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Thursday, April 22, 2010

Free Trade Doesn't Work: Is it time to Repeal NAFTA http://www.freetradedoesntwork.com/Excerpt_from_Free_Trade_Doesnt_Work_Ch_12.pdf

The rift created by free trade: The first rift this implies is between people who obtain most of their income from work and people who obtain most of their income from returns on capital. People in the latter category obviously want all labor to be as cheap as possible. People in the former category want the labor they consume (directly or embodied in goods) to be as cheap as possible, but the labor that they produce and sell, namely their own wages, to be expensive.This implies the possibility of an electoral coalition in which one part of society treats itself to cheap foreign labor at the expense of another. 

...Four congressmen have now moved a bill to repeal NAFTA. Superficially, this means little, as passage of this bill is unlikely in the near future. But more fundamentally, it means a lot because, unbeknownst to most Americans inside and outside the Washington Beltway, free trade is inexorably losing its base of support on Capitol Hill.This means, for a start, that President Obama's recent brave-faced pledge to move forward with his proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (interestingly, the dread phrase "free trade agreement" has been carefully left out of the name) is quite likely dead on arrival. Obama himself may know this and may have staged this gesture simply to placate foreign nations and domestic corporate interests.

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