A lot of people here hate trade agreements, especially NAFTA and the TPP. Many people mistakenly believe NAFTA caused the net loss of millions of jobs when the evidence suggests we lost jobs in some sectors, gained in others, and it was basically a wash.
I remember being at a county Democratic party meeting back in 1993 when the question was asked, who doesn’t support NAFTA? Of the 40 or so people at the meeting, only 2 people raised their hands, and I was one of them.
I really like Robert Reich. I also know he very much opposes the TPP, which may lead some to mistakenly believe he has consistently opposed past trade agreements. Here are some of the things Robert Reich has said about International trade in the past.
I don’t think it was a mistake, but it wasn’t really a tremendous help.
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If you have an environmental standard and a labor standard that, for example, bars all slave labor, guarantees the right to organize, maintains kind of minimum labor standards throughout the world, you are setting a floor for all nations. It’s not protectionism. This is a way of actually getting everybody up rather than having the bar continue to trend downward. We tried to do this in NAFTA, and, unfortunately, we couldn’t get the Mexican government support.
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Instead of being opposed to globalization, progressives should pressure the world’s wealthiest nations into sharing the benefits.
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Rather than advocate for less trade, progressives should seek to remove barriers that make it difficult for poorer countries to export to richer ones. That means fewer subsidies to farmers in advanced nations, combined with lower tariffs on farm products from the third world and fewer barriers (including “voluntary restraint agreements”) to textile and steel imports from poor nations.
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American capitalism is triumphant all over the world, and with good reason. Neo-Luddites who claim that advancing technologies will eliminate jobs & relegate most of us to poverty are wrong, even silly. Isolationists and xenophobes who want to put up the gates and reduce trade & immigration are misguided, often dangerously so. Paranoid populists who say global corporations and international capitalists are conspiring against us are deluded, possibly hallucinating.
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Why this backlash against globalization? Simply because most peoples’ jobs are more precarious now than ever before. And while trade isn’t the only culprit -- it’s also technology, and fierce domestic competition -- trade is the easiest culprit for most people to understand.
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Now these quotes go back to 1999 and are sourced at the link above. So is Robert Reich just a dishonest, establishment, corporatist shill? Of course not. When quotes and positions are taken out of historical context and the complexity of an issue is ignored, it can become easy for people to misrepresent or misinterpret the meanings of those positions.
Robert Reich has changed his views and support as the situation changed, as any reasonable person would do. Things change, and if you don’t change with them, you are left in the past. The positions we took 25 years ago, may very well not be the position we take today. The longer your public record the more people will falsely accuse you of being a flip flopper, dishonest, corrupt… Those doing the accusing are usually looking at the past through the filter of the present.
If we fail to try to understand the decisions of the past by understanding the conditions of the past, we will turn against all politicians who have served for many years, or we will embrace those who can only see cures for past problems as the solutions for the problems of the present and future.