Sherrod Brown Agrees with Hillary about Sanders and his Reflexive Rejection of Trade

[kennetha]

After showing a bit of both candidates bashing trump, Sherrod Brown comes on and compares the two on trade about two minutes in.
Rousing endorsement of Hillary from a guy on the same sides of many issues as Sanders.

http://on.msnbc.com/1Rj0LLR

[ucrdem]

1. Hope it helps!

[TM99]

2. Too bad Brown has fallen for more Clinton neoliberalism

hype on 'free trade'.

Clinton spoke of change the way other politicians would talk about God or Providence; we could succeed economically, he once announced, “if we make change our friend.” Change was fickle and inscrutable, an unmoved mover doing this or that as only it saw fit. Our task—or, more accurately, your task, middle-class citizen—was to conform to its wishes, to “adjust to change,” as the president put it when talking about NAFTA.

The phrase that best expressed the feeling was this: “It’s a no brainer.” Lee Iacocca uttered it in a pro-NAFTA TV commercial, and before long everyone was saying it. The phrase struck exactly the right notes of simplicity combined with utter obviousness. Globalization was irresistible, the argument went, and free trade was always and in all situations a good thing. So good, it didn’t even really need to be explained. Everyone knew this. Everyone agreed.

One reason the treaty required no brains at all from its supporters is because NAFTA was as close to a straight-up class issue as we will ever see in this country. It “boils down to the oldest division of all,” Dirk Johnson wrote in The New York Times in 1993: “the haves versus the have-nots, or more precisely, those who have only a little.” The lefty economist Jeff Faux has even told how a NAFTA lobbyist tried to bring him around by reminding him that Carlos Salinas, then the president of Mexico, had “been to Harvard. He’s one of us.”

So NAFTA, the grandfather of free trade, was a no brainer, literally. It was not sold with logic or even economics. It was sold with marketing slogans and pseuo-logic.

The results of this ---

The predictions of people who opposed the agreement turned out to be far closer to what eventually came to pass than did the rosy scenarios of those 283 economists and the victorious President Clinton. NAFTA was supposed to encourage U.S. exports to Mexico; the opposite is what happened, and in a huge way. NAFTA was supposed to increase employment in the U.S.; a study from 2010 counts almost 700,000 jobs lost in America thanks to the treaty. And, as feared, the agreement gave one class in America enormous leverage over the other: employers now routinely threaten to move their operations to Mexico if their workers organize. A surprisingly large number of them—far more than in the pre-NAFTA days—have actually made good on the threat.

These results have never really shaken the self-assured “no-brainer” consensus. Instead, the phrase returns whenever new trade deals are on the table. During the 1997 debate over “fast track,” restricting the input of Congress in trade negotiations, Al From, the founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, declared confidently that “supporting fast track is a no-brainer.” For some, free-trade treaties are so clearly good that supporting them doesn’t require knowledge of their actual contents. The influential New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, for example, still thought so when the debate was over an altogether different treaty. “I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA, the Caribbean Free Trade Initiative,” he told Tim Russert in 2006. “I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade.”

Twenty years later, the broader class divide over the subject persists as well. According to a 2014 survey of attitudes toward NAFTA after two decades, public opinion remains split. But among people with professional degrees—which is to say, the liberal class—the positive view remains the default. Knowing that free-trade treaties are always for the best—even when they empirically are not—seems to have become for the well-graduated a badge of belonging.

http://www.salon.com/2016/03/14/bill_clintons_odious_presidency_thomas_frank_on_the_real_history_of_the_90s/

Brown is allowing non-reason to steer him away from the reality of the class-divide that free trade is about. He may be 'progressive' in some ways, but in this one, he is speaking the neoliberal party line.

I would say I am disappointed, but after so many this election season, I just don't care anymore. Neoliberalism is an antagonistic economic philosophy to progressive economic justice. Period.

[juxtaposed]

3. If one would look back and compare one to the other one would see, Sherrod has always been

in line with Sanders and not HRC. It must be tuff for Sherrod to post such nonsense .

