Donald Trump just secured the votes of millions of American citizens by renegotiating NAFTA. However, it has yet to pass congress and may never, just because it is a big-time body blow to the desires of Wall Street and the billionaires in their efforts to redistribute more income from working Americans to the rich by exporting jobs, thereby creating greater income and wealth inequality using U.S. taxpayer dollars in the process.
The millions of U.S. jobs currently occupied by Mexico’s $3 dollar per hour labor will almost certainly see some jobs returning to the United States, or more than likely, they may be exported from Mexico to Pakistan, China or Vietnam.
Regardless, Richard Trumpka, president of the AFL-CIO wrote of the renegotiated treaty, “The United States Mexico Canada trade agreement is a huge win for working people. After a quarter-century of suffering under the failed North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and 18 months of hard-fought negotiations, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) is now proud to endorse a better deal for working people: the United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USCMA)…The USMCA isn’t perfect — no deal ever is. But it’s a far cry from the original NAFTA, and that is a huge win for working people in North America. While it won’t bring back every job lost under NAFTA, it will help stop the bleeding and add important new protections for workers across the continent.”
A few things need to be said about the agreement. It will slow the pace of income and wealth inequality that has occurred over the last forty years, but only a little bit. Nowadays, three men own more wealth than the bottom half of the U.S. population and the 1 percent now steal somewhere between 22 to 38 percent of all the income produced each year in the United States, up from 8 percent in 1980; much of this can be attributed to international trade agreements negotiated to export U.S. jobs by the tens of millions.
The difference between the old higher wages and the new third world wages goes directly into the bank accounts of the rich via higher corporate profits, dividends and share prices.
The USCMA passed through the Democratic Party-controlled U.S. House of Representatives last week. However, it now has to pass through the RepubliCon controlled U.S. Senate early in 2020. The RepubliCons and their Wall Street and other corporate masters are dead set against it.
U.S. RepubliCon Senator Pat Toomey, who represents Wall Street and some billionaires, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that he will vote against the trade agreement. Here are a few of his objections;
1. Car manufacturers will need to… “pay wages far above prevailing Mexican rates.” In other words, Mexican auto workers do not deserve to earn more than $3 an hour.
2. “First are the laws to facilitate unionization of Mexican factory workers.” Apparently, Toomey thinks that organized billionaires (shareholders in corporations) is something that has God’s blessing, but organized labor is evil. This is class warfare at its worse.
3. “Another flaw is the drastic reduction of the Investor-State Dispute Settlement mechanism. U.S. investors don’t always get a fair adjudication of their business disputes in foreign courts, even in Canada and Mexico.”
These were secret tribunals that were highly unconstitutional. The U.S. Constitution allows the rules of treaties to override U.S. laws. However, a treaty requires 67 percent of the U.S. Senate to approve of treaties. That was not the case for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was, and notice this, called an “agreement.”
NAFTA only required a majority vote since it was an “agreement.” Consequently, the always secretly held tribunals of the Investor-State clause of NAFTA has always been unconstitutional. Representatives of local government, citizen groups, labor groups, and others, were never allowed into the tribunals. Only lawyers for the governments of Canada, the U.S., and Mexico, as well as corporate lawyers, were allowed in. Local and state laws were overturned by this unconstitutional tribunal, but Senator Toomey thinks it unfair the power of the tribunals is no more.
Expect Wall Street and the entire RepubliCon party to reject this agreement in the United States Senate, but expect Donald Trump to benefit politically nonetheless.