NAFTA made sense if you were an owner of capital and you wanted to reign in one of the big cost factors in production. In doing that you made sure the entities you invested your capital into would remain competitive (being made able to seek the lowest common denominator in labor). That it also ended up helping to ship manufacturing jobs to Mexico (and elsewhere) was simply part of the "pain" of restructuring our economy to be more "efficient." It also, of course, allowed you investment entities more markets to sell those goods in, whether they were made here or not.
The Trade deal for trade across the atlantic to europe was simply more of the same. That we end up being more and more dependant on others to make what we are sold on needing is also beside the point. We will make up job losses by being more tech savvy and entrepreneurial, or at least that is how the rant usually goes. And to some extent it can be actually be true.
Naturally now, if you seek to get rid of those trade deals, you risk making the few companies still making things here less competitive again. And even if the jobs still here don't pay as much, relatively speaking to days past in manufacturing, you are likely to lose them because the markets, and the owners of capital surrounding those markets, will make sure you are punished.
Maybe it's time to start asking yourself if maybe the game itself that we've playing all of these years is the real problem. That perhaps it's time to start considering creating a completely new game, a game with rules that favor the rest of us, as opposed to the top few percent who own the capital, and control the markets.
Just a thought.
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