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Free Trade

United Auto Workers Indict ‘Free’ Trade

July 2, 2026 Cameron Harrison, People's World. , , , , ,
Detroit—The United Auto Workers (UAW) is challenging the big capitalist-driven trade policies that have gutted American manufacturing and wrecked working-class communities across the country. In a new white paper, “Trade and the American Dream: NAFTA, the USMCA, and the Future of the Working Class,” the union lays out its indictment of “free trade” policies and proposes an alternative: “NAFTA and the like are the social contract as written by multinational corporations,” UAW President Shawn Fain said. “It’s time we rip it up and start over.”

AI Advocates Using Same Playbook As Free Traders Before Them

April 25, 2026 Danny Parys, Rabble.ca. , , ,
From the late 80’s to the early 2000’s, Canadian politicians and business leaders sung sweetly about the promises of free trade and globalization. Indeed, in 2005, just three years before the 2008 global recession, a consortium of business leaders proudly declared “as an economy, Canada seems to be in great shape,” and that globalization in the 80’s and 90’s had “unleashed a wave of innovation and creativity” within the private sector. Though after two decades of free trade evangelization from thought leaders, many of the arguments in favour of globalization were being repeated by rote: New markets to sell to. More foreign investment. Cheaper goods for consumers.

Indian Farmers Reject Proposed Trade Deals With West

July 6, 2025 Abdul Rahman, People's Dispatch. , , , , , ,
Free trade agreements (FTAs) with countries in the West would harm India’s agriculture, its farmers, and small industries, claimed one of India’s largest farmer’s groups, All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), in a press release on Tuesday, July 1. AIKS also extended its support for and announced participation in the upcoming national strike on July 9 against the policies of the ultra-right-wing government in the country. Over 150 million members, along with other constituents of the farmers’ coalition Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM), will participate in demonstrations in towns and villages across India on July 9, claimed AIKS in a press release on Tuesday, July 1.

Indian Farmers Protest Visit Of Vice President JD Vance

April 24, 2025 Abdul Rahman, People's Dispatch. , , , , , ,
Thousands of farmers and working-class people in cities and villages across India took to the streets on Monday, April 21 to protest the visit of US Vice President JD Vance. They claim he has come to finalize an agreement which will be a disaster for India’s agriculture and small industries. Vance arrived in New Delhi on Monday on a four-day tour in the country. As per the reports, the primary agenda of his visit is to finalize a trade agreement between the two countries. The talks over the agreement have been ongoing since the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the US in February. The protesters gathered in villages and district headquarters across India.

Artists And Academics Oppose Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement

January 10, 2021 Montreal Artists and Academics, BDS Movement. , , ,
More than 150 artists and academics and over 20 trade unions, cultural organizations, student groups and indigenous collectives in Montréal are calling on the Canadian government to cancel the Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement. This community declaration of collective opposition to the Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement (CIFTA) was first launched in July 2020 as part of the global wave of protests to oppose a push by the extreme right wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu to formally annex the Jordan Valley, in the occupied Palestinian territory. Specifically this statement is part of a series of ongoing local actions in Tiohtià:ke/ Montreal aiming to build solidarity with the ongoing Palestinian struggle against moves by the Israeli state to expand colonization within the West Bank. 

How To Stop Trump’s Continuous Scam On The Working Class

February 19, 2017 Paul Street, www.truthdig.com , , , , , ,
By Paul Street for Truthdig. Two things are clear going forward. First, progressives hoping to defeat Trump and Trumpism will need to drive a class wedge between the new administration’s big basket of deplorable, super-wealthy plutocrats and the president’s conservative WWC base. Second, Trump is going to provide a lot of ammunition for that wedge-building task with policies that mock his posture as some kind of great white working-class hero. It is distressing that candidate Trump got away with taking that populist pose in the first place. Born to significant real estate wealth, Trump owed his rise to hyper-opulence “to his relentless manipulation of the corporate-controlled media market … to increase the market value of his name, which he then licensed to be sold. … The result,” author Mike Lofgren notes, “was Trump resorts, Trump steaks, even Trump dietary supplements retailed through multilevel marketing, the polite biz school euphemism for a pyramid scheme. As for Trump University, the principal lesson it imparted … was how to avoid being victimized by such scams in the future. … Such is Donald Trump, friend of the working class.”

Even Free Trade Economists Admitting Problems With Free Trade

February 16, 2017 Jeff Ferry, www.thehill.com
By Jeff Ferry for The Hill - In the past few weeks, those of us who believe in balanced trade and believe that America’s dismal record of trade deficits are the cause of many of our economic problems have won so many intellectual victories that it’s just stunning. Now you do have to read the free traders’ utterances carefully. But when you do, you can see that the light is beginning to dawn—and growing brighter by the day. The forces of the “free trade” religion are in retreat. Read on. The most hopeful sign this past week was the comment by German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble to a German newspaper that “The euro exchange rate is, strictly speaking, too low for the German economy’s competitive position.” Schauble was responding to comments by President Trump’s trade advisor Peter Navarro that the low euro was benefiting German industry at the expense of U.S. industry.

