Bernie Sanders' myths about free trade

[question everything]

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

[Hoyt]

1. Good to see the truth posted, even if it doesn't fit folks' agenda.

[Baobab]

18. The truth isn't favorable to Hillary - er whole so called health care plan was a cover up..

of G- A- T- S-

Also, read up on NAFTA and its extremist ideology

[kristopher]

19. Intro

http://www.citizen.org/documents/GATS-facing-the-facts-final.pdf

[Baobab]

22. Yes, "facing the facts" is a really good pub. from Canada's best NGO on G A T S

One of a great many- read them all...

here is an interesting one few of us have probably read before..

https://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/reports/public-auto-insurance-and-trade-treaties


Trade treaty 'chill': New Brunswick abandons public auto insurance in face of trade treaty threats
June 30, 2004 | National Office

OTTAWA--A study released today concludes that the New Brunswick government should have proceeded with public auto insurance, despite threats from the foreign insurance industry to sue under international trade treaties to thwart the policy.

[Firebrand Gary]

2. Kicked and Recommended.

[Baobab]

34. I disagree- This post is totally misleading

here is the real truth on Clinton's true feelings about unions and trade and working people...

http://www.thenation.com/article/the-clinton-email-bernie-sanders-should-bring-up-in-sundays-debate/

“as union leaders and human rights activists conveyed…harrowing reports of violence to then-Secretary of State Clinton in late 2011, urging her to pressure the Colombian government to protect labor organizers, she responded first with silence” and then public praise for “Colombia’s progress on human rights
hereby permitting hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid to flow to the same Colombian military that labor activists say helped intimidate workers.”

Considering that Clinton said in that email that Colombian “workers were going to end up w the same or better rights than workers in Wisconsin and Indiana and, maybe even, Michigan,” here’s the question Sanders should ask her: Did she mean that she hoped to raise Colombia up to US standards, or lower the United States’ to Colombia’s?

[Recursion]

3. "Since 2000, when domestic auto employment peaked"

That's the one bit I think not enough people have processed.

The high-water mark of US auto employment was 11 years after Roger & Me. NAFTA was 6 years after it.

[kennetha]

4. yeah it's amazing that Sanders gets away with such Simple Minded Demagoguery

[dogman]

5. How about if those shelves had products made in the USA?

But who besides Bernie cares about American workers?

[TM99]

6. Yes, indeed there are plenty of myths about '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.

Th 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/

[AzDar]

8. ...

[TM99]

24. I have posted this link

and these quotes twice tonight in 'free trade' threads.

You will notice that none of the neoliberal free trade apologist have responded to it.

[amborin]

7. you could not be more incorrect;

[LSK]

9. you know where they made the Chevy Camaro from 1993-2002? Canada

Chevy trucks are made in Mexico.

Sorry but Detroit is a mess because our trade agreements made it easy for the auto factories to move out of the country.

[cosmicone]

10. Free trade is a double edged sword

Industries that export are for it. The free trade and TPP opposition will backfire badly in California and Washington where most of the jobs depend upon export from Hollywood movies to integrated circuits to iPhones to Boeing planes to Amazon. None of those industries want radical tariffs and barriers.

[litlbilly]

11. you do know the difference between free trade and fair trade right? didnt think so...

[WIProgressive88]

12. So now we have Clinton supporters so obsessed with taking down Sanders that they'll link to a piece

written by a right-wing, libertarian, free-market fundamentalist. Says a lot about Hillary and her supporters...

[Baobab]

20. Apparently...

But I think people can recognize the facts through the spin now.

Sorry guys, nice try...

[Senator Tankerbell]

13. Clinton and Obama on NAFTA in 2008

[Ken Burch]

14. Another right-wing source?

I'm shocked...shocked to see that Republican columns are posted by the Clinton campaign:

[ucrdem]

15. That's just half of it. The other half is that where would the jobs come from without NAFTA or TPP?

The trade deals are needed to create markets for American products including high tech, pharma, agriculture, and entertainment to name the ones that come to mind, and of course the big ol' gas guzzlers we keep on making in Detroit.

[kristopher]

16. Not the way they are structured.

With the WTO and the trade agreements that guarantee the right of profit (among other things) the corporations are establishing a transnational supra-governmental system of governance that is not under the control of "democracy".

[Luminous Animal]

17. Apparently, you have not heard about Fair Trade… which Bernie supports.

Free trade benefits corporations. Fair trade benefits communities.

[angrychair]

21. Two "miss the point" pieces from Tribune

Posted here in one day. Funny, the HRC crowd here is always so quick to trash a post based on source alone. The Chicago Tribune is a right-leaning rag that happens to be Bernie bashing as well as conflating him with tRump, a twofer, and as a bonus since it impugns and demeans union labor, made in the USA and Sanders in one article than I guess it achieves all its requirements.

I will answer to it anyway.

I'll hit the high points and expand if asked.
*Offshoring our manufacturing base is detrimental to our industrial capacity and long-term security.

