Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is opposing President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs after spending his career in Washington, DC, trashing the nation’s decades-long free trade policy for allowing multinational corporations to easily outsource American jobs to low-wage countries like China and Vietnam.
“As someone who helped lead the effort against disastrous unfettered free trade deals with China, Mexico, and other low-wage countries, I understand that we need trade policies that benefit American workers, not just the CEOs of large corporations,” Sanders said in a statement before using economic libertarian talking points to attack Trump’s recipricol tariffs:
And that includes targeted tariffs which can be a powerful tool in stopping corporations from outsourcing American jobs and factories abroad. Bottom line: We need a rational, well-thought-out and fair trade policy. Trump’s across-the-board tariffs are not the way to do it. We do not need a blanket and arbitrary sales tax on imported goods which will raise prices on products that the American people desperately need. We should be doing everything we can to lower prices, not make them incredibly higher. [Emphasis added]
Further, and most importantly, what Trump is doing is illegal and another step toward authoritarianism. In pushing his tariffs he is usurping the power of Congress and abrogating existing agreements under “emergency” provisions – when there are no real emergencies. In other words, he is incorporating more and more power into his own hands. That is unacceptable. [Emphasis added]
The statement is unusual for Sanders, as he has spent most of political career in Washington, DC, warning against the devastating impact that free trade has had on America’s working and middle class communities.
In 1993, then-Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) railed against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as nothing more than a massive outsourcing giveaway to multinational corporations looking to cut labor costs by sending American jobs to the lowest-wage countries.
“The NAFTA treaty is being supported by almost every multinational corporation in America, and these corporations are spending tens and tens of billions of dollars trying to influence the members of this body to vote for it,” Sanders said at the time.
Sanders also attacked what he called the “corporate media” for their universal support for NAFTA — similar to the universal opposition by the media that Trump faces with his tariffs today.
“Corporate America wants us to pass NAFTA, and they are telling us that corporate America is going to create more jobs … it’s the same old song and I fear that they are once again not telling the truth,” Sanders said. “And I think that NAFTA will end up, once again, making the rich richer, but it’s going to hurt the vast majority of working people in this country.”
Indeed, Sanders was correct. NAFTA, with its tariff-free agreement, cost the U.S. some 4.5 million manufacturing jobs and sent worker pay plunging, while salaries for executives have hit record levels.
Likewise, in 2008, Sanders went after the Bush administration for continuing D.C.’s free trade consensus that ultimately carved out industrial towns across the Rust Belt and elsewhere. Sandler said:
The reality is that we have lost some three million manufacturing jobs in Pennsylvania and Ohio and in the state of Vermont. We’re losing good-paying jobs because, in my view, of a disastrous trade policy that simply encourages corporate America to throw American workers out on the street, move to China, then bring their products back into this country.
Similarly, in 2011, Sanders opposed the U.S. free trade deals with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama — stating that such tariff-free agreements would cost American jobs, send wages into the ground, and more readily allow corporations to outsource — all of which has occurred.
“Trade agreements like NAFTA and Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China have cost this country millions of good-paying jobs as companies shut down factories here and move to low-wage countries abroad,” Sanders said at the time.
“In the last 10 years alone ,we have lost 50,000 factories,s and it is harder and harder to buy products manufactured in the United States,” Sanders continued. “These new trade agreements are nothing more than a continuation of a failed trade policy and should be rejected. Our demand must be that corporations reinvest in this country, create jobs here and not in China or other low-wage countries.”
As the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) has found, U.S. free trade with China has cost millions of American workers their jobs.
“The growth of the U.S. trade deficit with China between 2001 and 2018 was responsible for the loss of 3.7 million U.S. jobs, including 1.7 million jobs lost since 2008 (the first full year of the Great Recession, which technically began at the end of 2007),” EPI researchers note. “Three-fourths (75.4%) of the jobs lost between 2001 and 2018 were in manufacturing (2.8 million manufacturing jobs lost due to the growth in the trade deficit with China).”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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