More evidence-free cheer-leading for "free trade"

I see where Toronto Star business columnist David Olive has another screed on view about how great globalization/free trade is for us; World must accept realities of globalization.

Oh, must it really?

Is this an article about actual facts, or is it vacuous pro business propaganda? I've read it through a few times, and I can find no reason why the "world must accept realities of globalization."

The sub-head kind of gives the game away, doesn't it? If you're iffy about "free trade" you're obviously a xenophobe. Nobody in Canada wants to be a xenophobe. Heck, if you're a xenophobe in Canada you're probably a scab-picking opioid addict who hates immigrants and sympathises with the racist Trump campaign. Who wants to be tarred with that brush?

Here are David Olive's proofs that free trade is great.

Here are some inconvenient truths for free trade critics:

• To oppose free trade now is to close the barn door long after horse has gone. Due to the lingering malaise from the Great Recession, growth in trade this year will be a mere 1.7 per cent, compared with an annual 7 per cent in the 1980s and 1990s. Growth in world trade has been slowing to a crawl for years.

Hmm... was not the Great Recession the result of the Lehman collapse, which was a result of the deregulation that is part and parcel of globalization?

• The decline of globalization is bad for poor people. More vigorous trade among countries over the past generation is the leading factor in the reduction of extreme poverty worldwide, which has been cut in half over the past two decades. About three years ago, the UN was able report that for the first time in history, the number of poor people in the world had ceased to grow, and is now in decline.

This is a result of "free trade?" Really? The biggest improvements in poverty stats over the past generation have come from India and China. Show me the free trade agreements that made this improvement possible.

• The goods that account for so many of the offerings at Wal-Mart, Costco, Dollarama, Home Depot and the like — imported from China, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Vietnam and other lower-wage countries — have for the past three decades reduced the rate of inflation in North America by about 1 per cent a year. Considering that the current rate of inflation in each of Canada and the U.S. is 1.1 per cent, that’s no small number. Globalization raises incomes in emerging economies, while in the West it drives down the cost of living.

There you have it, working class America; your wages have been stagnant for forty years but you can buy a 52 inch flat-screen TV for under five hundred bucks at Wal-Mart, so stop whining already.

• Any business or country intent on growing its sales or economy is compelled to seek free-trade access to emerging economies. There just isn’t enough GDP growth in the mature economies to sustain growth rates of more than 1 per cent or 2 per cent. The fastest-growing markets for the West’s high-priced goods, including cars, energy-efficient appliances and mainframe computers — are located among the emerging economies, greater access to which the vilified trade deals would make possible.

Growth growth growth... if we're to have a sustainable economy and a sustainable planet, we seriously need to get away from this obsession with growth. Why can't we have sustainable stability instead?

• Especially in the U.S., trade deals are condemned as job killers. But it’s not the fault of any trade deal that North America has starved its social infrastructure, notably education. We haven’t confronted technology’s impact on low-income workers who often are “precariously employed,” lacking job security. The U.S. ranks a dismal 30th in student test scores, and Canada ranks an unimpressive 13th. North America’s real problems include income inequality; gender bias in hiring, pay and promotions; the affordable housing shortage; and the impact of private-sector underfunding of R&D.

And how will the TPP and the other trade agreements in the pipeline rectify any of those problems? 

• No question, the TPP is ambitious. Of course, its stated aims include spurring economic growth in Canada, the U.S. and the 10 other founding TPP members. But it also promotes faster access to cheaper generic drugs (much to the annoyance of Big Pharma); eradication of child labour and forced labour; the right to collective bargaining (that could be a problem for Southern U.S. states that effectively prohibit unionization, a major contributor to income inequality); improvement in workplace conditions, notably safety; and stricter environmental protections. That’s a short list of both social and economic improvements the TPP, CETA and the TTIP are committed to achieving.

