The following article was originally published by Cory Doctorow on his blog. It is reprinted here with his permission and under the terms of its Creative Commons 4.0 licensing.
Five years ago, Trump touted his “big, beautiful” replacement for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the “free trade agreement” between the U.S., Mexico and Canada. Trump’s NAFTA-2 was called the USMCA (US-Mexico-Canada Agreement) and it was pretty similar to NAFTA, to be honest.
That tells you a couple things: first, NAFTA was, broadly speaking a good thing for Trump and the ultra-wealthy donors who backed him (and got far richer as a result). That’s why he kept it intact. NAFTA and USMCA are, at root, a way to make rich people richer by making poorer people poorer. Trump’s base hated NAFTA because they (correctly) believed that it was being used to erode wages by chasing cheaper labor and more lax environmental controls in other countries. Neither NAFTA nor USMCA have any stipulations requiring exported goods to be manufactured by unionized workers, or in factories with robust environmental and workplace safety rules.
The point of NAFTA/USMCA is to goose profits by despoiling the environment, maiming workers, stealing their wages, paying them less, all while poisoning the Earth. Trump’s “new” NAFTA was just the old NAFTA with some largely cosmetic changes so that Trump’s base could be (temporarily) fooled into thinking Trump was righting the historic…
