Bernie Sanders' myths about free trade
Cross posting from GDP
http://www.democraticunderground.com/12511492906
Bernie Sanders' upset victory in Michigan came just two days after he stood on the debate stage in the perennially beleaguered city of Flint, Mich., and decried the economic condition of the surrounding area. He put the blame where he, like Donald Trump, often puts it: on free trade.
(snip)
Michigan has seen more than its share of economic trouble, but the Vermont senator is not the guy to explain it. The decline he lamented and the causes he cited didn't come close to coinciding. Many vacant buildings in the Motor City were vacant when Clinton was practicing law in Little Rock. Michael Moore's documentary film "Roger & Me," about the calamitous shutdown of General Motors plants in Flint, came out in 1989 — more than four years before the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect and long before China exported much of anything. Detroit lost more than a third of its population between 1960 and 1990.
A generation ago, the auto industry was competing not with companies in Mexico or China but with those in Japan. Toyota, Honda and other Japanese companies took sales away from the Big Three, particularly after the energy crisis of the 1970s, by offering cars that were more reliable and fuel-efficient.
They won over American consumers at a time when trade was far from free. President Ronald Reagan protected U.S. automakers by forcing "voluntary" limits on Japanese auto sales. Japanese trucks faced a 25 percent import duty — which is still in effect.
(snip)
The other change came in the form of automation. Many of the jobs that have vanished in American car factories haven't moved abroad — they've gone to robots and other labor-saving machinery. Since 2000, when domestic auto employment peaked, the number of workers required to produce a given number of vehicles has fallen by more than one-third.
(snip)
Sanders falls in a long tradition of trying to wall our economy off from the world. The AFL-CIO opposed the 1987 free-trade agreement with Canada. The Vermont socialist would deny American consumers the better products and lower prices that such accords provide. Those benefits are especially important to people of limited means, who spend a disproportionate share of their income on necessities. Yet many of these people have cast their ballots for Sanders and Trump.
If Michiganders went to Wal-Mart or Home Depot tomorrow and found the shelves stripped of everything made abroad, they would quickly grasp the upside of free trade. If either of the people they chose for president gets to the White House, that realization may come, but too late.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chapman/ct-bernie-sanders-free-trade-michigan-chapman-0310-20160309-column.html
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No, the Sanderistas did not like this. And I really like the usual comments on DU - not only on this topic - of "blaming the messenger." If the writer or the publication are considered right winged, they will be dismissed, even if they declare that the sun rises in the east.
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That is why I admire Democrats like Obama who have the guts to put our country first!
It's very simple. We manage trade and world economics and financial systems - or somebody else will. This is a chance for us to export the best things about us - to make the world more like us, with worker rights, labor standards, minimum wages, environmental progress, rising economic standards - and we get much cheaper, better stuff to offset our "wage" stagnation.
But it's so much easier to simply declare "Trade Bad" rather than tell the truth.
Next it will be "Robot Bad!" 