*it often leaves urban blight and poor transitional migration of impacted workers to new job skills.
Companies are rarely required or inclined to offer the ability to the impacted workforce or community to recover from a sudden lose of income and/or training that results in transferable job skills.
*Suppliers, especially single-source, as well as supporting services and service industry businesses that benefit from a thriving community, cut staff and/or end services to that community that can no longer sustain the benefit of their service (few to no restaurants, grocery stores, large hospitals or multi-practice clinics or malls in a local or regional economy)

What the article doesn't say is the reason the domestic automakers picked after a very long lag time it needed to adjust to a changing economy. There lies the rub and why people like Sanders care so much. Cheap goods from overseas don't mean anything unless people can afford to buy them. People have to work at somewhere. Training, education and innovation are the keys to success. We can use that education and those innovative efforts to leverage good products being made by a educated workforce to build it here as opposed to being made by hand by a 12 year old girl in a crowded manufacturing plant for next to nothing in pay and no benefits in very dangerous working conditions.

Someone always pays for the benefit of those cheap products, one way or the other.

[Samantha]

23. Good timing for the Chicago Tribune to land a hit piece on the Sanders' campaign

The automobile industry in Japan grew because of the advice Americans gave them at the end of World War II to build a stable economy. That advice was to build an automobile industry to stabilize the country's financial status. Japan took that advice very seriously, and in all honesty made some of the best automobiles this planet has ever seen. And Americans loved them. As time passed, many more bought them -- they were beautiful to look at, very easy on gasoline, and extremely reliable. I know because I bought two of them and until recently still had them. I sold one of them but still have the other. Today they look as wonderful as when I bought them. So the United States just did not compete very well in this area.

This leads to another point. Sanders does not object to international trade. What he does not support is free trade. He supports fair trade. And if you think we have fair trade, how do you explain the huge trade deficit we have with China?

Better products and cheaper at that? I don't think so. Most of the items I have bought did not last very long because they were not well made. They were in fact cheaply made and had to be replaced sooner rather than later. I would rather pay more as I used to for a washing machine that lasted as long as my Maytag did (over 20 years with only one minor repair which my former husband was able to do himself). The clothes do not last as long and sorry to say this, but they are no where near the quality that used to be manufactured in this Country, often with a union label.

And do I need to mention the chemicals used in these products which never would have been added had they been built here? A great example of that is the flooring which had to be recalled because of a cancer-causing chemical used in the production.

Free trade is just as Sanders says, a race to the bottom.

Just how dumb does the Chicago Tribune think we Americans are?

Sam

[quaker bill]

25. much better economists beg to differ.

[Tortmaster]

26. I've looked at Senator Sanders' position on the TPP, and it is almost silly.

A full half of his arguments are based upon the mythical "Death Panels of Democracy" that the ISDS arbitration mechanisms will supposedly cause. In fact, in all the years of NAFTA, the United States is 13-0 in arbitration hearings. There has been a 50+ year history of similar agreements in the WTO and GATT treaties, and we never lost our democracy.

Most importantly, Senator Sanders ignored the current economics. It is now cheaper to manufacture in the United States that it is, on average, in the factories of our chief trade partners. The TPP could be a boon to America, but you wouldn't know it from his analysis.

I'm going to trust Krugman and Obama on this, thank you very much.

[DonCoquixote]

27. It is sad to see people tie themselves into knots

when failing to answer two questions that any Junior high school student can ponder:

1) if places like China or Korea or (insert third world here) can pay their people pennies, who will hire Americans?
2)what will stop the TPP from being abused to maintain the status quo, which involves a lot of those jobs bleeding towards Asia?

[Jitter65]

28. What is really sad is to see the Democrat party destroyed by an infiltrator with an anemic record in

Congress. He is the amendment king and king of amendments going nowhere in all those years. A mercy and two student organizing events, then disappearing into lily white Vermont where the people who know him best like him least. If it weren't for the really stupid actions on the part of the GOP candidates things would be much worse. Like families a divorce and dysfunctional kids ruin families.

[DonCoquixote]

29. IF the democratic establishment had addressed concerns form the get go

Bernie would have been squashed. But Hillary, for whatever reasons (hint DWS) chose to say nothing about the tpp or KXL until she was forced to. Say what you will about Bernie, but if not for him, this would have been a glorified Parliament picking Hillary as a de facto prime minister, with the insiders making sure she did not walk one micromillimieter to the left of Richard Nixon.

[mythology]

31. The Democrat party?

Interesting.

[Jitter65]

30. A little late for this but a welcome lesson going forward. nt

[NurseJackie]

32. Interesting stuff. We need more stories like this.

[Kelvin Mace]

33. More stories from right-wing newspapers?

Suddenly they have credibility?

[libtodeath]

35. You have to be kidding.

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.

Do you know how much something like this being posted on a liberal website makes one want to throw up?

Those lower prices were on the backs of little more than slave labor.
Walmart?
What the?