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The basic story on automation, trade and jobs is fairly straightforward. "Automation" is also known as "productivity growth," and it is not new. We have been seeing gains in productivity in manufacturing ever since we started manufacturing things. Productivity gains mean that we can produce more output with the same amount of work. Before the trade deficit exploded in the last decade, increases in productivity were largely offset by increases in output, making it so the total jobs in manufacturing did not change much.

The extraordinary plunge in manufacturing jobs in the years 2000 to 2007 was due to the explosion of the trade deficit, which peaked at just under 6 percent of GDP ($1.2 trillion in today's economy) in 2005 and 2006. This was first and foremost due to the growth of imports from China during these years, although we ran large trade deficits with other countries as well.

It’s not simply that Trump has effectively channeled their pain and anger through his rhetoric. The harsh truth is that Trump gets traction on trade—and his glaring defects get a pass from many—because he’s filling a huge vacuum in the country’s political discourse. For years, neither of the two main political parties has articulated a vision of international trade that puts workers, communities, and our environment ahead of corporate interests.

Only last month, the Obama administration, backed by corporate interests, successfully blocked the Indian government’s massive solar energy program by persuading the WTO that India’s promotion of domestic solar panel manufacturing violated WTO rules.

Clinton’s positions remind us that we have to resist the temptation to distill the trade struggle into a contest between candidates. Instead, we must build a movement for trade justice that rejects both Trump’s opportunism and the long-standing neoliberalism of the Democratic and Republican parties.

While the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and others adhere to a rigid “neoliberal” ideology that favors deregulation, privatization, and the interests of the global North and the private sector over the poor, UNCTAD has a rich history of favoring people-centered development, promoting interests of the global South, and being a voice of the poor majority in international forums.

It is despicable that in a conference focused on trade and development, rich countries successfully prevented UNCTAD from calling for changes to the WTO, to allow more flexibility for development in poor countries. They even successfully blocked a call for a resolution to trade-distorting subsidies in agriculture that damage developing countries every day.

The EU and US even opposed inclusion of “Special and Differential Treatment” — the simple historical recognition of the fact that rich and poor countries have different economic capacities and need different rules to promote prosperity — although this was finally included.

The massive text largely reflects the interests of the 500 official U.S. trade advisors representing corporate interests that had privileged access while the public, Congress and the press were shut out the secretive process: investor privileges that make it easier to offshore American jobs to low wage countries and retrograde terms that expose U.S. food safety, environmental, Internet freedom, health and other safeguards to attack and rollback.

Except the WTO just sideswiped Obama's TPP claims. Will he stand by his claim that 'no trade agreement is going to force us to change our laws? If so, Obama's Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, did not get the memo. "Congress has got to fix this problem. They either have to repeal or modify and amend it," Vilsack said in May when the WTO issued a previous ruling on the case.

After previous WTO rulings, the United States has rolled back U.S. Clean Air Act regulations on gasoline cleanliness rules successfully challenged by Venezuela and Mexico and Endangered Species Act rules relating to shrimping techniques that kill sea turtles after a successful challenge by Malaysia and other nations. The U.S. also altered auto fuel efficiency (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards that were successfully challenged by the European Union.

Take, for instance, labor rights. While those promoting the trade deal said it would advance workers in member nations and allow the formation of unions, the actual language in the agreement offers only false promises of progress. In fact, countries with abysmal labor standards will have to do little, if anything, to comply with the commitments of the TPP’s labor chapter. A country may have to adopt a minimum wage, but even one penny an hour would be sufficient to meet the requirements of the TPP.

While elected officials often use hyperbole to talk about so-called critical votes they make, this is one time they won’t be. The lives of millions of Americans will beadversely affected if those on Capitol Hill ultimately vote to approve the TPP. That’s why we and our coalition partners are speaking out forcefully against this deal. And it’s why lawmakers must side with their constituents over corporate interests when they ultimately consider the trade agreement next year.

“Apparently, the TPP’s proponents resorted to such extreme secrecy during negotiations because the text shows that the TPP would offshore more American jobs, lower our wages, flood us with unsafe imported food and expose our laws to attack in foreign tribunals,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “When the administration says it used the TPP to renegotiate NAFTA, few expected that meant doubling down on the worst job-killing, wage-suppressing NAFTA terms, expanding limits on food safety and rolling back past reforms on environmental standards and access to affordable drugs.”

“Many in Congress said they would support the TPP only if, at a minimum, it included past reforms made to trade pact intellectual property rules affecting access to affordable medicines. But the TPP rolls back that past progress by requiring new marketing exclusivities and patent term extensions, and provides pharmaceutical firms with new monopoly rights for biotech drugs, including many new and forthcoming cancer treatments,” said Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program. “The terms in this final TPP text will contribute to preventable suffering and death abroad, and may constrain the reforms that Congress can consider to reduce Americans’ medicine prices at home.”

The TPP Intellectual Property Chapter would roll back the “May 2007” reforms for access to medicines. The TPP Environment Chapter would roll back the “May 2007” reforms by eliminating most of the seven Multilateral Environmental Agreements that past pacts have enforced. The TPP Investment Chapter would expand the scope of policies that can be challenged and the basis for such challenges, including for the first time ever allowing investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) enforcement of World Trade Organization intellectual property terms and new challenges to financial regulations.

