Donald Trump is being encouraged to stay strong in NAFTA negotiations by people who aren’t normally his allies.
This story by The Canadian Press appeared in Automotive News Canada.
Sen. Bernie Sanders and other members of the anti-NAFTA left held a news conference Wednesday on Capitol Hill where they demanded that the president keep his promise to drastically overhaul the agreement.
They held their event as negotiators from the three countries met in Washington.
Sanders expressed support for hardball U.S. negotiating positions like increased Buy American protections, and he wants to go even farther than Trump and not just water down the investor-state dispute mechanism in Chapter 11 but end it entirely.
He also wants Trump to go farther on labor standards and to end incentives to outsource jobs.
Those disagreements on specifics illustrate that while Trump and the left share similar rhetoric about trade, some of their specific proposals veer in different directions, raising doubt about how many left-wingers Trump could hope to win over in a ratification vote for a trade deal.
Sanders says poorly designed trade deals are one of the factors that have hurt U.S. manufacturing communities in recent decades and led to greater inequality between haves and have-nots.