Just What We Don't Need - Another Free Trade Agreement

George Washington, protectionist, made it a point to wear an American-made suit to his first inauguration.

The father of our country understood that America has to protect its ability to make things important to Americans. Today that means things like steel. Brake drums. Airplane parts. Computer chips. Battleships. Safe toys. Food that doesn't kill us.

What America doesn't need right now is another so-called "free-trade agreement" that kills that ability.

Sadly, President Bush will soon sign the latest NAFTA-style trade deal with Peru, passed by the Senate on Tuesday. More deals - with Colombia, Panama and South Korea - are in the pipeline.

American workers don't want these deals. They've seen through the false promises that "free trade" will create more exports, better jobs and better wages. Instead, NAFTA, CAFTA and PNTR brought trade deficits, shuttered factories, poisoned toothpaste and lead toys.

Free traders like to say labor unions are backward-looking protectionists. They love to dust off the old myth that Sen. Reed Smoot and Rep. Willis Hawley caused the Great Depression by passing the protectionist Smoot-Hawley Act.

What free-traders never tell you is that Smoot-Hawley became law in 1930, eight months after the Great Depression started. They don't tell you that Franklin Roosevelt's "free trade agreements" with 14 countries didn't do anything to help the American economy.

There's a reason free-traders always end up shouting "protectionist." They don't want you to hear that giant sucking sound from south of the border.

We heard that sucking sound in Cleveland, Ohio, where the Mr. Coffee plant shut down and moved to Mexico, throwing 400 Teamsters out of work.

We heard it in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where the Circle D plant packed up and left, and in Long Island City, N.Y., where the Swingline Stapler plant no longer employs hundreds of our members.

Where did those factories go? To Mexico, where they now sit in the slums of their own making.

Those slums are filled with poor Mexican farmers, wiped out when U.S. agribusiness flooded Mexico with cheap, subsidized grain. Many Mexican farmers immigrated to the U.S. In the first year after NAFTA took effect, 80,000 people were arrested in Arizona alone for trying to enter the country illegally, a 53 percent increase over the previous year.

American workers were promised something different. They were promised that illegal immigration would subside. They were promised that America would get richer by helping Mexico grow into a strong trading partner.

Those promises never made any sense. This is a world where capital circles the globe in seconds and assembly lines are shipped across borders in days. Eliminating trade barriers between a developed country and an undeveloped country can't possibly result in the free-traders' fantasy, where each country concentrates on what it makes best in the most efficient way.

Of course, these deals aren't just about tearing down trade barriers.

NAFTA was more about protecting foreign investment and giving U.S. corporations access to cheap Mexican labor. NAFTA was negotiated by a self-serving political elite in Mexico that feared the country was drowning in debt and needed to keep attracting foreign investment.

Ordinary Mexicans didn't agree to the deal - just as ordinary Peruvians didn't agree to the latest version of NAFTA.

Ordinary Americans aren't too happy about it either. Anyone who aspires to the office that George Washington once held had best understand that.

Comments

[glitzqueen]

An important issue that seems not to have been raised here yet is that the nastiest provision in the Peru deal protects Citigroup as the largest shareholder in ProFuturo AFP, one of the private retirement account providers authorized to compete against the public social security system. The deal empowers foreign investors to demand compensation from the Peruvian government in UN and World Bank tribunals, if its widely reviled social security privatization program is ever reversed. Further, Citibank could seek an immense amount of money, because the right to provide the private accounts has no time limit under the privatization statute.

As an opponent, Rep. Mike Michaud (D-Maine) put it: “In addition to promoting offshoring US jobs, pushing down wages, displacing peasant farmers in impoverished trade partner nations and banning Buy America and anti-offshoring policies, these agreements frequently contain outrageous buried provisions that favor certain corporations. With the Oman FTA, it was landside port activities. With the Peru FTA, it’s financial service firms profiting from a privatized social security system.”

[H8FascistCons]

Wrap your brain around this America; Free trade is protectionism, it protects multinational corporations against approximately
one hundrid fifty million working Americans. You cannot, not have protectionism, it just depends on how it is going to be used, for the good of a few corporations or for the good of all Americans. We have seen the damage caused by the Fascist corporate application of protectionism in free trade, it has been a failure for the United States of America and for democracy, just look who is running our country now!! Please give this important issue some thought.....

[mmckinl]

" Free Trade" is a Hoax perpetrated on the American people. The idea behind this is to guarantee property and legal rights to corporations in foreign countries devastating the middle class in both countries.

" Free Trade" is part and parcel of the neoliiberal economics that defund and deny Public goods such as individual rights, workers rights, education, healthcare and pensions to fund Corporate Profits.

America has been sold down the river by governance by , for and of the plutocracy. Welcome to the third world America.

[cke]

NAFTA is about Canada and Mexico, right? It's not about China or India. As far as impact to the US goes, it's China & India that are the whole story. Railing for protected markets and the evils of NAFTA are completely missing the mark. We will be importing goods from those cheap countries. The US consumers demand it. The best we can hope for is agreements so we have a two-way street so that we can have fair access to their markets as well. And we just have to bet on US worker ingenuity in creating things the world finds valuable.

[therealredstateblues]

We must stop letting the neo con/neo libs frame all those wanting fair trade and smart trade as "protectionists" as well.

[FightingTheRight]

Sorry if this double post.

