By now Americans know that trade deals like NAFTA, negotiated in secret without regard for workers rights, economic and social justice, and environmental protections only benefit the elites--those with wealth and power--at the expense of average people on all sides of the trade deal.
That is one reason that one of America's greatest economists, Joseph Stiglitz, has come out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership. (TPP)
The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a massive trade deal that the United States is trying to negotiate to remove national regulations to corporate power across the Pacific world.
Joseph Stiglitz was the Chief Economist of the World Bank. He was White House Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under Bill Clinton.
Because of his training and experience, Stiglitz is uniquely equipped to comment on the TPP trade deal.
He said, "There is a real risk that it will benefit the wealthiest sliver of the American and global elite at the expense of everyone else. The fact that such a plan is under consideration at all is testament to how deeply inequality reverberates through our economic policies. Worse, agreements like the TPP are only one aspect of a larger problem: our gross mismanagement of globalization."
Stiglitz observes because trade tariffs around the world are already low, the purpose of new trade deals is to reduce or eliminate national regulations, thus promoting "a race to the bottom."
Sometimes our political leaders and even those of us without power act as if inequality and the global economic race to the bottom are inevitable.
Of course, the global economic race to the bottom and horrendous inequality are not inevitable. First we have to put the needs of people first. Then we gave to create political frameworks that allow average people to build power, including by organizing their workplaces. And we have to put profits and the corporations that pursue them at our expense in their proper place--as servants to humanity and social justice, not masters.