Restoring Trust After Our “Free Trade” Charade Ends

January 11, 2017 Stan Sorscher, www.huffingtonpost.com , ,
By Stan Sorscher for The Huffington Post - The 2016 elections threw a bucket of cold water into the face of free-trade orthodoxy. It’s no surprise that voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere are deeply discouraged by decades of failed promises of boon from establishment leaders. The real surprise is, what took us so long? We need a new approach to globalization that does as much for workers and the environment as it does for global investors. Everyone I know wants trade and globalization. However, we have managed globalization badly. Our failed “neoliberal” approach has been to manage globalization through trade deals, written by and for the interests of global companies.

TPP And Free Trade: Time To Retake The English Language

October 27, 2016 Dean Baker, www.truth-out.org , ,
By Dean Baker for Truthout - The proponents of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are planning to do a full court press in the lame duck session of Congress following the election. We will be bombarded with speeches and columns from President Obama and other illustrious figures telling us how it is important to approve the TPP for a variety of reasons. We can be certain that one of the reasons will be the inherent virtues of free trade. They will not be telling the truth.

Is The Trans-Pacific Partnership President Obama’s Vietnam?

July 26, 2016 Dean Baker, www.truth-out.org , , , ,
By Dean Baker for Truthout - The prospects for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are not looking very good right now. Both parties' presidential candidates have come out against the deal. Donald Trump has placed it at the top of his list of bad trade deals that he wants to stop or reverse. Hillary Clinton had been a supporter as secretary of state, but has since joined the opposition in response to overwhelming pressure from the Democratic base. As a concession to President Obama, the Democratic platform does not explicitly oppose the TPP.

Massive Crowd, Giant Blimp, Protests Trans-Pacific Partnership

July 26, 2016 Staff, www.medium.com ,
By Staff of Fight for the Future - The show also featured speakers from a wide range of organizations opposing the TPP, including Food and Water Watch, Public Citizen, Padres y Jovenes Unidos, the Sierra Club, the Association of Flight Attendants, Conservation Colorado, Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, Standing Up for Racial Justice, United Steelworkers, Denver-based technology startup SecureSet, Communications Workers of America, Student Labor Action Project, and more. Of course, there were also crushing guitar solos.

Hillary Clinton, Morgan Stanley And TPP: A Free Trade Triumvirate?

July 13, 2016 Alex Lazar, www.opensecrets.org , ,
By Alex Lazar for Open Secrets - As pressure increases for 2016 presidential contender Hillary Clinton to say where she stands on the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership(TPP) trade deal, her ties to avid TPP supporters won’t escape notice. One glaring example: A linked trifecta consisting of the TPP, the mega-investment firm Morgan Stanley, and the Clinton family that involves campaign contributions, former members of Bill Clinton’s administration and large donations to the Clintons’ foundation.

Slavery As Free Trade

July 3, 2016 Blake Smith, www.aeon.co , , ,
By Blake Smith for Aeon. For nearly four centuries, the Atlantic slave trade brought millions of people into bondage. Scholars estimate that around 1.5 million people perished in the brutal middle passage across the Atlantic. The slave trade linked Africa, Europe and the Americas in a horrific enterprise of death and torture and profit. Yet, in the middle of the 18th century, as the slave trade boomed like never before, some notable European observers saw it as a model of free enterprise and indeed of ‘liberty’ itself. They were not slave traders or slave-ship captains but economic thinkers, and very influential ones. They were a pioneering group of economic thinkers committed to the principle oflaissez-faire: a term they themselves coined. United around the French official Vincent de Gournay (1712-1759), they were among the first European intellectuals to argue for limitations on government intervention in the economy. They organised campaigns for the deregulation of domestic and international trade, and they made the slave trade a key piece of evidence in their arguments.

Another Corporation Suing Our Government Thanks To Trade Agreements

June 29, 2016 Dave Johnson, www.ourfuture.org , , ,
By Dave Johnson for Campaign for America's Future - A Canadian corporation is suing the us because we wouldn’t let them build a pipeline across our country (seizing people’s property along the way) so they could sell oil to China. They can do this because we signed a trade agreement that places corporate rights above our democracy. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would increase by an order of magnitude the companies that can sue us for hurting their profits by protecting the environment, consumers, public health and small businesses.

Free-Trade Opposition Unites Political Parties In Bloomberg Poll

April 2, 2016 John McCormick and Terrence Dopp, www.bloomberg.com , , ,
By John McCormick and Terrence Dopp for Bloomberg - Opposition to free trade is a unifying concept even in a deeply divided electorate, with almost two-thirds of Americans favoring more restrictions on imported goods instead of fewer. The latest Bloomberg Politics national poll shows the issue unites the country like few others, across lines of politics, race, gender, education, and income. A stunning rejection of what was a postwar cornerstone of American economic and foreign policies reverberates again and again in the answers to the poll’s questions.
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