Trump’s Trade Talk is Another Big Scam

Trump’s ostensible trade position and reasoning for renegotiating trade deals is to protect the American worker. Trump paints himself as a pro-worker, anti-elite populist, but he is not. He is far from it. He is a liar, a scam artist and a conventional republican. 

 

Everything Trump stands and advocates for are anti-worker. During one of the past GOP presidential debates Trump said the following:

“We have to become competitive with the world. Our taxes are too high, our wages are too high, everything is too high,”  

Repeat….. ‘Wages are too high’.

Trump’s strategy to improve the trade imbalance is to lower the standards of the American worker so that they are more competitive with that of the slave labor standards of foreign countries. While in office, as a typical Republican, Trump’s entire agenda has been to ingratiate himself with the wealthy special interests of the corporate elite. The corporate elite, who for 40 years, have done everything they can to stifle wage growth and eliminate benefits are not interested in raising the living standards for American workers.

Trump is no friend to middle class American workers. Last year he signed a tax bill that could only be described as a massive transfer of wealth from the struggling middle class to the already super rich. He has signed numerous executive orders that deregulate our economy and allow corporations to further degrade and pollute our environment for their own financial gain. He has done everything he can to sabotage the health insurance market to drive up the cost of premiums in an effort to disparage the Affordable Care Act. Trump is doing everything in his power to eliminate every Federal worker and state worker he can. Trump has appointed a Supreme Court Justice that voted for the destruction of state workers unions in the now infamous Janus V. AFSCME. Trump is anti-worker in every sense of the word.

Nowhere in Trump’s critique of trade deals has he ever advocated for our trading partners to match American labor standards. This demand would be wholly unacceptable to his corporate backers who count on the slave labor and lax environmental standards of third world countries to drive their enormous profits. Many of the countries the United States has trade deals with, such as China, have no workers’ rights whatsoever and this the way Trump and the GOP want it. The workers in these countries have no right to organize, no right to collective bargaining, no right to strike, no right to decent wages or benefits, no right to a safe workplace, no right to be able to sue their employer when injured under unsafe work conditions, no right to retirement and no right to vote in a political process. Instead of leveling the playing field by demanding our trading partners provide these basic rights to employees, Trump and the GOP seek to lower American labor standards. 

While there is much we can do to improve the lives of America workers through the renegotiation of trade deals, Trump’s purported representation of American workers is another one of his scams.  Don’t fall for it.