No, that is not the point of trade treaties. In fact, if you look at the economic wreckage that followed NAFTA and the other trade treaties of the past two decades you would know that the point of these treaties is to enrich large multinational corporations at the expense of the economies of the respective nations.
The fact that the Times comes from the perspective that trade treaties are designed to help economies rather than enrich already rich corporations shows the lie to its “impartial” and “objective” reportage and editorializing. This is the subtle technique of neoliberal “rebranding”, which takes policies that destroy national economies and purposely confuses the advantages to the plutocracy with advantages to the nation. This is also how GDP works (counting destructive economic activity as productive), as well as the incessant focus on the stock and bond markets as indicators of “recovery”. That’s where the notion of a “jobless recovery” comes from, as if such a phenomenon should hold any interest or import for the actual people who can’t find jobs or are watching their incomes dwindle during the supposed “recovery”.
That you don’t see the distinction is just more proof of the effectiveness of what is truthfully just blatant propagandizing on behalf of an oligarchic corporate/state nexus.
