| The Pacific Basin |
and as a way of stating the obvious,
I have not been asked to help design
the new Pacific Trade Pact.
I recall, when the North American Free Trade Agreement
was being crafted, that one of the issues at stake was the fact
that a lot of Latin American workers were coming to the U.S.
for work in factories, and that American workers were worried
that their own wages would erode, or jobs would be lost.
Everyone knew that poverty alongside prosperity,
or hunger alongside plenty, could not sustain themselves.
Everyone knew that the economies of Latin American countries
had to improve, that it had to become possible for people there
to find jobs there, in order for them to stay there,
if that is what they wanted to do.
So that is what happened. U.S. and Canadian companies
shifted some of their factories south of the border.
Labor was cheaper there, there were no unions there,
and goods could be sent back north rather cheaply.
And, to a significant degree, that has worked.
Mexico is economically stronger, and more diversified.
The pressure for emigration to the U.S. has slowed.
Many goods are cheaper in the U.S. than otherwise.
But some jobs are no longer here: they are there.
Basic economics is a powerful force: Latin Americans
are just as intelligent as human beings anywhere,
and if they can be hired for five or ten dollars an hour
instead of twenty, it will inevitably happen. It happened.
Their wages are rising, but it takes time, and organization.
Our idiocy, here in the States, was not that we did not stop
what eventually would happen, anyway, but that when the economy
shifted, we did almost nothing to deal with it, or respond to it.
If auto production was moving from Michigan,
not only to Mexico, but to Tennessee and the American South,
for the same reasons, what did we do about the people
who were fifty or sixty who used to work in those factories?
Almost nothing. "Retrain as software engineers!", we told them.
Start a business of your own: Steve Jobs did. Bill Gates did.
Move in with your parents. Don't eat out: cook your own meals!
Diagnose your own diseases, and vote against health care.
Privatize Social Security: what could go wrong with the Stock Market?
Scorn government! They are a bunch of thieves!
Help the rich get rich: it will leak out of their leaky pockets
and you can get rich picking up what dribbles down their legs.
We cannot wall ourselves off from the world.
What is manufactured in Mexico affects us. So, too, with Japan
and China and Thailand and Taiwan and Germany and everywhere else.
The real question is not whether we can stop that,
but how we adapt to it, how we help the people who are being hurt,
and how we take advantage of the opportunities that are there,
and that have never been there, before.
China has finally, and once again, emerged as a giant force
among the nations of the world. It has brain power, labor,
resources more than adequate to reshape much of what
will happen on a global scale. It has already done so,
and will continue to do so. The Pacific Trade Pact
is a major effort to pull together other nations around the Pacific
who need coordination to have a say in what happens.
Canada, the USA, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Vietnam, and Brunei have agreed to act commonly to be able to bargain effectively in matters of trade.
I do not know how good or fair the Pact is. I do know that reaching agreement is far better than just bellyaching about how much we owe China, or how many cars are being assembled in Mexico. I do know that no one else has actually put together a viable proposal to manage what is happening in the Pacific Basin. And it is obvious that doing nothing is incredibly stupid and self-mutilating.
Once, in American history, we consoled ourselves that the problems of "Old Europe" and the Far East were a long ways away: oceans away. The oceans isolated us. Now the oceans, and the sky, are tying us together.
The Rio Grande is not so grand, anymore. Donald Trump's "big, beautiful fence" is a big, ugly joke. The oceans that used to divide us now make us neighbors.
I hope the negotiating nations have done the best they could to reach an agreement, because we need to do something like that. And, as we should have learned by now, we need to watch what is changing, and adapt to the changes by doing everything we can to help the people who will be hurt. It isn't enough to tell them to do what Bill Gates did, or to be born rich, the way Donald Trump was.
It is not a question of stopping change. The world is changing. The question is what we can do to manage it, and to take advantage of it, for everyone involved.
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