I almost broke my pledge of sanity not to blog on the weekends when I read Roger Lowenstein’s monumentally stupid article on trade in the Sunday Times Magazine. The piece was so moronic as to…well, let’s go to the text.

  Lowenstein starts out by setting the terms of debate thus:

During the primaries, Obama and Hillary Clinton attacked free trade as if it were a scourge at times each one accusing the other of (horror of horrors) harboring a hidden affection for the North American Free Trade Agreement. Clinton has called for a "time out" on new trade deals, and Obama has insisted he would renegotiate Nafta. Given that most economists think Nafta, and trade deals like it, have been good for the country, their pandering to the opponents of trade was faintly humorous.

  It is hardly shocking that "most economists" think NAFTA has been good for the country–because they (for example, Gary Hufbauer and Jeffrey Schott) were all wrong about NAFTA. And Lowenstein does do me a favor by quoting Hufbauer, who bemoans the breakdown of the "consensus" on trade dating back to the Clinton Administration. You see, Hufbauer, and Schott, produced THE study that was leaned on by the Clinton Administration, business and pro-NAFTA supporters in Congress to bludgeon NAFTA’s critics.

  Here is what they promised: NAFTA would generate 200,000 new American jobs, that the relatively small $9 billion U.S. trade deficit with Mexico and Canada would turn into a trade surplus and that the U.S. would become an export engine of manufactured goods. Mexicans would buy up exported goods from the U.S and rocket into the middle class. Canadians would also benefit from new trade opportunities.

  Here is what happened: Using the same methodology NAFTA’s proponents wielded, the agreement cost the U.S. 750,000 jobs, many of them good-paying manufacturing jobs that were a backbone of America’s middle class. The U.S. trade deficit with Mexico and Canada ballooned to $87 billion in 2002 and wages in Mexico plummeted.

  Some of Hufbauer’s claims were bizarre. A new, large Mexican middle-class just waiting to be born? Mexico’s population was mired in abject poverty, unable to feed their families let alone buy consumer goods like cars. In the immediate years post-NAFTA, more than one million more Mexicans worked for less than the $5 a day minimum wage in the border-area maquiladora industries and eight million more people fell from the shrinking middle-class into poverty.

  None of this should truly come as a shock. While proponents waved around numbers about exports from the U.S., they would conveniently ignore an obvious outcome: a huge wave of imports coming into the U.S. generated by cheaper labor across the border. The evidence was in plain site. During the NAFTA debate, the Mexican government ran huge full-page ads in business magazines, touting its teeming masses. In one, a troubled Anglo business executive worries, "I can’t find good loyal workers for a dollar an hour within a thousand miles of here." The ad declares: "Yes you can. Yucatan."

  What went wrong? Actually, nothing—NAFTA worked perfectly if one understands that it was an agreement to make life easier for corporations, not people. Blinded by the tens of millions of dollars spent by corporate interests to push NAFTA and the backroom deals made by Bill Clinton to buy votes, Congress either did not see, or did want to admit, that companies were not as interested in exporting goods as they were in exporting jobs. Yes, NAFTA had labor and environmental side-agreements. But, the very fact that they were side agreements, not part of the main text, speaks volumes about the irrelevance of workers to those who dictated the agreements’ ideological framework.

  And, perhaps, the greatest problem: people like Hufbauer and "most economists" are never held accountable for their erroneous bullshit. They slink back to their think-tanks and continue to spew more stupid stuff–to be regurgitated, uncritically, by people like Lowenstein.

  Lowenstein also makes this statement:

This was also the fear in 1930, when the U.S. hiked tariffs, aggravating the world Depression.

  This is flat-out false. You may remember that during the fight over NAFTA, then-Vice President Al Gore debated Ross Perot on "Larry King Live". Gore, the designated attack dog for the Clinton Administration on NAFTA (I’m sorry, Gore lovers, this is just a historical fact), held up a picture of Representative W.C. Hawley, and Senator Reed Smoot, authors of a bill to raise tariffs in 1930. The point: those opposing NAFTA (and, frankly, it was a travesty that the media anointed Perot as the public face of NAFTA’s opposition–but that’s a different story) were going to lead us into another Depression.

  Any honest economist will tell you that that assertion is just nonsense. The Smoot-Hawley tariffs passed long after the Depression was in its full fury and it has almost no effect on the Depression. But, this is a lie that keeps on giving, regurgitated by educated people who still read the lie in Economics 101 textbooks. It isn’t true.

  The problem is not trade. No one is against trade. It’s the RULES of trade. Lowenstein–presumably, a well-paid, upper-middle class white guy–has no ability to understand that a lot of working class people here and abroad–white, brown, black, and all other shades–do not benefit from trade because the underlying motivation for trade is WAGES. It is not in his personal experience so instead Lowenstein quotes discredited economists who represent the "consensus"–a consensus that has proven to be wrong on the facts but, more important, wrong when it comes to advancing the interests of most working people.

  You cannot have trade that advances communities and people if it is based on seeking out the lowest wage possible. Period.