Global Trade: What's A Good Progressive To Do?
Ruth Connie
The Progressive
Progressives who have long criticized trade deals that favor multinational corporations, suppress wages, accelerate outsourcing, and replace local democracy with unelected tribunals, shrink from keeping company with the racist, isolationist right.
Rightwing populists are making a lot of noise about the weather latelythat is, the lousy economic climate brought on by trade deals that favor corporations at the expense of labor. As a result they are making inroads with an anxious working class.
Progressives cant afford to cede economic populism to the man who could prove to be the most effective white nationalist campaigner of our generation, Tarso Luís Ramos, executive director of the rightwing watchdog group Political Research Associates put it to me recently, when I interviewed him about Donald Trump.
Human rights advocates see no reason for the TPP to make it easier for Malaysia, which has a problem with human trafficking, to access U.S. markets. LGBT activists dont want to roll out the red carpet for Brunei, which is bad on LGBT rights.
Overall, the trouble with the TPP is that it doesnt learn the lessons of NAFTA, St. Louis says. It expands incentives for offshoring and creates more opportunities to challenge environmental and health and safety laws through secret tribunals.
Alex4Martinez
(2,180 posts)Sold as a way to lift up other countries peoples, it was a sham.
By and large, the countries that have been kissed by western capitalism/globalism have caught terminal diseases.
Monsanto products are a great example.
Further, there could be no globalization without monumental exploitation of fossil fuels and the consequential damage to the environment.
I disagree: to look far enough down the road is to reject globalization outright, not to say that "it must continue to move forward".
It has never moved forward, it has only served to worsen conditions for regular people here and over there and causes irrevocable shifts in cultures and stability.
Not all progress is progress, not all technology and trade and economic activity. Some of it is downright deadly.
Overseas
(12,121 posts)Overseas
(12,121 posts)Local and national governments need the power to make their own environmental regulations which cannot be overruled by corporations.
The TPP allows corporations to sue governments for regulations that impede their profits.
We were told, when NAFTA was being pushed, that it would bring other countries up to the stronger environmental standards we had in place at the time. But that did not happen.
We need dramatic reductions in CO2 and methane all over the world. Other countries may establish those limits before we do and I don't want multinationals to be able to sue them for impeding their corporate profits in order to limit damage to our planet.
Corporations already have too much power in the USA. I am depending on other countries to lead the way in curbing their destructive practices.