Download or read book Getting the 'Message' on Free Trade written by Sara A. Dillon and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the presidential campaign of 2016, Donald Trump successfully marshaled years of repressed popular anger over job losses and the erosion of the middle class, caused in part by a globalizing economy and the movement of the American manufacturing base to other parts of the world. Although a great deal of job loss in the American “heartland” was caused by automation, there is little doubt that many factories were closed and moved abroad with no regard for the devastated middle-class workers left behind. This outsourcing of the American workforce was the result of free trade laws devised in the 1990s, resistance to which mainstream politicians and scholars had largely failed to take seriously. Trump articulated and channeled this populist anger, while ignoring the opportunistic role played by American corporations in taking advantage of free trade rules to move their operations abroad in pursuit of greater profitability. Trump also distorted public understanding of the problem by emphasizing the idea that other countries had “taken advantage of” and “ripped off” the United States. In this, he relied on an untapped well of resentment among American workers, seducing voters with the promise that he could renegotiate these deals and restore a lost economic world in which they had felt more secure.This article argues that global free trade and the laws that support it have complex purposes, and mixed economic effects. While job losses have occurred, globalization has also brought about benefits in terms of peace and international understanding. This article also explores the important legal question of whether and how one president is capable of bringing down the entire world trading system, built up over several decades. In addition, the reasons behind the obvious failure of trade law specialists to confront the contradictions posed by free trade doctrine, and the extent to which they failed to prescribe remedies for its adverse fallout are also analyzed in depth. Finally, this article suggests possible remedies to protect American workers against the ill effects of labor outsourcing, but notes that few if any American politicians have seriously pursued such remedies, for instance by drafting statutes to that end. Empowering workers in corporate decision making and imposing serious penalties on corporations when jobs are lost through outsourcing are methods that have scarcely been tried.