Some framing on G-7/Trump – The Guardian: Donald Trump was right. The rest of the G7 were wrong
Folks have asked what the heck to think about the G-7 dumpster fire. Monbiot piece is spot on re. larger context. (Tho not accurate re. administration demands on NAFTA rengots, which in addition to sunset clause include elimination of ISDS, etc. ) I also pasted in my blog on a similar theme from last week, below.
The Guardian
Donald Trump was right. The rest of the G7 were wrong
In arguing for a sunset clause to the Nafta trade agreement, this odious man is exposing the corruption of liberal democracy
George Monbiot Wed 13 Jun 2018 01.57 EDT https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/13/trump-nafta-g7-sunset-clause-trade-agreement
He gets almost everything wrong. But last weekend Donald Trump got something right. To the horror of the other leaders of the rich world, he defended democracy against its detractors. Perhaps predictably, he has been universally condemned for it.
His crime was to insist that the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) should have a sunset clause. In other words, it should not remain valid indefinitely, but expire after five years, allowing its members either to renegotiate it or to walk away. To howls of execration from the world’s media, his insistence has torpedoed efforts to update the treaty.
In Rights of Man, published in 1791, Thomas Paine argued that: “Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.” This is widely accepted – in theory if not in practice – as a basic democratic principle.
Even if the people of the US, Canada and Mexico had explicitly consented to Nafta in 1994, the idea that a decision made then should bind everyone in North America for all time is repulsive. So is the notion, championed by the Canadian and Mexican governments, that any slightly modified version of the deal agreed now should bind all future governments.
But the people of North America did not explicitly consent to Nafta. They were never asked to vote on the deal, and its bipartisan support ensured that there was little scope for dissent. The huge grassroots resistance in all three nations was ignored or maligned. The deal was fixed between political and commercial elites, and granted immortality.
In seeking to update the treaty, governments in the three countries have candidly sought to thwart the will of the people. Their stated intention was to finish the job before Mexico’s presidential election in July. The leading candidate, Andrés Lopez Obrador, has expressed hostility to Nafta, so it had to be done before the people cast their vote. They might wonder why so many have lost faith in democracy.
Nafta provides a perfect illustration of why all trade treaties should contain a sunset clause. Provisions that made sense to the negotiators in the early 1990s make no sense to anyone today, except fossil fuel companies and greedy lawyers. The most obvious example is the way its rules for investor-state dispute settlement have been interpreted. These clauses (chapter 11 of the treaty) were supposed to prevent states from unfairly expropriating the assets of foreign companies. But they have spawned a new industry, in which aggressive lawyers discover ever more lucrative means of overriding democracy.
The rules grant opaque panels of corporate lawyers, meeting behind closed doors, supreme authority over the courts and parliaments of its member states. A BuzzFeed investigation revealed they had been used to halt criminal cases, overturn penalties incurred by convicted fraudsters, allow companies to get away with trashing rainforests and poisoning villages, and, by placing foreign businesses above the law, intimidate governments into abandoning public protections.
Under Nafta, these provisions have become, metaphorically and literally, toxic. When Canada tried to ban a fuel additive called MMT as a potentially dangerous neurotoxin, the US manufacturer used Nafta rules to sue the government. Canada was forced to lift the ban, and award the company $13m (£10m) in compensation. After Mexican authorities refused a US corporation permission to build a hazardous waste facility, the company sued before a Nafta panel, and extracted $16.7m in compensation. Another US firm, Lone Pine Resources, is suing Canada for $119m because the government of Quebec has banned fracking under the St Lawrence River.
As the US justice department woke up to the implications of these rules in the 1990s, it began to panic: one official wrote that it “could severely undermine our system of justice” and grant foreign companies “more rights than Americans have”. Another noted: “No one thought about this when Nafta implementing law passed.”
Nor did they think about climate breakdown. Nafta obliges Canada not only to export most of its oil and half its natural gas to the US, but also to ensure that the proportion of these fuels produced from tar sands and fracking does not change. As a result, the Canadian government cannot adhere to both its commitments under the Paris agreement on climate change and its commitments under Nafta. While the Paris commitments are voluntary, Nafta’s are compulsory.
Were such disasters foreseen by the negotiators? If so, the trade agreement was a plot against the people. If not – as the evidence strongly suggests – its unanticipated outcomes are a powerful argument for a sunset clause. The update the US wanted was also a formula for calamity, that future governments might wish to reverse. But this is likely to be difficult, even impossible, without the threat of walking out.
Those who defend the immortality of trade agreements argue that it provides certainty for business. It’s true that there is a conflict between business confidence and democratic freedom. This conflict is repeatedly resolved in favour of business. That the only defender of popular sovereignty in this case is an odious demagogue illustrates the corruption of 21st-century liberal democracy.
