By Marjorie Griffin Cohen
Opening
Free trade and its structures are so fundamental to our current way of life and so taken for granted, that they rarely are a part of debates about the future — even in discussions of the possibilities of a shift in economic approaches in the post Covid-19 world. Globalization, based on a largely unregulated international market system that was dramatically accelerated by free trade, developed in many of the ways anti-free trade activists predicted, resulting in a world that massively increased the might of international monopolies, facilitated vast surges in unequal wealth and income distribution, and justified ‘austerity’ in public policy in order to limit wages, taxes and social spending. The movement that developed in protest against the first Canada-US free trade agreement in the mid-1980s until the 1988 Canadian ‘free trade’ election anticipated these negative results, although it did not understand how rapidly and thoroughly globalization would condition the actions of governments. Nor did it anticipate the subsequent rise of right-wing fanaticism in the US that accelerated as the consequences of free trade became known…