This Vox Feature on Free Trade and Bernie Sanders is Infuriatingly Stupid

By Shane Ryan

If you’re looking for a way clever way to support America’s disastrous free trade deals, and to pretend they’re not exclusively about letting corporations outsource jobs to countries where they can pay workers subsistence wages (at best), or to leverage the threat of such a move to reduce the wages of American workers and decimate unions, try this:

1. Gloss over the incredible damage these deals have done to American’s manufacturing sector, and the ongoing wrecking ball they’re applying to the working class, as an inevitable product of globalization.

2. Use selective research to assert the ridiculous position that deals like CAFTA, NAFTA, and PNTR are responsible for alleviating poverty in poor countries.

3. Appeal to liberal sympathies by posing the free trade question as an either/or proposition. As in, either you accept the hit to American workers and the disappearance of our national manufacturing sector, or you’re a shitty nationalist who wants to condemn millions of foreigners to starvation and death just so you can keep your HBO subscription and high-fructose corn syrup.

It’s not a bad strategy. If you ask the average American whether he or she would support an agreement that would help destroy our economy for speculative gains abroad, all while contributing to the plight of climate change by empowering the industrial sector in countries with no environmental protection, my educated guess is that most responses would be resoundingly negative.

But what if you performed the old free trade soft shoe, and framed the argument this way: “Aren’t you willing to sacrifice some American prosperity for the good of the global poor?”

In that case, you might be able to hoodwink a few well-meaning liberals who don’t quite understand the complex free trade issue, but who positively, definitely, emphatically don’t want those poor people overseas to starve. This argument is especially to the privileged upper class liberal, who prefers to care about the less fortunate from a safe distance.

much more

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/04/this-vox-feature-on-bernie-sanders-free-trade-posi.html