Olive is writing pure fiction now. TPP will reduce prices for prescription drugs? That's not what I've been reading. And Big Pharma is annoyed with the TPP? Olive knows this how? Big Pharma has been inside the TPP tent while the agreement was crafted. The media and politicians were not. There's been zero transparency about the TPP, and what little we know comes from unauthorized leaks. But Olive knows Big Pharma is annoyed?

I don't think so.

But my biggest problem with Olive's vapid spot of cheer-leading was this non-sequitur in the middle of his story;

 We’ve seen the 1965 Auto Pact transform southern Ontario into an industrial powerhouse. 

What's David been smoking? Not that I disagree with the statement that the Auto Pact transformed southern Ontario into an industrial powerhouse, but because the Auto Pact was the very opposite of a free trade agreement!

The Auto Pact was about strictly regulated trade, not "free trade."

And what's happened to that southern Ontario industrial powerhouse since NAFTA?

Read this.

Or this.

Southern Ontario's powerhouse manufacturing sector was utterly decimated by NAFTA. I know, because I used to work there. 

TPP and the race to the bottom

My Globe and Mail this morning featured no less than four articles about the Trans Pacific Partnership "free trade" deal that is currently being hammered out in Hawaii.

Free trade agreements should at this point in time be understood as a mug's game, at least from the point of view of regular working folks. They help corporate profits and drag down the standard of living in high-wage countries.

I've been a keen observer of the free trade charade since before NAFTA, when Lyin' Brian Mulroney was campaigning on the merits of the pre-NAFTA Canada US Free Trade Agreement. Every time he saw a camera or a microphone he just kept repeating "jobs jobs jobs jobs..."

A lot of people believed him.

What we had to give up to get that deal was the Canada US Auto Pact that dated back to the early '60s, and which had created a thriving car manufacturing industry in Canada. The Auto Pact was the opposite of free trade; it was a focused trade deal that forced the automakers to build cars here if they wanted to sell them here. Auto manufacturing in Canada has been dying a slow death ever since.

Adding Mexico to the deal under NAFTA sped up the de-industrialization of the Canadian economy. I remember hearing the bullshit about how that one was going to lift all ships; the combination of Yankee ingenuity and capital, Canadian resources, and Mexican dollar-a-day labour were somehow going to combine in some magic formula to make North America an economic utopia.

And I guess it was for the corporate shitbags who closed down US and Canadian manufacturing, simultaneously creating America's rust belt and a manufacturing boom in Mexico.

So when we're told that TPP is far bigger and more important than NAFTA, I shudder with dread. The fact that these negotiations have been entirely shrouded in secrecy doesn't make me feel any better.

They've obviously got a lot to hide.

 

Requiem for the factory hands

In today's Globe and Mail Adam Radwanski offers a sympathetic treatment of the plight of southern Ontario's once-thriving working class.

Radwanski's lament goes on for many thousands of words. He interviews numerous academics, union officials, as well as the de-industrialized working class who struggle to survive on minimum wage jobs after their factories have been shuttered.

He even offers a passing hint that many of those jobs may have ended up in Mexico.

But what is truly amazing is that he manages this entire in-depth analysis of Ontario's manufacturing collapse without a single mention of NAFTA.

I remember Brian Mulroney campaigning on the JOBS JOBS JOBS NAFTA NAFTA NAFTA!!! platform back in the middle '80s. It was an obvious crock of BS from the get-go. It was a pitch geared to appeal to our inherent racist belief that the brown folks south of the Rio Grande were not up to building stuff in an industrial economy.

No one knew the truth better than the factory worker's themselves; working on an assembly line at Ford or Chrysler ain't rocket science, and Mexicans will be happy to do our work for a small fraction of our hourly wage.

We knew from the beginning we were doomed.

Thirty years later the national newspaper of record waxes nostalgic for a bygone era, but completely ignores the single most important reason why southern Ontario went from industrial heart-land to rust belt.

That's intellectual dishonesty of the highest order.