Four more years of Trump?

Improbable as it may seem, President Trump could be re-elected in 2020.

Photo by Anthony Behar

He’s been vilified by many, including those who know him personally such as former FBI director James Comey.

“He has a craving for affirmation that I’ve never seen in an adult before,” Comey told a conference in Ottawa. “It’s all, ‘What will fill this hole inside me?’ (Globe and Mail, June 5, 2018)”

Author Thomas Frank’s assessment is less psychological:

“He is deeply unpopular, the biggest buffoon any of us has ever seen in the White House. He manages to disgrace the office nearly every single day. He insults our intelligence with his blustering rhetoric. He endorses racial stereotypes and makes common cause with bigots. He has succeeded in offending countless foreign governments [!]. He has no idea what a president is supposed to be or do and (perhaps luckily) he has no clue how to govern (Harper’s magazine, April, 2018).”

However, Trump seems to vaguely understand the connection between trade deals and wage stagnation.

Trump withdrew from one such deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would have strengthened U.S. corporate power at the expense of Canada.

If he pulls out of NAFTA, it will hurt all three countries in the short term. But trade will not stop. We will continue to trade with the U.S. under rules of the World Trade Organization. Tariffs under the WTO would add only 1.5 per cent to Canadian exports.

Trade deals have been a bad deal for many U.S. workers. Jobs have been sent elsewhere. Wages have been stagnant. The threat of moving jobs offshore looms over those workers who complain.

Candidate Trump characteristically expressed his disdain for NAFTA on a visit to Flint, Michigan, where hundreds of thousands had been poisoned by lead in the water. In a caustic manner, he said “It used to be that cars were made in Flint and you couldn’t drink the water in Mexico. And now the cars are made in Mexico and you can’t drink the water in Flint.” Funny, and a telling display of Trump’s lack of sympathy.

The American economy is on a roll and that could put Trump back in office for another four years. The U.S. unemployment rate was 3.9 per cent in April, 2018, a seventeen-year low. Under trade deals, corporate America is currently sending some of those jobs offshore. If trade deals are cancelled that will create a worker shortage that will drive wages up.

Of course, cancelling trade deals will also drive up the cost of goods for Americans but voters may not care, or will be unable to make the connection. The pain of unintended consequences has never been a problem for Trump says Thomas Frank:

“The president, always a fan of burning down the village in order to save it, is currently threatening to scuttle the whole agreement: ‘A lot of people don’t realize how good it would be to terminate NAFTA, because the way you’re going to make the best deal is to terminate NAFTA.’”

What matters for American workers is that they are back at work. No matter that the sparks for the economic recovery were ignited by former President Obama and chair of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellen.

In the 2020 campaign, the slogan could be “it’s the jobs, stupid.” And Trump could win.

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Failure of NAFTA could be good for our creativity

It’s a toss-up on whether the North America Free Trade Agreement will survive. The fifth round of discussions has concluded in Mexico and Foreign Affairs Minister Christie Freeland is not optimistic. “Hope for the best and prepare for the worst and Canada is prepared for every eventuality,” she said.

     image: AgWeb.com

Failure of NAFTA will have only a slight negative economic impact. If the U.S. terminates NAFTA, as the unpredictable President Trump has threatened to do, trade would revert back to rules of the World Trade Organization. Under those rules, the added tariffs would only add 1.5 per cent of the cost of goods exported to the U.S. according to a study from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

With “trade” in the title, you could think that’s what NAFTA about. And since Canada is a trading nation, you could conclude that NAFTA is vital to our economy. While NAFTA offers some advantages, it has a number of disadvantages such as the investor-state dispute settlement provisions that allows foreign firms to sue governments. And exports of Canadian softwood aren’t even covered.

However, trade deals like NAFTA are not primarily about trade. Trade takes place without them. These trade deals are actually about protection of corporate interests such as “intellectual property” which is not property in the usual sense. It’s a means of commodifying artistic and technological creations such as brands, music, movies, patents, and software.

America normally supports trade deals because they benefit most. The deals enforce corporate interests, and in the U.S. corporate interests = government interests. The reason that the U.S. is so interested in intellectual property is because it’s one of their biggest exports. Culture, what the U.S. calls entertainment, makes up one-third of American exports. American movies are seen in theatres around the world. U.S. pop songs are heard in the streets. Kids play American-made video games. American inventions such as the iPhone are ubiquitous.

An indication of how poorly President Trump understands the American economy is his rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It was a license for U.S. corporate giants to impose protection of intellectual property. I celebrated its demise after Trump cancelled the TPP but I had to wonder what (if) the president was thinking.

The demise of NAFTA would lift a weight off of Canadian creativity and allow it to flourish.

Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, was asked to advise a Senate Open Caucus meeting on modernizing NAFTA.

“To my surprise, the shift in focus to a post-NAFTA world was liberating, opening the door to considering Canadian policies that have previously been viewed as unattainable given intense U.S. pressure on intellectual property policy that favours ‘Americanization’ of global rules,” he said (Globe and Mail, October 20, 2017).

By loosening the grip of the U.S. on creativity, Canadians can market their innovations globally; innovations such as software developed by Blackberry for self-driving cars and recently sold to the Chinese firm Baidu.

Of course, our intellectual property needs protection. With the U.S. out of the way, international agreements can be struck that encourage innovation while protecting creators without one player holding a big stick.