Consumers and journalists alike had failed to connect the dots between escalating crime in dying factory towns and page-three wire stories about Bangladesh textile factory fires. And why would they? The small-town reporter has little license to cover the goings-on of the W.T.O. or the United States International Trade Commission, and the few reporters who do cover international trade rarely venture to towns like Rocky Mount or Bassett.

All of which suits the press-avoiding chief executives just fine. The shareholders matter most.

The globalization of low-skilled manufacturing is already a fait accompli, T.P.P. proponents have argued, and the furniture- and textile-making jobs that once made the Piedmont region of the mid-Atlantic hum are not coming back from China or Mexico.

But what about the other manufacturing jobs we’ve managed to hold onto in the United States? How would the 1,350 workers at New Balance’s Maine and Massachusetts factories fare, if faced with the elimination of tariffs on shoes made by Vietnamese workers who earn an average of $90 to $129 a month?

As imports soared in the decade following 2001, American manufacturing sector jobs dropped by roughly a third. There are now more American workers on disability (8.9 million) than are working on assembly lines (8.6 million). And among the displaced workers in southside Virginia who were retrained via Trade Adjustment Assistance funds — only about a third of trade-displaced workers in Virginia opt for federally funded retraining — most end up with lesser-paying service jobs, many of them part-time.

“I take the global long view,” said an urban planner and T.P.P. supporter who came to a talk I gave last week in Greensboro, N.C., another former furniture-making region. He’s right that globalization has fostered better living conditions in the developing world. But improving the lives of Indonesian peasants willing to work for desperately low wages really has nothing to do with the decisions that closed some 63,300 American factories between 2001 and 2012.

Those decisions were made by the biggest beneficiaries of unfettered free trade, in a story line that seems straight out of a Michael Moore documentary: the C.E.O. who now earns 300 times more than his average worker; the shareholders who expect quarter-after-quarter growth in corporate profits; the lawyers who helped devise the fine print in the T.P.P. document and the lobbyists they hire who, if the leaks are to be believed, think nothing of cutting off the supply of new generic drugs for decades.

Unlike most of the people in my rural, conservative audiences, I’d still like to think President Obama means it when he says the T.P.P. will increase economic growth and expand United States exports.