Stopping the giant sucking sound.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Comment - US international trade policy

Twenty years ago, President Bill Clinton pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement. In his 1994 State of the Union address, Clinton celebrated, calling NAFTA and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) "the building blocks of our recovery." The trade deals would mean "more jobs and rising living standards for the American people," Clinton declared, adding, "There is no turning back."

In fact, NAFTA ushered in two decades of job flight, as American manufacturers shifted production to Mexico. Whole communities collapsed. The rise of a low-wage service-sector economy helped propel dramatic inequality.

The data on worker displacement after NAFTA reads "like a funeral program for the middle class," wrote former Congressman David Bonior, Democrat of Michigan, in a recent op-ed in The New York Times.

Nor has NAFTA benefited us, on balance, when it comes to trade.

The average annual growth of the U.S. trade deficit has been 45 percent higher with our NAFTA partners Mexico and Canada than with countries that are not party to a similar deal.

President Obama, in his 2014 State of the Union Address, which dwelt on efforts to reduce inequality and rebuild the middle class, slipped in a few discordant lines promoting the giant trade agreements he is seeking to fast track.

Note the stark difference between Obama's passing reference to the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Clinton's full-throated promotion of NAFTA.

That difference is the result of twenty years of hard experience. While it is still an article of faith on Wall Street that corporate trade deals benefit multinational corporations and workers alike, the American public is not buying it. Polls show that Americans oppose these deals by margins of 60 to 80 percent.

And a movement that first showed its strength when protesters disrupted the 1999 World Trade Organization negotiations in Seattle has only grown.

"The movement of movements that first came together during the Battle in Seattle is back to fight the TPP and fast track," says Arthur Stamoulis, executive director of the Citizens Trade Campaign. "Labor, environmental, family farm, student, Internet freedom groups, and others are actively working with one another to fight corporate power grabs disguised as trade agreements."

More than fifty demonstrations across North America, including a march by 100,000 citizens in Mexico City, protested the legacy of NAFTA on its twentieth anniversary and voiced opposition to backroom...