I think this TPP deal might be the beginning of the end of Hillary's Presidential aspirations

[mother earth]

121. The reality of NAFTA: same link from huffpo, there's no shortage of articles on NAFTA failures.

But if NAFTA wasn't a plausible economic bonanza for the U.S. and America's establishment knew it, then what was going on? Krugman again supplies an answer, writing in Foreign Affairs that, "For the United States, NAFTA is essentially a foreign policy rather than an economic issue." The real agenda was to keep people like President Carlos Salinas, friendly with powerful interests in the U.S., in power in Mexico City.

Bottom line? Free trade was pushed not because of any sincerely anticipated economic benefits, but to serve an extraneous foreign policy agenda. To his credit, Krugman later admitted the utter chicanery of it all, writing in The New Democrat in 1996 that:


The agreement was sold under false pretences. Over the protests of most economists, the Clinton Administration chose to promote NAFTA as a jobs-creation program. Based on little more than guesswork, a few economists argued that NAFTA would boost our trade surplus with Mexico, and thus produce a net gain in jobs. With utterly spurious precision, the administration settled on a figure of 200,000 jobs created--and this became the core of the NAFTA sales pitch.



NAFTA was sold in Mexico as Mexico's ticket to the big time. Mexicans were told they were choosing between gradually converging with America's advanced economy and regressing to the status of a backwater like neighboring Guatemala.

What actually happened? In reality, the income gap between the United States and Mexico grew (by over 10 percent) in the first decade of the agreement. This doesn't mean America boomed; we didn't. But Mexico slumped terribly.