Why Progressives are winning on trade.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Trans-Pacific Partnership

It must have given the earnest wonks at the Economic Policy Institute a bit of a start when Donald Trump touted their research in a speech courting white, working-class voters by criticizing NAFTA and U.S. trade policy with China.

EPI president Lawrence Mishel was moved to respond in a blog post titled "The Trump trade scam."

"If he is so keen to help working people," Mishel wrote, "why does he then steer the discussion back toward the traditional corporate agenda of tax cuts for corporations and the rich?" Progressives, who have long criticized trade deals that favor multinational corporations, suppress wages, accelerate outsourcing, and replace local democracy with unelected tribunals, shrink from keeping company with the racist, isolationist right.

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This is equally true in Trump's America and in Britain, now getting a divorce from the rest of Europe. Guardian columnist Gary Younge concurs with Mishel on the fraudulence of rightwing anti-globalism, and particularly the immigrant-bashing Brexit campaign.

"The very people who are slashing resources--the Tory right--and diverting what's left to the wealthy are the ones rallying the poor by blaming migrants for the lack of resources," Younge wrote. "Not content with urinating on our leg and telling us it's raining, they have found someone to blame for the weather."

Rightwing populists are making a lot of noise about the weather lately--that is, the lousy economic climate brought on by trade deals that favor corporations at the expense of labor. As a result, they are making inroads with an anxious working class.

"Progressives can't afford to cede economic populism to the man who could prove to be the most effective white nationalist campaigner of our generation," Tarso Luis Ramos, executive director of a watchdog group that monitors the right, Political Research Associates, told me in March, when I interviewed him about Donald Trump.

To get a progressive view on globalization, I spoke with Melinda St. Louis, international campaigns director for Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. St. Louis, who has spent her career working on fair trade, is optimistic about a global movement for economic justice.

"I don't think we're ceding talking points on this," she says, citing the campaign to defeat the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which she calls "kind of exciting."

For years, both major parties pushed multinational corporations' agenda in big trade deals. But not this year...