In the final days of the campaign, President Obama was still pushing the TPP deal (Wall Street Journal, 11/1/16)
It will be very hard to get used to the two words “President Trump,” but somehow we will have to figure out a way to survive and keep the country and world intact for the next four years.
There are many factors behind the rise of Donald Trump. Clearly, a big part of Trump’s appeal lay in his open expressions of racism, xenophobia and misogyny.
But this is not the whole story. Many of the white working-class people who voted for Trump on Tuesday voted for Barack Obama just four years earlier. Their character was not transformed in the last four years.
Undoubtedly, part of the story is that some of these people could not bring themselves to vote for a woman for president, even if they could vote for a black man with a foreign-sounding name. There were endless accounts of open and hateful displays of sexism directed against Hillary Clinton and her supporters, many of them encouraged by the candidate himself.
However, even against this backdrop, the election was still incredibly close, with states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan certainly well within Clinton’s reach. There were many factors that depressed Clinton’s vote, most obviously the endless drumbeat about emails, which were amplified in the last days of the campaign by FBI Director James Comey’s bizarre intervention into the race.
While many of these factors were beyond the control of Clinton and the Democrats, one factor that was under their control was the decision to push the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Needless to say, there is little public knowledge of the details of the TPP. But the TPP symbolized a pattern of trade that cost millions of manufacturing jobs in the prior decade, and put downward pressure on the wages of the workers without college degrees more generally.
Source: Economic Policy Institute, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of Economic Analysis data
This pattern of trade has been an important factor in the wage stagnation of the last four decades. If the wages of workers without college degrees had kept pace with productivity growth since 1980, they would be more than 40 percent higher than they are today. This is a big deal to these workers and their families. Even if trade was not the whole story of income inequality, working class people are certainly correct to see it as a big part of the picture.
The TPP probably would not have substantially contributed, at least directly, to further depressing wages. We already have trade deals with six of the 11 countries in the pact, and have extensive trade relations with the others. Rather, the TPP was about putting in place a business-friendly structure of regulation. It also increased patent and copyright protection, with the goal of increasing the profits of the pharmaceutical, software and entertainment industries. In other words, the TPP was about further extending a pattern of trade aimed at redistributing income upward.
It is important to understand that this is not some natural process of globalization. We deliberately placed our manufacturing workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world. The predicted and actual effect of this policy is to lower their wages. At the same time, we have left in place or even increased protections that benefit those at the high end. Our doctors earn on average more than $250,000 a year, twice the pay of their counterparts in other wealthy countries. This gap is in large part because we prohibit foreign doctors from practicing in the United States unless they complete a US residency program. There is a similar story of protectionism for dentists who must graduate a US dental school (or, recently, Canadian).
In addition, making patents and copyrights longer and stronger, both here and around the world, redistributes income from the bulk of the population to those in a position to profit from these protections. This is the story of the Hepatitis C drug Sovaldi, which has a list price of $84,000. The free market price is a couple hundred dollars. We will pay more than $430 billion this year for drugs that would sell for 10–20 percent of this amount in a free market.
There was nothing natural about the upward redistribution we have seen over the last four decades; it was deliberate policy. And the TPP was a symbol of this policy. It was a trade pact that was crafted by and for major business interests.
Donald Trump made opposition to TPP a centerpiece of his campaign (Twitter, 6/3/15)
Although Clinton disowned the pact in the course of the campaign, few took this disavowal seriously. After all, she had overseen much of the negotiation process as secretary of State, and she has been closely associated with backers of this pattern of trade over the course of her political career.
President Obama’s decision to push the TPP this year was in effect waving a red cape in front of an angry bull. Trump made opposition to the TPP and other trade deals a centerpiece of his campaign. While he has presented no coherent alternative position, his explicit opposition likely appealed to many working-class voters in key states.
It is certainly possible that pushing the TPP created the margin of Trump’s victory in several key states. The irony of Obama’s decision to push the TPP, rather than just letting it drop, is that the deal now appears genuinely dead. And, as a side effect, we have President Trump.
Economist Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. A version of this post originally appeared on CEPR’s blog Beat the Press (4/30/15).
I take exception to the statement “Undoubtedly, part of the story is that some of these people could not bring themselves to vote for a woman for president, even if they could vote for a black man with a foreign-sounding name.” I feel certain that more people voted for her than against her on the basis of gender.
I absolutely reject the idea that anyone who voted for Barack Obama would vote against a woman based on her gender. There are very good reasons why former Obama supporters might vote against Hillary — such as being terribly disappointed by Obama’s continuation of Bush’s foreign policy, with Hillary as the most hawkish member of the cabinet.
At a time when people are sick of corrupt, corporatist, militarist leaders, she is the worst example of all that. The disgusting personality of the person who defeated her is a measure of how sick everyone is of that vile agenda. Polls made it clear that very few people have any illusions about Trump, and that most people were voting for him only as the lesser of two evils.
I agree with this guy 100%. I came over to fair.org in search of unbiased, non partisan, facts based reporting and this article was the first I read. I kept thinking this must be an Op-Ed piece. Disappointed.
In the spirit of “The Art of the Deal” -the underpinning scripture of the coming President- how much private ‘trade’ between him and the TPP canal of Globalization would facilitate his abandonment of the white uneducated working class who voted for him ?
It’s not like the USA voter/tax-payer/campaign-donor ever came out from under the bus – maybe they welded in there. They can’t even revolt.
Basically, I think those shadow despots who have for so long controlled USA elections have determined that they can well work with Donald as they have done with Ronald, George, Bill, George, Barack – and could have with Hillary.
From the outset the USA 2016 was a WIN WIN for the power elite and a LOSE LOSE for the people. They apparently circumvented the spectacular rise of Sanders’ – rigging there was essential. They had him tied up, he did not genuinely complain of fraud and the indignation of his supporters and fair minded people did not result in a revolt or a re-count.
And Jill Stein was gagged because Green Party influence could bring sensibility into the national conversation and awaken voters. And Gary Johnson – like me, I don’t think the ruling class care anything about Libertarians.
It appears to me that the ruling class could not be bothered suppressing the vote or rigging the count for the General Election. I haven’t heard any complaints of that as was the case in the Democratic Primary to extricate Bernie.
Maybe the global bankers and war mongers had some fun for themselves this time – maybe they didn’t interfere and maybe made wages amongst themselves – USA, it’s all a bit unreal to me.
If the power elite had failed to circumvented the spectacular rise of Sanders they would have been forced to kill him. And they would have. But the trail of bodies is growing long. Even the power elite’s total control of the media wouldn’t have staved off an uprising.
The “sexism is why people didn’t vote for Secretary Clinton” argument is how Democrats erase that they have a massive unrecognized transmisogyny problem driving a larger-than-thought group of male-assigned voters out of their party.
75% of murder victims, 90% of unsheltered homeless, 93% of imprisoned….
CAMABs did not blow their male privilege on saturated fat and video games, and I’m tired of this smug bigotry from people who profess to care about women like me.
Its totally going verse. I just see start Clinton was leading but its totally change in Michigan. Now Trump leading and have score 92%.
“Undoubtedly, part of the story is that some of these people could not bring themselves to vote for a woman for president, even if they could vote for a black man with a foreign-sounding name.”
Its not good idea of refusing the Clinton. Trump ideas was not good but not sure how people are voting or Trump won this Election. I am not sure why people are Protesting now.