[Ken Burch]

17. Saddest case scenario: he's hoping to be Hubert Humphrey to HRC's LBJ. n/t.

[WillyT]

4. Wow... Ok...

[Carlo Marx]

5. Using hyperbolic language to disparage Sanders does not mitigate the economic damage of NAFTA.

Nor does it exonerate Clinton from her decision to side with her rich donors against working people and the environment, again and again. Brown does himself no favors by shilling for the neoliberal masters of the universe. This is a big F you to working people. If Clinton so thoroughly knows the details of these trade agreements, all the more shame for her supporting them.

[Fawke Em]

6. Meh... he's never lost his job to unfair trade. eom

[Impedimentus]

7. I suspect someone is putting the screws to Brown

It seems to be happening a lot this primary season. I can't imagine who?

[Hoyt]

8. Brown knows jobs are never coming back without trade.

We may no longer make buggy whips, but we can make things other countries can't.

[kennetha]

9. exactly

Plus he knows the difference between a workhorse, determined to make policy work in the real world, and blowhard who just spouts ideological blather from the sidelines.

Bernie Sanders: Too Good for the Real World

[hobbit709]

21. So what exactly do we make without the millions of jobs lost?

Besides guns and bombs and other children's toys.

Most of the jobs created in the last 10 years have been low paying service jobs-most only part time with little or no benefits.

[randome]

28. Hello? Have you heard of Internet technology?

If you're talking about making things, then, yes, you're right, that way of life has been greatly reduced. But the IT sector is still going strong.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]You should never stop having childhood dreams.[/center][/font][hr]

[JonLeibowitz]

10. Sanders has never "rejected trade" -- he is opposed to the neoliberal lie that is free trade.

[Samantha]

13. True - he said again this evening he is not against trade; he wants fair trade not free trade (eom)

[MADem]

11. That'll cause a little cognitive dissonance.

Is there any room left under that bus, I wonder?

[AgingAmerican]

12. So it's just a "reflex"?

[earthshine]

14. Hillary and trade; flip ... flop ... wait for the other shoe to drop.

[NurseJackie]

15. I'm a little surprised that SO FEW of Bernie's colleagues in the Senate have endorse him.

I forget the exact total, but I do know that MORE senators have endorsed Hillary.

[bigtree]

16. I like Sen. Brown

...just as much as when he was a congressman.

[Jitter65]

18. Hope the rest of the folks here read the Chicago Tribune piece on trade.

Maybe they will learn something.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chapman/ct-bernie-sanders-free-trade-michigan-chapman-0310-20160309-column.html

[Ken Burch]

19. Bernie doesn't "reject trade"...nobody does...he rejects the unjust corporate approach

to trade. We don't have to accept being totally at the mercy of the 1% of trade. Why not push for a trade policy that DOESN'T force working people to try to grind each other into the dirt.

It's not as though TPP and NAFTA are the ONLY ways to have global trade.

[DefenseLawyer]

20. Offshoring jobs is not trade

If someone in Vietnam catches shrimp and ships them to the United States, we are trading with Vietnam. If an American company that has a shoe factory in America, making shoes for the American market moves its factory to Vietnam to exploit cheap labor and ships its product back to the United States, that isn't "trade" with Vietnam. The only thing being traded is labor.

[pdsimdars]

22. They are showing their true colors

For years people have been told certain things about certain people, and now, we are finding out where people really stand. Sherrod is supposed to be a progressive, that's been how he has talked. But look at this and his earlier endorsement of Hillary. . . he is obviously a closet corporatist.. When push comes to shove they aren't standing tall as progressives like Elizabeth Warren.
The lines are being drawn and they are on the wrong side.

[Impedimentus]

23. Sherrod Brown wants to be Hillary's VP Pick - Almost Anyone Can Be Bought

Sherrod Brown, Howard Dean, Rachel Maddow, ... the list keeps getting longer and longer

[vintx]

24. All this shows is how few people in govt have any integrity.

As others have pointed out Sanders isn't 'against trade' and it's sickening to see this kind of corporatist-friendly spin come from his mouth.

[99Forever]

25. Frankly my dear....

...I don't give a damn.

[ChiciB1]

26. Sheered Brown, I Used To Thin You Were On Our Side...

You have betrayed me just like Howard Dean and Barney Frank! AND so, so, so many others! Got Money? Will Move On Up! And so it goes.

Sorry, but it's just how I feel and the reason that I came to realize that THIS Democratic Party isn't the one I joined!

[ladjf]

27. There goes another politician I formerly respected. nt