It’s tempting to valorize the so-called openness of free trade that Democrats have embraced. But in reality, they are promoting massive handouts for corporations and the undermining of democracy abroad while exposing workers to fierce competition and downward pressure on wages.

I’ll never forget the moment when the absolute crockery of the Trans-Pacific Partnership dawned upon me.

It was in mid-2012, in the runup to the 2012 election. At this point, Obama had soured my naive optimism. His baffling retreat from a public option during the inception phase of the ACA was a golden egg given to the insurance industry and left millions without coverage. Whatever populist credibility he had feigned in the 2008 election had evaporated in the wake of the financial crisis, and he was busy wooing Wall Street’s cash at $38,000-a-plate dinners.

Then came this doozy: a 52-page thriller of a trade document that revealed that Obama’s negotiators had already agreed to terms basically subverting local law to extra-judicial “investor-state” tribunals. That’s industry jargon for private international tribunals, staffed by rotating lawyers and judges.

The document was a scandal. One met with almost deaf ears by liberals and tacit encouragement by Republicans. The leak confirmed some of environmentalist and human rights groups’ greatest fears. Under the guise of trade, sovereign nations would be powerless to stop the ever steepening profit drive and would be subject to private tribunals.

I said it then and I’ll say it now: it was a bunch of bullshit. But perhaps more discouraging was the lack of uproar it caused amongst Democrats. Democrats who in 1999 took to the streets in thousands to protest the World Trade Organization in Seattle.

Now, six years later, we have been even more impoverished by the lack of a substantial, critical dialogue regarding free trade. Democrats have astonishingly become the party of free trade, appealing to the liberal strand of internationalism, arguing that an open economy is an open world.

Here is why they are wrong.

Free trade is not free

Liberals have a penchant for somehow glossing over the power dynamics involved in exchange. This is dangerous as it ignores who is at the losing end of any exchange.

Democrats are perhaps worse than Republicans in this matter: obfuscating the power and leeway given to corporations by labeling free trade as part of an “open economy” that somehow facilitates a more open, cosmopolitan world.

When in fact, at the heart of their support for an “open economy” lies imperialistic support for the US’s interest and competitiveness abroad. Something that hardly promotes good global governance. Take a recent opinion piece by Terry McAuliffe attempting to stoke nativist pride: “Instead, Democrats will win with an optimistic vision of an America that is confidently able to compete around the world because of new investments in education for our workers, research in cutting-edge industries and modernized infrastructure.”

To that: how dare you play on my feelings of multiculturalism when you are supporting free trade sweatshop zones in Mexico, where workers toil under deadly conditions, making on average a sixth of what their US compatriots make?

Mexico clearly exemplifies that free trade benefits more powerful countries. In the years since NAFTA’s enactment, goods produced in maquiladoras — factories inside free trade zones, that produce goods for foreign consumption and are staffed primarily by young women — have become Mexico’s chief exports, displacing oil. US companies own the majority of the factories. While, ironically enough, Mexico imports more than half of its goods from the US. Mexico is thus directly subsidizing the American economy. This has made Mexico the least diversified economy in Latin America and left it largely dependant on the ups and downs of the American economy.

NAFTA may have created a lot of jobs in the maquiladora zone — adding about 800,000 jobs in 1997. But, based on national statistics, Mexico’s poverty rate in the years following NAFTA actually increased, leading to about 20.5 million more Mexicans living below the poverty line. On a national level, wages have remained stagnant as well, up just 4.1 percent over 20 years.

Further abroad, the conditions are worse. Take Nike, for example. The IGLHR recently reported that Nike’s shoes produced in Indonesia and Vietnam carry a declared customs value of $5.27 (while retailing in the hundreds). These shoes are made by people like RM, “a 32-year-old mother who works 55 hours, six days a week and makes just $184 a month after 12 years at the PT Nikomas factory, a Nike subcontractor that employs 25,000 people. That’s 83 cents an hour or $2,208 a year.”

This exploitation incentivizes multinationals to shift their production abroad, devaluing labor back home and gutting the country of jobs. By allowing countries like Vietnam, where workers often lack even basic rights, to freely export their goods into the US, it sets the worst standards as the baseline. It also supports slave-like working conditions.

Democrats themselves are often even the architects and enforcers of slave-like working conditions abroad. The state department under Hillary Clinton acted in full lockstep with corporations, prominent among other actions, moving to block reform for minimum wage in Haiti in 2009 to keep corporate profit margins higher.

In the long run, the mounting pressure on wages will be disastrous for even higher skilled jobs. As countries like China invest heavily in education, we will see a hollowing out of skilled jobs shifting to countries with cheaper labor. Again, workers are exposed to a decreasing socially necessary amount of labor, devaluing their labor.

Rather than using the US’s considerate economic clout to force countries like Vietnam and Indonesia to raise their working standards to gain access to the US market, Democrats choose the path of corporate profit.

Free trade is also disastrous environmentally for poorer countries.

Take Ecuador, for example. In 2012 they were ordered by a World Bank tribunal to pay US oil corporation Occidental Petroleum Corp $1.7 billion. All for having the gumption and good sense to cancel the deal after their President caved to an Indian group of activists who accused the company of exploiting natural resources without benefiting Ecuadorians. Occidental Petroleum also broke Ecuadorian law by entering into a farmount agreement with a Canadian firm, granting them a 40% economic interest in the venture.

Any such agreement, granting decision-making power to a third, foreign interest, required prior consent of the Ecuadorian government. Occidental Petroleum argued that actually nothing changed, the World Bank agreed and ordered the country to pay damages for breaking the contract.

Another recent example is El Salvador’s case with OceaniaGold. The country moved to ban cyanide-based gold mining and broke a deal with an Australian mining company utilizing it. In the case, El Salvador argued that the company actually hadn’t acquired the necessary environmental licenses to even begin operating. The case would languish in courts for over 4 years before being thrown out.

No one should be mistaken about this. Free trade is corporate governance, designed to blur the lines between public and private to the advantage of private accumulation. And what is yet more disastrous is that free trade extends the logic of corporate governance past the nation sate, where existing institutions are fragmentary and neolibral. It uses an unprecedented increase in productivity and reduced shipping costs to violently depress the value of labor around the world. That’s something we must fight.

So what’s there to hope for?

Any future US trade policy needs to check it’s goddamn privilege at the door and punish companies like Nike for promoting horrific work conditions in poorer countries.

It needs to shatter the myth of American exceptionalism that believes that spreading consumerism around the world benefits everyone. It doesn’t, as shown by the impoverishment of workers in poorer countries.

Any effective attempt to redistribute resources and wealth to poorer workers and to raise slumping wages requires a comprehensive public good and infrastructure package that would reinvigorate American industrial production and force corporations to part with their massive cash reserves.

One of the best ways to do this would be to mandate a quicker transition to the green economy, promoting regional co-ops or publically owned investment funds that reinvigorate the rust belt.

It’s up to us to take both Democrats and Republicans to task for undermining the rights of workers abroad in search of short-sighted lifts to corporate profits on consumer goods. Any truly leftist trade policy would search to disadvantage the ruinous exploitative nature of multinational corporations and instead put pressure on countries with a poor track record for workers’ rights to raise their standard and invest more in programs or industries that benefit the impoverished.