Without a currency that could appreciate against those of her trading partners, German productivity increased and its technical excellence produced a declining real cost of exports, while in its European trading partners, deprived of currencies that could depreciate, stable purchasing power and easy credit produced a corresponding increase in demand for German goods.

Stiglitz concedes that austerity may eventually work, but he argues that even if it does, the cost is too high. Better to allow countries to declare bankruptcy and start over, just as individuals and firms can do in a domestic economy. Varoufakis and Galbraith dismiss austerity as flatly self-defeating, because low growth simply ends up increasing the debt-to-GDP ratio.

Germany has emerged almost unscathed—at least so far. Berlin has preserved the existing euro system, which advantages it as an international creditor, an exporter of high-quality goods, and a country that suppresses wage increases. It has enjoyed lower interest rates and higher growth than the rest of Europe, which has depressed the real cost of its exports, resulting in a trade surplus larger in absolute terms than China’s.

In fact, in a private meeting between U.S. civil society and Robert Gerber, the Deputy Head of the U.S. delegation, he told us that he thought that analyzing “the global economic crisis” itself was outside of UNCTAD’s mandate, which was to focus on trade and development. I’m not sure how to make an argument that these things are not related, but I guess when you’re the United States at the United Nations, you don’t have to have a logical argument.

He also said the language in the text that was most important to the United States was on UNCTAD’s efficiency, effectiveness, transparency and accountability; we’re looking forward to seeing the U.S. push hard for similar issues regarding the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and U.S. aid in Haiti, among other places.

the non-EU bloc of developed countries) was asked directly at one point during the negotiations why he did not want this language included, the representative responded gruffly, “we don’t want any competition in intellectual thinking!”

The HKMD reads: "We agree to ensure the parallel elimination of all forms of export subsidies and disciplines on all export measures with equivalent effect to be completed by the end of 2013. This will be achieved in a progressive and parallel manner, to be specified in the modalities, so that a substantial part is realized by the end of the first half of the implementation period. We note emerging convergence on some elements of disciplines with respect to export credits, export credit guarantees or insurance programmes with repayment periods of 180 days and below. We agree that such programmes should be self-financing, reflecting market consistency, and that the period should be of a sufficiently short duration so as not to effectively circumvent real commercially- oriented discipline."

In sharp contrast to the joint proposal, the US maintained that the deadline for phasing out export subsidies must remain the same for both industrialized and developing countries. Under Article 9.4 of the Agreement on Agriculture, the developing countries are provided a longer duration as part of special and differential treatment flexibility. But the US wants to deny that flexibility and by suggesting the same time period for everyone, the US is disregarding the existing WTO provisions and the ministerial mandates, developing country agriculture negotiators maintained.

In a nutshell, the developed countries have resorted to an unprecedented form of cherry-picking to suit their interests by altering the existing ministerial decisions and mandates underpinning the four elements in the export competition pillar. But the same developed countries along with some developing country allies have launched a war-like effort to deny minimal credible developmental outcomes such as the permanent solution for public stockholding programs for food security and the special safeguard mechanism for developing countries, trade envoys argued.

Developing countries are also fighting to be permitted by WTO rules to invest in their own agricultural production and strengthen domestic food security programs that are currently permitted for rich but not developing countries, not even for Least Developed Countries (LDCs).

it seems that developed countries never intended to deliver on those development and agricultural reform promises, and have spent the last 14 years of the Doha Round sidelining development issues and instead working to expand the WTO’s neoliberal dictates on services, goods, agriculture and other issues. At the same time, they have taken their corporate wish lists to other forums, concluding the TPP and negotiating the TTIP, TiSA, ITA and EGA mentioned above.

This effort, which is the main fight in Nairobi, is even more pernicious because their goal is two-fold: abandon the development mandate, and then open up space to introduce all the new corporate issues they have been negotiating in the TPP, TTIP and other deals into the WTO, including investment, government procurement, disciplining state owned enterprises, and others. Many of these issues are not permitted to be on the agenda in the WTO while Doha is still being negotiated.

In the face of sharply differing views, the chair Ambassador Vitalis said he will hold bilateral consultations with members in the coming days. However, it is unlikely that the chair's efforts will yield any result because of the continued diversionary tactics adopted by the US, the EU, and other industrialized countries, said an African trade envoy.

In recent years, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia have withdrawn from the ICSID Convention, all for similar reasons. These governments cling to the quaint notion that their societies’ resources ought to belong to the people who live there, and they view the ICSID as a way to grease the skids for the continued pillaging of said resources (which is usually accompanied, of course, by environmental degradation).

In any case, a withdrawal from the ICSID is not a shield from claims by private interests, and states like Venezuela and Ecuador are still staring at billions of dollars in potential compensatory payments stemming from a number of cases over the last decade. States cannot simply ignore these judgments, as it would be viewed like a sovereign default, with all the economic risk that entails.

As a recent McClatchy piece on a high-profile dispute between Oceana Gold Corp. and the government of El Salvador put it, “international investment laws are empowering corporations to act against foreign governments that curtail their future profits, “ and the ICSID is the vehicle these corporations are using to ensure that these profits are not threatened.