100% corporate. 100%. All of the advisors to the admin on upcoming trade deals.

[JDPriestly]

58. A "service" economy means most jobs are "service" jobs.

And people who do service jobs are interchangeable. I could be as effective as a sales clerk in a department store selling imported goods as anyone. My skills would be sufficient. I can count. I can be pleasant. I can remember where things are. I can punch in on time. I might need a few weeks to practice and get up to speed, but I would be interchangeable with any other person who bathes and speaks good English in that service job.

People who do manufacturing or technical work have skills. Even if they don't have college degrees, they are not easily replaced in a job.

Because one employee is interchangeable with another in most service jobs, service employees have no leverage in the workplace. They can be too easily replaced. Training is not so costly. The leverage is almost entirely on the employer's side when it comes to labor negotiations.

In a country like ours in which liberal government and pro-worker policies and public attitudes are not prevalent, we need to have an economy that is based on manufacturing and the production of technology (in other words a valuable workforce) in order to have an economy in which labor has much of any voice.

As long as Americans can just import cheap shoes, cars, mowers, whatever from overseas, as long as we do not have a strong manufacturing sector in our economy, conservatives will dominate politically. Working people will not have much voting clout or economic clout.

That is why I think that "free" trade is bad for most Americans. It makes us dependent on the corporations because they provide us everything at low prices. Sooner or later those low prices will rise, but no one is thinking about that. Our dollar will not hold its value if we continue to have the terrible trade imbalance. Judging from past trade agreements, yet another agreement will just worsen our trade imbalance and increase our unemployment. Trade is good, but we need to have a more positive trade balance before we increase our trade with other countries. And we need to protect some of our industries against the low-wage economies with which we propose to enter into the TPP.

I suspect that our trade policy is mostly inspired by our wish to buy friends. You cannot buy true friends. True friendship is based on mutual respect. Our trade imbalance is a more important problem than we seem to be recognizing. We need to deal with it.