Global Trade: What’s a Good Progressive to Do?

[demwing]

Some progressives are uneasy about their new allies in the fight against corporate trade deals.
BY RUTH CONNIFF | JULY 6, 2016

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.

<snip>

Right-wing populists are making a lot of noise about the weather lately — that 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 can’t afford to cede economic populism to the man who could prove to be the most effective white nationalist campaigner of our generation" (said) Tarso Luís Ramos, executive director of the right-wing watchdog group Political Research Associates.

http://billmoyers.com/story/global-trade-whats-good-progressive/

Conniff's answer to her lead-in question seems to be summed up in a quote from Melinda St. Louis, International Campaigns Director for Public Citizens’ Global Trade Watch:

"For years, both major parties pushed multinational corporations’ agenda in big trade deals. But not this year. Growing public ire over NAFTA, especially in the Rust Belt, which has seen more than 57,000 factories offshored, has changed the political debate. Now the candidates are fighting over who hates the TPP more. That is a prudent response since all of the trade unions, environmental groups, LGBT organizations, women, retirees — the entire progressive base is opposing TPP.

It’s not about trade or not trade, it’s about who writes the rules and who benefits."

In other words, globalized trade is an inevitability. Therefore, we can either stand by and watch, or try to lead the world toward a more progressive outcome - within the parameters of a reality which we may not appreciate, but must now face.

Please DU the Globalization poll in GD2016:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/12512242643

[merrily]

1. Everyone blames "progressives" (whatever that word may mean to you) for everything.

As anyone who owned a small US manufacturing operation or who worked in any US manufacturing location what he or she thinks of trade treaties with foreign nations. Then ask him or her if he or she is a liberal or a progressive.

(I say this while having the warmest of feelings for Moyers, whom I consider a national treasure.)