Robert Reich on the Real Reason the Corporate-Friendly TPP Is Nearly Dead

[Dems to Win]

40. I'm opposed to trade, except in very limited circumstances

About 25 years ago, I was eating some pretzels I had bought from Trader Joe's, and noticed on the package that they were made in Israel.

What the hell? They harvested wheat in a desert country and made it into pretzels, then shipped it to the other side of the world for me to buy in a Utah market? What a travesty for our Mother Earth, such a waste of precious resources.

It is so wasteful as to be evil to catch fish in the US then ship them to China (in a container kept frozen, using fossil fuel to do so) for processing then back to the US for sale.

Economic signals -- the invisible hand of the free market -- are incredibly wrong and wasteful and exploitive of the Earth and its people.

The only trade that should be happening would be trade in very rare minerals, for example. That makes sense.

But using fossil fuels with abandon to ship items and raw materials across vast oceans, because oil is being kept artificially cheap, to take advantage of cheap labor in poor countries, is just wrong. Wrong for our planet, wrong for people.

As an environmentalist, I try to limit what I buy. Grow as much of my own food as I can, forget buying clothes made in sweatshops (I wear secondhand stuff, though I could afford to buy it new), and even my computer I'm typing on right now is secondhand.

Yes, I'm an American proudly opposed to free trade. Glad that Robert Reich has taken notice!