i know this won’t come as a surprise to you, but NAFTA was championed by HW Bush, not Clinton, even though Clinton was left to implement it. which he did, including things like money to help workers find new careers at community colleges. i know that because i remember my parents in those classes, earning a chance at middle class income in their late 40s. they were immigrants, not former manufacturing workers but still. The digital boom of the 90s happened in part because of new free trade. and the fact remains NAFTA actually worked for the benefit of consumers.
yes corporate entities exploited it and left manufacturing towns behind, but it took decades of willful ignorance from state and federal government to really hit. there was a way to save them by hammering and diversifying the workforce. but no, state parties left those efforts as soon W got preoccupied with war, and obama was hamstrung by republicans (and joe lieberman) at every turn.
police militarization is bipartisan unfortunately, and only now there are some democrat officials calling things as they are. that’s democrats changing and republicans digging in. that’s what progress actually looks like in the rear view mirror. it’s painfully slow and disgusting in hindsight.
i don’t have much detail to share about obama letting banks off the hook, but that’s laughable. i don’t want a president going after in search of villains. that smells of the likes of trmp and bolsanaro. no thanks.
obama hired many USAs, and all of them took a look at the cases and saw that they could prove nothing, because the banks were not dumb, knew the law, and protected themselves. it was literally LEGAL to dupe regular folk into buying things they couldn’t afford. Dodd-Frank could have arguably been stronger and more permanent, and they could have let more than just lehman fail, but Obama actually did direct some money for homeowners, and helped some of them make payments. more could have been done, sure, but not under TARP that W negotiated and signed into law. source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/12/30/after-helping-a-fraction-of-homeowners-expected-obamas-foreclosure-prevention-program-is-finally-ending/
NAFTA fucked over poor farmers in Mexico, stole communal lands from indigenous people, destroyed the primary food crop in Mexico which was corn by exploding the supply of US subsidized corn (lol free trade) and was why the Zapatistas declared war on the very day it was signed. Up an down NAFTA was for financialization, monopolization, imperialism. It was about the free flow of Wall Street money and multinational corporations.
I agree with this and don’t care at all what happened to a relative handful of bankers. But, for the most part the lenders were bailed out when that money could have gone to the borrowers instead.
You really shouldn’t be taken seriously though with your screen name. That alone makes most of your posts trolling. Post seriously on your serious account and maybe just post some memes or something on this gimmick account.
i actually do vote for socialists, in my own interpretation of what social safety nets are. i maxed out campaign contributions to several who call themselves that. that doesn’t mean i support all socialists (lol Kshama).
i don’t have any other accounts. the screen name is perhaps tongue in cheek, but not a troll.
This is how neoliberalism is the same thing as imperialism. Of course the weaker states fail to protect their industry or their people while the powerful states impose their will. And if they manage to do a little tiny bit of protecting their own interests we find new leaders for them.
But as I alluded to, it’s not free trade. The powerful countries protect (subsidize - same thing) whatever they want. And lots of economists recognize that weaker states benefit from protecting their industry. It’s how Alexander Hamilton helped the US become a rich country.
The British wanted free trade because they had an advantage and want the US to be a source of raw materials and consumers of their manufactured goods. That’s what we want poor countries to be now, or especially wanted like up until the 70s as we began moving more towards information and finance. Now we want them to borrow our money and pay us back with stuff. Sweet deal.
ok, i should probably preface this that i was doing software for finance during real estate boom. my understanding that if TARP didn’t lend or buy pretty large pieces of equity to firms that were in too deep, they would have failed and taken out hundreds of institutions. evictions would have been the least of our worries. food would rot unharvested and gas would double practically overnight.
even so, the Fed sold the equity it purchased and recouped almost all of the money. was it a bailout? sure, but it was in fact a good and turned out to be a cheap thing for the government to do. it wasn’t big enough to cover individuals, and that’s awful. should have been bigger, as some socialists have said at the time and since.
