trade pacts that most Americans believe cost jobs while empowering the president to sign and enter into secret deals before Congress approves them," said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. "In their speeches and commentary, the administration, corporate interests and GOP leadership disregard the real, detrimental impacts that previous fast tracked trade deals—which serve as the model for the Trans-Pacific Partnership—have had on America’s middle class over the past 20 years."
President Obama is likely to use next week's State of the Union address to push for TPP passage and Fast Track authority, Dave Johnson predicts in an op-ed published Thursday....
But first, of course “trade” is a good and necessary thing. We all trade with others. This is how people, businesses and even countries “make a living.” Critics of our country’s current trade policies are not “anti-trade”; they are anti-trade-deficit. They are opposed to the use of so-called “trade” agreements to promote the interests of the largest multinational and Wall Street corporations at the expense of America’s working people, its middle class, its domestic “Main Street” companies, our environment and the country’s long-term economic health.
Compare the timeline of a chart of our country’s trade deficits with the increase in the economic tensions of our middle class, our manufacturing regions and other economic troubles:
http://ourfuture.org/20150115/as-obama-pushes-tpp-in-sotu-keep-this-in-mind
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As far as manufacturing jobs, they have dropped dramatically in Germany (as elsewhere) though their manufacturing output has increased tremendously.
source - the US International Trade Commission. But the numbers they used at the link you provided to reach their conclusions were not the numbers actually from the USITC.
They cite the US International Trade Commission as the source for their statistics but a cursory glance at that site shows shows that, at the very least, the figures for our 2013 trade deficit with Canada and Mexico are not accurately represented on the citizen.org table in the article. Here is the link to the ITC and the actual trade deficit figures for 2013: http://dataweb.usitc.gov/scripts/cy_m3_run.asp Here is the link to the Census showing trade with Mexico: https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c2010.html And here is the Census date for trade with Canada: https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c1220.html
Seeking to base a discussion of trade policy on facts is "unDemocratic"? Quite the contrary, I think that discussing issues without facts is republicans are quite good at.
If you check the US International Trade Commission and the Census Department, you will see that I am not the one "making up figures".
You have a good one, too.
Therefore it wasn't bad!.
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OP way back when: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024904802
Seeing how well NAFTA turned out, count me a critic, too.
Obama Blasted for Lumping Critics of Trade Deal Secrecy with 'Conspiracy Theorists'
'If the president is concerned that people don't know what's going on in the negotiations then the president should release the text and remove it from being a state secret.'
- Sarah Lazare, staff writer
Published on Friday, May 2, 2014 by Common Dreams
Critics of the highly-secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations responded with outrage after U.S. President Barack Obama charged they have a "lack of knowledge of what is going on in the negotiations" and dismissed their concerns as "conspiracy theories."
The president made the comments this week during a press conference in Malaysia—one of the stops on his Asia-Pacific tour, aimed at advancing the TPP and the U.S. military "pivot" to the region. His tour has been met with region-wide protests against the economic and military agenda of the U.S.
SNIP...
Bernadette Ellorin, Chairperson of BAYAN-USA—an alliance of Filipino organizations in the U.S., told Common Dreams, "President Obama lacks knowledge of how so-called 'free trade agreements' impact people on the ground. The push-back he has gotten over the TPP comes from people who have long-suffered from these impacts."
"He should go back and talk with the parent-less children in the region, whose parents had no choice but to look for work overseas because they couldn't find work in their own country due to these so-called 'free trade' agreements," she added. "He should go back and talk to the indigenous children whose parents were killed by paramilitary groups because greater foreign investment stipulations in these agreements have led to forced evacuations and militarization of their land for the purpose of large scale foreign mining."
CONTINUED...
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2014/05/02-5
Which is sad, really, as so many people think officials the United States government are incapable of lying or doing anything criminal or using office for personal enrichment.
