I guess I need to Blog on NAFTA again.

I feel that I need to blog on NAFTA once again, as confusion and ignorance still exist.


NAFTA is a free trade and investment agreement that provided investors with a unique set of guarantees designed
to stimulate foreign direct investment and the movement of factories within the hemisphere, especially from the United
States to Canada and Mexico. Furthermore, no protections were contained in the core of the agreement to maintain
labor or environmental standards. As a result, NAFTA tilted the economic playing field in favor of investors, and against
workers and the environment, resulting in a hemispheric “race to the bottom” in wages and environmental quality in the
United States, Canada, and Mexico.

Most Americans are aware of the economic devastation that the "free-trade" pacts are doing to our country. Disloyal corporate heads are displacing hundreds of thousand American workers and replacing them with imported cheap foreign labor or exporting their good paying jobs to countries with pools of near-slave labor. Most of these Americans are then relegated to sub par jobs with their families in desperate straits. Some are even left homeless, living in their cars.

Many of America's brightest young people are bypassing college (men in particular) because of the massive number of high tech and science jobs being sent overseas or filled here with cheap foreign graduates. It is heartbreaking to think of what could have been for many Americans if not for the evaporating opportunities brought about by globalization.

The formally great United States is being deindustrialized by globalization. Since 1978, 14,449 US companies have been sold to foreign buyers for a total acquisition amount of $1,777,738,035,222. These American industries couldn't compete with the cheap goods protected by "free-trade" that were flooding US markets, and as a result they failed and were bought up by the foreign firms with their profits from their US sales. How many products stamped "made in America" have you seen lately in the stores? Ramifications include our cities being eroded by the mass exodus of their industrial base and our dependence on the rest of the world for our many needed goods, which has national security implications.

Growing trade deficits with Mexico and Canada after NAFTA took effect reduced employment in high-wage, traded-goods
industries, resulting in a substantial loss of wage income for such workers. This contributed to growing inequality
in wages and falling demand for workers without a post-secondary education, males in trade-related production, and
minorities. NAFTA has also hurt workers in Mexico too as evidenced by the increase in illegal immigrants trying to come to the USA since NAFTA was passed. Without major changes in NAFTA to address unequal levels of development and enforcement of labor
rights and environmental standards, continued integration of North American markets will threaten the prosperity of a
growing share of workers in the United States and throughout the hemisphere. Negotiation of additional NAFTA-style
agreements, such as the proposed Korean, Malaysian, and Thai Free Trade Agreements, will only worsen these problems.

China is a special case in point. Its unchecked flooding of our markets with cheaply made goods has created 26% of the US $725.8 billion trade deficit. The Economic Policy Institute reported that, between 1997 and 2006, the massive US/China trade imbalance took 2,166,000 US jobs, the bulk of which (1.8 million) were lost after China joined the WTO in 2001. Proponents of this affiliation wrongly claimed that China's trade surplus would decline and US employment would bounce back.

China subsequently bought up vast quantities of US government securities with the dollar profits from their trade imbalance. As a result, they have attained the ability to blackmail the US. A quick sell-off of these government securities would send interest rates spiraling up, possibly crash the dollar and spark a recession.

People wake up. We are continuing to lose our Sovereignty because of "free trade".
Conservatives for many years were Protectionists. Now its the Democratic party calling for Protectionism. If the Republicans don't wake up soon the Democrats will win in November based largely on their being for the average worker, and being for Nationalism instead of Globalism. I don't think the Republicans will win if they are tied to Free Trade and Globalism.
Conservatives and Republicans need to be the ones For Nationalism and Protectionism and the absolute loudest on the injustices of Outsourcing.
Otherwise it may be 8 long years of Hillary or Obama and that means more moral and social decay.
Jimbo