You’re assuming there are evictions and food rotting because why? If people had the money they would have been able to pay for housing (prices going down, sure, but that’s a good thing) and they would have had money to pay for food. Or the government could have done infrastructure to keep the economy going and then we’d have more than just solvent investment banks to show for it.
eta: the food rots because the banks foreclose on farmers? Well, actually because the police throw the farmers off the land.
every country subsidizes its own agriculture. you cannot find an example that doesn’t, even places so poor that USAid has to come in with grants. it makes sense to subsidize food, or you will be at the whims of drought and famine. even with free trade.
ETA: reasonable farm subsidies is “justified protectionism”, much like public education, and building roads. of course corn subsidies in US are like steroids for huge conglomerates, and that should be dismantled.
in mexico the free trade policy integrated north mexico economy well enough, but fucked over those in the south. should they have foreseen it in negotiations? probably. should they have held put for better terms? maybe. should they have rejected nafta even with the warnings of what will happen? no.
food rots because the supply chain depends on billions in lines of credit. food doesn’t pay for itself until it’s purchased at the supermarket, or eaten at a restaurant.
eta: it’s past midnight here. i’m not in the mood to come off as defending neoliberalism at large based on nafta (lol). there are obviously problems, but free trade isn’t one of them.
i do enjoy substantive posts from you. i suspect we probably agree on a LOT that we haven’t identified yet
You keep blaming them as if it were a fair negotiation. The elites in Mexico had the same interests as the elites in the US the same way the people who ran Central America have always had the same interests as United Fruit/Chiquita or as the giant Canadian Mining companies. We don’t get to just make deals with the owners of Honduras and then tell the peasants that they screwed up by having bad leaders. That’s on us.
i am not blaming anyone. nafta was needed, even if it was flawed or mishandled by the governments. let’s just stop being outraged that in a changing competitive market actors find new edges to exploit.
blaming nafta is a go-to trope for what’s wrong with neoliberalism/neoconservatism/capitalism, and it ignores that there were no actually good-old-days before free trade.
The government can lend money to farmers too. One state even has a public bank. The commie state of North Dakota.
USDA does too, and so what? if processors are not bailed out too, food rots in the fields. and if distributors are not bailed out too, food rots in the warehouses. and so on. bailing out every piece of the chain is expensive and politically impossible, and government won’t get paid back in full. funding the enormous agriculture credit economy costs several times more than the cost of keeping the banks from shutting down (timeframe for collapse in 2008 was weeks). and that’s just the interim problem, it doesn’t address root causes of financial crisis, doesn’t help anyone pay their mortgages either.
i understand that feels like the rich got bailed out while the rest lost their house. but that’s not accurate. banks took a temporary loss, to rid themselves of MBS and CDS instruments. it turned out not doing dumb shit and just investing in the obama recovery was worth more anyway. and i am not ignorant of the many people lost their occupations and defaulted on mortgages, and it took years for them to recover (if they did at all). yet, even that wouldn’t be possible if 2008 caused 20% unemployment rather than 10%.
in short, “shitlib obama bailed out his corporate masters” is another trope that works well on the internet but is just uninformed. the “corporate masters” are currently beating the drum of “should have let the auto-industry fail in 2009”. uhh… obama saved the auto workers a LOT of misery and made money back for the taxpayers. that bailout was the right thing to do.
lol votefor”socialists” has to be the most misleading screen name on this site
Wait. Did you say this with no support? Was there no trade at all during the 1950s and 1960s? I thought those were times of soaring economies and green revolutions where millions were lifted out of poverty with strong labor organization and social welfare protections in the US.
If you put the words “free trade” in the title of a bill to make people eat their own…
Well, I’ll try to be less hostile. But it’s good enough to make a lot of people go “econ 101. Gotta have free trade. Economists. Don’t be so uninformed and native. Lol hippies.” Ok, still pretty hostile I guess. Sorry, I’m trying to entertain the crowd.
Free trade deals facilitated multinational corporations stealing land from indigenous people and it was by design, not an unintentional consequence. United Fruit, ie Chiquita, even hired death squads to murder people and Eric Holder helped them get a slap on the wrist for it.
Man it sucks how after the 70s essentially all of the growth that has been pretty consistent since the end of WW2 has gone towards people who have equity, but all those policies that moved our economy to one based on FIRE were necessary.
