In his hateful, unhinged, dangerous and almost roundly false rants, Donald Trump repeatedly makes one singular true statement: NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, was a disaster for the country. Putting aside whether he actually believes the point or it’s just another part of the mutterings of someone entirely unqualified to serve as President, that statement is both a warning sign and a potential inspiring rallying cry for Democrats.
Trump’s attack on NAFTA is a startling, direct rejection of the orthodoxy of the Republican Party. NAFTA bound together Canada, Mexico and the U.S. in an agreement that oiled the machinery of corporations to do as they pleased, loosening up the movement of capital and investment between the countries and taking a heavy toll on U.S. workers’ wages.
DONALD TRUMP AS PRESIDENT WOULD MAKE THE WORLD LOOK LIKE THE WILD WEST
Every NAFTA-type deal passed with significant, large majorities of congressional Republicans, in the face of opposition to those deals by a big, and steadily growing, part of the Democratic Party. Indeed, opposition by a majority of Democrats in Congress has slowed down President Obama’s efforts to pass another bad trade pact, the Trans Pacific Partnership.
Whoever becomes the nominee of the Democratic Party, he or she had better understand that the national revolt against the status quo and establishment politics is a rejection of many horrendous economic policies-but a big flashing red light leads directly to Bill Clinton’s NAFTA.
NAFTA helped hasten the shuttering of manufacturing plants, intimidated workers from demanding wage increases lest their companies pack up and leave and, as well, impoverished millions of Mexican farmers who could not compete, sending them looking for sustainable livelihoods to the north.
That putrid deal is the model for every trade deal that followed, including the TPP — deals that have undercut wages, brutalized communities, cost millions of good-paying jobs and exacerbated the environmental threats to the planet. The penalty for such actions was zero; in fact, the rhetoric supporting the deals emphasized how much they aided “global competition” and “efficiency.”
Bernie Sanders, running for the Democratic presidential nomination, understands this. As a member of the House of Representatives, he fought NAFTA and each of its malignant progeny negotiated by Democratic and Republican administrations.
From a purely political point of view, if the Democratic Party wants to ensure that its presidential nominee holds on to the votes of a whole lot of people who live in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, upstate New York and other hollowed-out communities, it had better take an unambiguous stand at its convention against NAFTA-style deals. Throughout those towns and cities, Trump will make inroads simply by castigating a trade deal people view as having cost them good-paying jobs.
There is a precedent. The Democratic Party took a largely unnoticed big electoral hit in 1994 because of its embrace of corporate-driven trade deals. While the Clinton administration’s botching of health care reform was often cited as the greatest factor driving the midterm elections that delivered the House speakership to Newt Gingrich, I would argue that NAFTA played a significant role in many of the Congressional districts, particularly in the so-called rust-belt, that flipped to the Republican Party.
Thousands of workers had been educated about NAFTA and mobilized to oppose the agreement, particularly by their unions. When they saw a Democratic president — Bill Clinton — trumpet NAFTA as its loudest champion, they felt that they had been abandoned. Many voted Republican for other reasons, such as guns or other social issues, or simply stayed home.
One positive outcome of the current Democratic primary contest is that Hillary Clinton now says she opposes the TPP, despite having previously called it the “gold standard” for trade agreements. That shift in her position comes entirely because of the astounding grassroots organizing to oppose TPP. So, in effect, the current position of the party’s potential standard-bearers is to kill the TPP, as it is written today, if it is still in limbo in Congress after the election.
However, what the party needs, in terms of short-term electoral benefits and the longer-term best interests of workers, is an unambiguous pivot away from NAFTA-style deals.
I’ve actually read NAFTA and its big bound volumes sit on my book shelf-a scary admission, indeed. These are not “free trade” agreements, as theorized by the 19th century economist David Ricardo.
Instead, every NAFTA-type deal has been structured for corporate rights, with detailed exceptions and protections for capital, patents, intellectual property and other financial benefits. You cannot patch on, as an afterthought, language on workers and the environment because it’s a sham, cynically conjured up to sell the deal, its protections unenforceable.
If the Democratic Party really wants to claim the banner championing the fight against inequality, raising wages and saving the planet — and above all, deny Donald Trump any chance to gain traction with voters by claiming he can best undo the damage wrought by NAFTA-style deals — it will have to deliver an entirely new trade vision, one that works for American workers.
Tasini is a surrogate for Bernie Sanders and author of “The Essential Bernie Sanders and His Vision for America”
