First his glorious Amendment, which within the House Healthcare Bill would make abortion practically impossible in America. Then Toyoto. And now this:
U.S. Congressman Bart Stupak (D-Menominee) and Congressmen Gene Taylor (D-MS), Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and Walter Jones (R-NC) authored and introduced legislation to repeal the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and save American manufacturing jobs.
The four senior members of the U.S. House of Representatives represent regions of the country hit hard by NAFTA and are spearheading the repeal efforts.
They have been joined by 23 of their colleagues in the House who have co-sponsored the legislation.
“I opposed NAFTA in 1993 because it was not in the best interest of Michigan workers,” Stupak said. “I remain opposed to NAFTA because it continues to hurt the U.S. economy and put Americans out of work. I am pleased to join my colleagues to propose a repeal of this failed trade policy. NAFTA has failed to deliver the benefits that were promised and has cost Michigan hundreds of thousands of good manufacturing jobs.”
According to the Economic Policy Institute, 78 percent of the net job losses under NAFTA were high-paying manufacturing jobs.
Since 1993, when NAFTA was passed, nearly five million manufacturing jobs have been lost.
This is in stark contrast to the inaccurate predictions economists made claiming that the United States would run a trade surplus with Mexico of $7 billion to $9 billion within two years and see a net creation of 170,000 jobs in the U.S. economy.
Especially damaging to Michigan, the trade deficit with NAFTA countries can be attributed to the automotive industry.
In 1993, the U.S. deficits in automotive goods were $3.6 billion with Mexico and $9.5 billion with Canada.
By 2000, those automotive deficits had grown to $24 billion with Mexico and $19.3 billion with Canada.
“With Michigan unemployment at 14.5 percent and the national unemployment rate at 9.7 percent, it is time to repeal the trade agreements that have shrunk our domestic manufacturing base,” Stupak said. “NAFTA is clearly an unsustainable policy that has shipped far too many jobs across the border. It is time to say enough is enough and repeal NAFTA.”
And no, opposition to NAFTA is not anti-Canadian. Quite the reverse, in fact. It was truly hilarious, when the Buy American debate was on, to see poor Paxman unable to cope with a union leader who described himself as "a Canadian living in Canada" and who fully supported Buy American, only regretting that the Canadian Parliament had not had the courage to enact Buy Canadian.
Likewise, the impending Asia-Pacific Agreement is as much a threat to Australian and New Zealand (among other) jobs as to American ones, and as much a threat to Australian and New Zealand (among other) sovereignty and culture as NAFTA has proved to be to Canadian sovereignty and culture. Yes, as much as that.
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Yes, and NAFTA hurt Mexico too. American politicians campaigning in favor of NAFTA argued that it would promote development in Mexico, thus stemming the tide of illegal immigration into the United States. What actually happened was that small Mexican farmers were ruined by powerful American agricultural corporations, and consequently, the stream of immigration into the U.S. from Mexico turned into a flood.
ReplyDeleteAfter NAFTA, giant American agribusinesses dumped cheap (often government-subsidized) agricultural products onto the Mexican market, ruining the small Mexican farmers who could not possibly compete. The ruined Mexican farmers and their families either went into the low-wage maquiladora factories or crossed the border into the U.S. looking for work.
Additionally, the American public did not benefit from this state of affairs either.
First, these big agricultural companies are not the friends of small family farmers. They have been instrumental in the decline of family farming in the United States, all the while soaking up government subsidies that were originally created during the Great Depression to help out struggling small farmers. The result is that, because of the rise of big agribusiness, American agriculture nowadays looks more like Soviet-style collective farming than the traditional American model of small, independent family farms or farm cooperatives.
Second, American taxpayers and consumers also suffer because, in addition to paying large subsidies to Big Agriculture, agricultural imports to the U.S. face an average 18 percent tariff, much higher than the average 5 percent tariff on other imports. So the American public must suffer higher taxes and prices to protect these giant agricultural companies that hide behind all sorts of nonsense rhetoric about "protecting family farmers."
Finally, American workers had to suffer increased competition from cheap Mexican immigrant labor, helping to further drive down wages in the U.S. in a pernicious race to the bottom.
Unless one is rich, I can't see how anyone can keep supporting the neoliberal consensus, knowing all the misery it has caused and continues to cause.