There was much rejoicing this week over the photo of Trump being harangued by the other G7 leaders. But when I saw it, I thought: “The stitch-ups engineered by people like you produce people like him.” The machinations of remote elites in forums such as the G7, the IMF and the European Central Bank, and the opaque negotiation of unpopular treaties, destroy both trust and democratic agency, fuelling the frustration that demagogues exploit.
Trump was right to spike the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He is right to demand a sunset clause for Nafta. When this devious, hollow, self-interested man offers a better approximation of the people’s champion than any other leader, you know democracy is in trouble.
• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
EYES ON TRADE
For G-7, Trump’s racism and misogyny are ok, but his trade policies are intolerable
Lori Wallach June 08, 2018 http://citizen.typepad.com/eyesontrade/2018/06/for-g-7-trumps-racism-and-misogyny-are-ok-but-his-trade-policies-are-intolerable.html
U.S. President Donald Trump seems as welcome at the G-7 picnic as a rabid skunk.
Most G-7 leaders have worked to build warm relationships with Trump, despite his xenophobia, racism, misogyny, climate denialism, warmongering and corrupt business self-dealing. But apparently, taking on the trade status quo was a bridge too far.
That is a bitter irony, given that the trade and financial policies that the G-7 has relentlessly promoted created the political context that helped to make Trump president. Decades of U.S. presidents from both parties and their G-7 counterparts have pushed international economic policies that have created expansive new rights and powers for multinational corporations and hurt working people.
Pushing corporate-rigged trade agreements, blessing financial deregulation and loosening trillions in speculative investment flows were the economic priorities.
Even as millions of manufacturing jobs were lost, absent was coordinated G-7 action to counter China’s currency manipulation or a unified approach to end Chinese subsidies and other unfair trade practices that, among other problems, fueled the global steel and aluminum oversupply glut.
And as working-class wages declined and income inequality and financial instability grew, the majority harmed by the G-7 version of globalization were told their fate was inevitable.
In the United States, that message was conveyed by Democratic and Republican presidents alike even as the economic and social fallout became increasing difficult to deny. About 4.5 million net American manufacturing jobs have been lost since the 1994 start of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and 2000 trade deal with China related to its admission to the World Trade Organization. Sixty-thousand manufacturing facilities shuttered. And real wages flattened, given that the replacement of the higher-wage manufacturing jobs with lower-wage service sector jobs pushed down wages economy-wide even if one did not lose their job to trade.
Enter Trump, who, whatever else his trade policies may or may not do, ended the bipartisan presidential practice of not seeing or talking about the many Americans who have been harmed by our trade status quo.
Therefore perhaps Trump’s truly unforgiveable sin, finally meriting open ire from G-7 partners, is to demonstrate that the trade status quo is, in fact, not pre-ordained, but rather is a set of policies he is shredding.
Trump may well not achieve the better trade outcomes he promised.
That would require him to stay focused on changing China’s cornucopia of unfair trade practices rather than settling for the usual Chinese promises to buy more U.S. exports. And, unless he can implement a replacement deal that eliminates NAFTA’s investor-state outsourcing incentives and adds strong labor and environmental terms with swift and certain enforcement to raise wages, companies will keep moving jobs to Mexico to pay workers a pittance and dump toxins and import those products back for sale here.
And, the U.S. corporate lobby is in overdrive working against any attempt to change the trade policies to preserve the status quo. Doing so is apparently a higher priority for them than preserving the Republican congressional majority. The Koch Brothers just announced a campaign designed to line up congressional Republicans against Trump’s trade agenda before the midterm elections, even as polls show GOP and Independent voters support that agenda.
Plus, Trumpian chaos has led to Trump caving on well-thought-out policies, such as the China trade enforcement action aimed at dismantling the technology theft essential to the China 2025 agenda to dominate industries of the future. That approach was revived, for now.
But whether or not Trump’s trade policies succeed, the other G-7 leaders should reflect on the painful lesson of Trump’s rise and that of other authoritarian politicians who wrap themselves in economic populism: Political leaders who fail to offer a new approach on trade and the related economic policies that provide greater economic security for all only serve to alienate more and more people who are left behind, creating fertile political ground for more Trumps.
Trump’s pledges to upend the trade status quo, end job outsourcing and create manufacturing jobs attracted hard-hit working-class votes in the key Midwestern swing states that put him in the White House. And President Barack Obama’s relentless efforts right through the 2016 campaign to pass the business-as-usual Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and Secretary Hilary Clinton’s ambiguous views on the TPP and connection to President Bill Clinton’s NAFTA, dampened working-class enthusiasm for the Democratic ticket.
If Trump’s foreseeably cringe-worthy exploits at the G-7 don’t drive home this point, perhaps yesterday’s election of Doug Ford — considered the Donald Trump of Canada and brother of the infamous right-wing, populist, crack-smoking Ontario Mayor Robert Ford — as Ontario’s new Premier will.