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The World Trade Organization promotes free trade by establishing a rule based international trading system and providing a venue for resolution of trade disputes. Most Americans would be far better off without it.

Free trade may increase economic growth in a macro sense but there are just too few winners and too many losers that free trade produces.

Who are the winners? Transnational corporations and the stockholders who own shares in these companies. Many of these shareholders are members of the most venal class of all; upper middle class knowledge workers who have watched the value of their 401Ks go through the roof as unencumbered trade boosts the value of the companies that benefit from it.

Who are the losers? Working class workers of all colors, ethnicities and religions who have watched their jobs shipped to nations willing to tolerate their citizens being paid slave wages or near slave wages. Economists may call this taking advantage of comparative advantage. A better term for it is a return to an economy based on feudalism.

Trump was more right than wrong about free trade. The World Trade Organization is an abomination. We wouldn’t need to waste trillions of dollars on Biden’s “Build Back Better” welfare programs if we focused on bringing back jobs that don’t require a college degree to our shores. Accomplishing this wouldn’t be easy or fast even if the United States abandoned the WTO but If we are forced to follow WTO strictures the American working class as a whole (of course there are exceptions) will be permanently enfeebled.

We don’t need a free or fair trading system, we need a trading system that benefits the American working class as much as possible. If that means we abandon free trade, so be it. If it results in lower profits for transnational corporations which result in lower stock prices for upper middle class 401Ks that’s just too fu..ing bad.

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Sep 28, 2021Liked by Claire Berlinski

Great essay! Regarding the timing of the 12th WTO Ministerial Conference (MC12), normally it would have taken place two years after the previous one in Buenos Aires, hence in late November or December 2019. But, exceptionally, MC12 was originally scheduled for 8-11 June 2020 so that it could be held in Kazakhstan's capital, Nur-Sultan. Rather than hold the event virtually, as some high-level meetings of inter-governmental organizations were during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the WTO's members decided to postpone it until late 2021, and move it to Geneva, a city in which the virus would presumably be largely under control.

One thing the two-year delay did was provide more months to wind up negotiations on an agreement on fisheries subsidies, which were supposed to have been concluded by the time of the originally scheduled Ministerial Conference. As it is, prospects for reaching a deal in time for the Ministers to sign it, more than 20 years after the 4th WTO Ministerial Conference that launched the talks, still isn't assured.

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