TPP dead, NAFTA next?

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It means the Australians, Canadians and New Zealanders are going to ditch the US and build up geographic trade with a new TPP with our Asia/Pacific neighbours

Looks like the US is going to have to rely on domestic manufacturing to survive
good luck
http://jalopnik.com/5110995/the-ruins-o ... -factories

We obviously have to have trade deals of some sort, so they will come back in another form. I expect they'll have more of what I hated in the TPP, special courts for corporations paid for by them. They'll definitely have less of what I liked, worker protections. I can't separate those from the subject of trade and tariffs, but the argument from the right will be that worker protections can be handled separately, if at all, at some unspecified time in the future.

From 1995 to 1999, when I was 18-22, I worked in two textile factories here in SW VA. The first wasn't all that great, but after just a few months I got to upgrade into a better factory. It was nearly all women, but after my husband had some trouble at his job, they hired him as well.

When I worked at the factory, I had pretty much everything possible to pierce on my face pierced, short green hair (and was bald for a short period of time), tattoos, and dressed in the most offensive t-shirts I could find. That was pre-Internet, so I got these t-shirts through underground catalogs.

No one cared what I looked like. Everyone there was a different race, class, and age. Some people had mental or emotional problems. Many people were autistic. Several of us were "unhireable" for various reasons (me for the way I looked). As long as you could do the hard a** manual labor, be on time, and keep up basic human politeness, no one cared. I loved that place.

After NAFTA, just a few of us went to college. The economy in my town collapsed. Most of the people I worked with then are now working at Walmart or Taco Bell and are grateful for that. Making much less than what we made in the 1990s. The factories that are still around fire quickly, pay little, and have terrible conditions because they can. There's no competition.

The young people now don't even know what the world used to be. Things used to be so much easier. You used to have more options. I hope things will be that way again.

It doesn't seem right that we'd had a free trade deal with repressive countries like Vietnam or Brunei, deals with Malaysia/Peru/Singapore seem like recipe for job loss too. I believe in tariffs as a means of raising tax revenue, I don't see how it is different than taxing your own citizens. They try to say oh well then prices will be raised for consumers which is a confusing rationale considering they want to raise taxes on big business and the minimum wage a ton in this country and the common argument against those is that it will just be felt by consumers. A tariff is not any different than a tax, I think they should be raised on countries like China who utilizes exploitative borderline slavery 3rd world labor, American workers should not have to compete with that. The US probably should of never opened trade relations with China, imagine how different our country would be without all the 'made in China' crap.

Corporations drive these deals, and resource-extracting corporations love authoritarian regimes. They even influence various government bodies in the US to use eminent domain, about as big an expression of government authority as there is.

If unions want more members, then they should use the celebrity recruiters more effectively.

Recruit fans at NFL, NBA, NHL, and every other union shop. Actually appeal to their interests, and be ready to shut down sports in solidarity with other unions. Money always talks, and I don't even think many sports fans think of their heroes as proud union members.

I'm just glad the TPP is dead. The TPP would've been a nightmare for copyright law.

You know, Jacoby, I kind of expected that I kind of expected that even if we agreed on the problem, we would have different plans to fix it.

I recall that one of the empty promises of NAFTA was that prices would drop on some things. The products that we used to make were sweatshirts, which then usually cost $15-20 each. University sweatshirts cost up to $60.

That's about what they cost now. Our plant closed nearly 20 years ago.

Our plant moved to Mexico immediately following NAFTA but is now in Guatemala.

I don't know what Mexicans made in 1999 but 2016 they made about $0.50/hour. We made $7-$12/hour back when minimum wage was $4.25/hour.

Guatemalans can make as little as $0.38/hour currently.

Why have sweatshirts cost the same this whole time? Think about the massive, massive profits. And this is just wages. I'm not even talking about the human rights. Obviously we don't let children work here in the US and it's much harder to force people into slavery. Easy to do that in these other countries.

NO these companies will not have to do ANYTHING different if they bring back manufacturing. All it will do is cut into their profit margins.

They will raise prices to keep their profit margins.