(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Thomas Friedman’s Trump Trade Column Must be a Hack Job

Thomas Friedman’s email account must have been hacked! Assuming the New York Times columnist doesn’t walk his offerings over to the paper’s editorial page office, what else could explain the appearance last night of an essay on trade under his byline so chock full of embarrassing mistakes and stale canards?

True, the column had a characteristically clever, Friedman-like premise: Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump shouldn’t be criticizing President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement because it contains exactly the kinds of tough-minded provisions that the champion deal-maker would insist on himself. Unfortunately, whoever really wrote the article revealed such ignorance that identity theft must have been committed.

To start, the impostor assumed that passages in a treaty’s text are remotely likely to change facts on the ground. But anyone as knowledgeable about trade policy as Friedman – who covered the beat for The Times in the 1990s – must realize that monitoring and enforcing rules on the books has never been a remotely strong suit of the U.S. government.

A big part of the reason is logistical. As I’ve noted repeatedly, manufacturing complexes even in smallish developing countries like TPP signatory Vietnam are so vast that making provisions like new labor rights and environmental protections actually stick is impossible even for a superpower. Indeed, Washington struggles even to enforce such rules in the United States.

Another big reason has to do with the secretive nature of Asian governments like those in Vietnam and other TPP signatories such as Japan and Malaysia. Although the Pacific Rim trade pact does seek to curb the ways that these bureaucracies distort trade flows, anyone as familiar with the region as Friedman surely realizes that these regimes put few of their biggest decisions in writing, and make even fewer of them public. So as has long been the case, American officials will be hard-pressed even to identify violations of the new TPP provisions, let alone combat them effectively.

It’s also hard to imagine that the real Friedman would simply parrot the Obama administration talking point that TPP will greatly benefit Americans by eliminating tariffs in 18,000 product categories. How could he not have seen the documentation provided by Public Citizen (and refuted by exactly no one) that the United States doesn’t even sell overseas more than half of these products, and that its exports in most of the rest are miniscule?

And it’s positively inconceivable that the genuine Thomas Friedman would have claimed that “if we walk away from the TPP all our friends in the Pacific will just sign up for China’s R.C.E.P., or Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which will set trade rules in Asia….” He obviously would have known that six of the ten other TPP countries are clearly hedging their bets by signing on to the Chinese initiative, too. These including the biggest by far (Japan and Australia), along with Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, Vietnam.

In other words, the real Thomas Friedman would never have written that a negotiator as good as Donald Trump would have okayed an agreement with this many gaping loopholes and other weaknesses. Let’s hope that the hacker(s) are caught before Friedman’s reputation takes on more water!

Apple is a transnational corporation that operates as a sort of global citizen without allegiance to a country. This will work for them until the next world war erupts.

As a Government Major in College, I spent much of my last semester, writing a term paper based on the Great League of Nations Debate, where a small band of patriotic Senators vindicated the wisdom of Washington & Jefferson, by intellectually destroying the fatuous arguments of that generation of internationalists.

In the course of that debate, the Republican Leader in the Senate, Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., who was a moderate, trying to steer a middle ground between that small band of patriots and the advocates of the League, did rise to deliver a classic speech denouncing those who saw all nations as the same, so long as they could make money in them. That, then (1919) reprehensible greed, has unfo0rtunately become the norm. No one would imagine Senator McConnell making a similar speech.

Trump's tough talk is not just about the economics of struggling American communities in every State in the Union. It is about something far, far more important than the economics of the next four years. It is about the very concept of what being an American actually means.

I certainly have no objection to Americans making money in other lands. The objection goes to Americans pretending that there is really such a thing as a "citizen of the world"; pretending that the peoples of the earth are interchangeable; pretending that the Founding Fathers were somehow benighted in charting an independent, unique course for the Americans who came together in the concepts of our unique Revolution; truly the clearest counter-Revolution against demonstrably unhealthy trends in the late 18th Century, parallel to many today.

The tariff debate is only one small--meaningful to be sure--but still relatively small issue, in the battle for the America that those brave men vouchsafe to their posterity.

Of course, I no long take any supposed expert on tariffs seriously, who does not couple the discussion with the social effects of other revenue devices. The Founders relied on excise taxes, including tariffs, for revenue. They did not want to ever employ incentive & achievement penalizing income taxes. Tariffs have certainly been employed to protect local industry; but they have other functions, being deliberately ignored.

Of course, the "protective" aspect would be less necessary--or even unnecessary--if we protected our labor & cultural imperatives, by closing the open border; if we reinstated immigration policies that protected both our labor, culture & identity. That is not an attack on any other people--far from it. It is a recognition of factors that rational people have always considered in the past, as the very concept of the "Nation," increasingly took hold.

And observing the conduct of the Left on all relevant issues; it is very clear that in their destructive pursuit, they have long recognized the inter-realtionship of these issues. It is well past time, we woke up to the war being waged on our continued existence as a people.

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