Henry Ford understood that if he priced his cars and paid wages that allowed his workers to purchase them, he would have a built in, loyal customer base.

I have noticed that as G.M.'s North American workforce shrinks, so does their share of sales in the U.S.

I am from a G.M. town and everyone around here use to have relatives working at G.M. Your relatives made a livig at G.M. and could get you a G.M. discount, so you bought G.M. products. That doesn't hold true anymore.

Once my relatives, who have retired from G.M. are no longer with us, my loyalty to G.M. goes with them.

[FightingTheRight]

Henry Ford understood that if he priced cars and paid wages that would allowed his employees to purchase them, he would have a built in loyal customer base.

I find it interesting , that as G.M.'s American workforce shrinks, so does their market share.

I'm from a G.M. town and most people in our area, at one time had family members who worked at G.M. Since they had relatives making their living working for G.M. they would buy G.M. cars.

[FightingTheRight]

NAFTA, CAFTA and PNTR have never really been about "free trade".

They have been a cover for promoting a "global workforce".

The people working in the call centers in India aren't calling people in low wage countries trying to convince them that they need credit card protection, a different cell phone carrier or internet carrier. The companies they work for are calling people in what are still considered high wage countries, to make their profits.

G.M. doesn't expect to sell the majority of the cars they build in Mexico and China in the countries where they are built.
You notice that no matter how low workers wages get, the price of cars never drops.

Just as "Global Warming" was miss named, and should have been referred to as a "Global Climate Change", free trade agreements should have been called "globalization of the workforce".

[CajunCountry]

Amen.

Now how to convince the elites who've made billions from these disastrous 'deals' that enough Kool-Aid is enough already.

These trade agreements are just more of the 'privatize gains and socialize the costs' Three Card Monte scam the DLC and Neo-libs have been conspired to foist onto the this country to the enormous detriment of their fellow citizens whom. naturally they never actually see or speak to, wrapped as they are in privilege and gated communities within the Beltway.

"While some number of workers will lose their jobs due to trade and others will be employed in export sectors, the main effect of trade on workers comes through their impact on wages. The effect of recent trade deals has been to put the 70 percent of the workforce without college degrees in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world. More highly educated workers, like doctors, lawyers, economists, and reporters are still largely protected from this sort of competition. The predicted effect of this pattern of trade is to lower the relative wages of less educated workers, a pattern that has been widely documented over the last quarter century."
--Dean Baker

[Nonamnesiac]

Excellent post Mr. Hoffa. Part of the problem though has been the support of pro-unbridled free trade Democrats at all levels by Labor. The globalists are bi-partisan and the DLC types, including the Clintons and Obama (and Edwards until this campaign) have basically treated Labor leaders better than the Republican treat them in return for mercilessly cutting jobs, allowing companies to do manufacturing work overseas and imposing minimal or no sanctions against employers who hire undocumented workers to do work that was formerly done by US workers at union scale with union benefits (not just work "Americans won't do").

I realize it's difficult, but Labor must stop supporting Democrats who make these unbridled free-trade agreements and refuse to pass stiff sanctions against employers to perform union work but say nice things about us while they cut our throats.

[jfoster]

So when are the Teamsters going to rise to the occassion and support John Edwards the only candidate who stands with American workers in opposition to these free trade agreements.

Both Clinton and Obama aspire to the office once held by George Washington and they have given the labor movement and all American workers the middle finger.

We have to stop the Bush/Clinton free trade carnival.

John Foster
GCC/IBT Local 4C

[factanonverba]

It doesn't work on both ends at least in the Latin American cases. FTAs have been an unmitigated disaster for every Latin economy to agree to one with the US. As Mr. Hoffa notes, FTAs permit a flooding of agricultural goods into economies where the rural sector remains the largest sector in terms of employment if not GDP. The effect is devastating throwing people off the land into non-existent or at best scarce manufacturing jobs.
If illegal immigration has grown by a four fold factor since 1992, you can thank NAFTA which destroyed Mexico's corn production. The only winners are the already rich businesses like Cargill, ADM, Monsanto in the US and textile producers in Latin America.
I was once a committed neo-liberal but in the last five years, I've done a 180-degree turn. For Latin America to break its cycle of dependent development, protection of its agricultural sector is paramount.

[drkazmd65]

The greatest hoax that Satan ever managed was convincing 'us' that he didn't exist.

And even though I am a devout Agnostic (if that is possible) the principle is the same.

'We' were sold a bill of goods with NAFTA and CAFTA and the other 'aftas' - a bill of goods that Ross Perot warned us about back in 1991-1992. Too bad we didn't listen. That big-eared little millionare from TX was telling us all the truth.

And the biggest trick pulled on us,... the Republicans and 'moderate' Democrats convinced
us' to vote for them anyway. This despite the fact that they were pulling the rug out from under us.

[therealredstateblues]

Right on Mr Hoffa!

We need to start calling a spade a spade and describing what these trade agreements really are

Exploit cheap labor trade, suppress US workers wages trade, avoid regulation trade, boost profits by cutting corners on safety and quality trade.

Did anyone ever really believe that people in third world countries would be buying US goods and services in any meaningful way?

Old Perot's "sucking sound" doesn't seem so nutty anymore does it

[Desiderata]

Any union that does not support John Edwards cannot claim to be against these NAFTA deals that have gutted manufacturing jobs in this country.