4 ms·
I'm afraid my view is a bit more jaded - I think those storylines were manufactured for ulterior motives as part of an effort to sell a program to the American
by photochemsyn 4y ago
I'm afraid my view is a bit more jaded - I think those storylines were manufactured for ulterior motives as part of an effort to sell a program to the American public that would significantly reduce the average standard of living while concentrating wealth in the hands of billionaires. They'd already seen the effects of NAFTA and with China, they were hungry for more of the same.
I don't believe the conversion of the industrial manufacturing heartland of the United States to a region now called 'The Rust Belt' was accidental or unplanned. Nor was the destruction of much of the West Coast garment and electronics manufacturing industries.
This has been a deliberately planned policy with a known outcome by its architects, and it's been going on for about four decades. See for example:
https://www.epi.org/blog/nafta-twenty-years-disaster/ https://www.epi.org/blog/nafta-twenty-years-disaster/
> "By any measure, NAFTA and its sequels has been a major contributor to the rising inequality of incomes and wealth that Barack Obama bemoans in his speeches. Yet today—channeling Reagan, the Bushes and Clinton—the president proposes two more such trade deals: the Trans-Pacific Partnership with eleven Pacific Rim countries and a free trade agreement with Europe."
- roca 4y agoLots of relatively rich countries are in the TPP, including my country, NZ. It has significant rules protecting labour and environmental conditions. It's fine. From your link: > The surplus with Mexico turned into a chronic deficit. And the economic dislocation in Mexico increased the the flow of undocumented workers into the United States. So they're saying that jobs moving from the USA to Mexico increased the flow of Mexican workers to the USA? That makes no sense at all.
- photochemsyn 4y agoThe other side of the NAFTA coin was that it allowed US agribusiness to dump products like corn in Mexico at below-market prices, driving many small-scale Mexican farmers into poverty. At that point, they could either work as low-paid maquiladores (the border factories etc.) in Mexico or become Mexican expats at significantly better wages in the US agriculture, construction, restaurant, hotel & golf course etc. sectors. The neoliberal project in a nutshell involved the outsourcing of unionized well-paid domestic manufacturing jobs overseas, on one hand, and the import of cheap expat labor to fill jobs that couldn't be moved offshore, driving down labor costs and creating hundreds of new billionaires, who used their money to buy more politicians to lock in the programs and prevent any change.
- roca 4y agoI'm not an expert on Mexico but none of this has happened in NZ with the TPP.