The Same Bosses
Fighting corporate trade deals requires uniting with immigrants and foreign workers — not scapegoating them.
When NAFTA was signed, there had been only a handful of treaty-based arbitrations globally. By 2020, arbitrations had ballooned globally to 1,061 known cases, many of them dealing with challenges to nondiscriminatory public interest regulation. (Woody Wood / Flickr)
One of the standard media frames for the 2016 election is the idea that both the racist billionaire Donald Trump and the self-declared socialist Bernie Sanders are “populists” — and nowhere is their supposed populism more pronounced than on the issue of trade.
It’s true that both Trump and Sanders have spoken out against free-trade agreements — like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the US, Canada, and Mexico — and at certain US economic competitors, most of all, China.
Sanders’s opposition to trade deals that Hillary Clinton has defended throughout her career may have helped him pull off a stunning upset to win the Michigan primary on March 8. Exit polls of voters in the primary showed that 58 percent thought trade deals cost US jobs. Among that group, Sanders beat Clinton by ten percentage points.
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