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For G-7, Trump’s racism and misogyny are ok, but his trade policies are intolerable

By Lori Wallach

U.S. President Donald Trump seems as welcome at the G-7 picnic as a rabid skunk.

Most G-7 leaders have worked to build warm relationships with Trump, despite his xenophobia, racism, misogyny, climate denialism, warmongering and corrupt business self-dealing. But apparently, taking on the trade status quo was a bridge too far.

That is a bitter irony, given that the trade and financial policies that the G-7 has relentlessly promoted created the political context that helped to make Trump president. Decades of U.S. presidents from both parties and their G-7 counterparts have pushed international economic policies that have created expansive new rights and powers for multinational corporations and hurt working people.

Pushing corporate-rigged trade agreements, blessing financial deregulation and loosening trillions in speculative investment flows were the economic priorities.

Even as millions of manufacturing jobs were lost, absent was coordinated G-7 action to counter China’s currency manipulation or a unified approach to end Chinese subsidies and other unfair trade practices that, among other problems, fueled the global steel and aluminum oversupply glut.

And as working-class wages declined and income inequality and financial instability grew, the majority harmed by the G-7 version of globalization were told their fate was inevitable.

In the United States, that message was conveyed by Democratic and Republican presidents alike even as the economic and social fallout became increasing difficult to deny. About 4.5 million net American manufacturing jobs have been lost since the 1994 start of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and 2000 trade deal with China related to its admission to the World Trade Organization. Sixty-thousand manufacturing facilities shuttered. And real wages flattened, given that the replacement of the higher-wage manufacturing jobs with lower-wage service sector jobs pushed down wages economy-wide even if one did not lose their job to trade.

Enter Trump, who, whatever else his trade policies may or may not do, ended the bipartisan presidential practice of not seeing or talking about the many Americans who have been harmed by our trade status quo.

Therefore perhaps Trump’s truly unforgiveable sin, finally meriting open ire from G-7 partners, is to demonstrate that the trade status quo is, in fact, not pre-ordained, but rather is a set of policies he is shredding.

Trump may well not achieve the better trade outcomes he promised.

That would require him to stay focused on changing China’s cornucopia of unfair trade practices rather than settling for the usual Chinese promises to buy more U.S. exports. And, unless he can implement a replacement deal that eliminates NAFTA’s investor-state outsourcing incentives and adds strong labor and environmental terms with swift and certain enforcement to raise wages, companies will keep moving jobs to Mexico to pay workers a pittance and dump toxins and import those products back for sale here.

And, the U.S. corporate lobby is in overdrive working against any attempt to change the trade policies to preserve the status quo. Doing so is apparently a higher priority for them than preserving the Republican congressional majority. The Koch Brothers just announced a campaign designed to line up congressional Republicans against Trump’s trade agenda before the midterm elections, even as polls show GOP and Independent voters support that agenda.

Plus, Trumpian chaos has led to Trump caving on well-thought-out policies, such as the China trade enforcement action aimed at dismantling the technology theft essential to the China 2025 agenda to dominate industries of the future. That approach was revived, for now.

But whether or not Trump’s trade policies succeed, the other G-7 leaders should reflect on the painful lesson of Trump’s rise and that of other authoritarian politicians who wrap themselves in economic populism: Political leaders who fail to offer a new approach on trade and the related economic policies that provide greater economic security for all only serve to alienate more and more people who are left behind, creating fertile political ground for more Trumps.

Trump’s pledges to upend the trade status quo, end job outsourcing and create manufacturing jobs attracted hard-hit working-class votes in the key Midwestern swing states that put him in the White House. And President Barack Obama’s relentless efforts right through the 2016 campaign to pass the business-as-usual Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and Secretary Hilary Clinton’s ambiguous views on the TPP and connection to President Bill Clinton’s NAFTA, dampened working-class enthusiasm for the Democratic ticket.

If Trump’s foreseeably cringe-worthy exploits at the G-7 don’t drive home this point, perhaps yesterday’s election of Doug Ford — considered the Donald Trump of Canada and brother of the infamous right-wing, populist, crack-smoking Ontario Mayor Robert Ford — as Ontario’s new Premier will.