Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog,
Back in the early 1990s, the North American Free Trade Agreement was
one of the hottest political issues in the country. When he was running
for president
in 1992, Bill Clinton promised that NAFTA would
result in an increase in the number of high quality jobs for Americans
that it would reduce illegal immigration. Ross Perot warned that just the opposite would happen. He warned that if NAFTA was implemented there would be a "
giant sucking sound"
as thousands of businesses and millions of jobs left this country.
Most Americans chose to believe Bill Clinton. Well, it is 20 years
later and it turns out that Perot was right and Clinton was dead wrong.
But
now history is repeating itself, and most Americans don't even realize that it is happening.
As you will read about at the end of this article, Barack Obama has
been negotiating a secret trade treaty that is being called "NAFTA on
steroids", and if Congress adopts it we could lose millions more good
paying jobs.
It amazes me how the American people can fall for the same lies over and over again. The lies that
serial liar
Barack Obama is telling about "free trade" and the globalization of the
economy are the same lies that Bill Clinton was telling back in the
early 1990s. The following is an excerpt from a
recent interview with Paul Craig Roberts...
I
remember in the 90′s when former Presidential candidate Ross Perot
emphatically stated that NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement)
would create a giant “sucking sound” of jobs being extracted away from
the U.S. He did not win the election, and NAFTA was instituted on Jan.
1, 1994. Now, 20 years later, we see the result of all the jobs that
have been “sucked away” to other countries.
According to an article by the Economic Policy Institute on 1/3/14:
“Clinton and his collaborators promised that the deal would bring
“good-paying American jobs,” a rising trade surplus with Mexico, and a
dramatic reduction in illegal immigration. Considering that thousands of
kids are pouring over the border as we speak, well, how’d that work out
for us?
Many Americans like to remember Bill Clinton as a "great president"
for some reason. Well, it turns out that he was completely and totally
wrong about NAFTA. The following are 20 facts that show how NAFTA is
destroying the economy...
#1 More than 845,000 American workers
have been officially certified for Trade Adjustment Assistance because they lost their jobs due to imports from Mexico or Canada or because their factories were relocated to those nations.
#2 Overall, it is estimated that NAFTA has cost us
well over a million jobs.
#3 U.S. manufacturers pay Mexican workers
just a little over a dollar an hour to do jobs that American workers used to do.
#4 The number of illegal immigrants living in the United States
has more than doubled since the implementation of NAFTA.
#5 In the year before NAFTA, the U.S. had a trade
surplus with Mexico and the trade deficit with Canada was only 29.6
billion dollars. Last year, the U.S. had a combined trade deficit with
Mexico and Canada of
177 billion dollars.
#6 It has been estimated that the U.S. economy loses
approximately 9,000 jobs for every 1 billion dollars of goods that are imported from overseas.
#7 One professor has estimated that cutting the total U.S. trade deficit in half would create
5 million more jobs in the United States.
#8 Since the auto industry bailout, approximately
70 percent of all GM vehicles have been built outside the United States. In fact, many of them are now being built in Mexico.
#9 NAFTA hasn't worked out very well for Mexico either. Since 1994, the average yearly rate of economic growth in Mexico
has been less than one percent.
#10 The exporting of massive amounts of government-subsidized U.S. corn down into Mexico
has destroyed more than a million Mexican jobs and has helped fuel the continual rise in the number of illegal immigrants coming north.
#11 Someone making minimum wage in Mexico today can buy
38 percent fewer consumer goods than the day before NAFTA went into effect.
#12 Overall, the United States has lost a total of
more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001.
#13 Back in the 1980s, more than 20 percent of the jobs in the United States were manufacturing jobs. Today, only
about 9 percent of the jobs in the United States are manufacturing jobs.
#14 We have fewer Americans working in manufacturing today
than we did in 1950 even though our population has more than doubled since then.
#15 Back in 1950,
more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs. Today,
only 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.
#16 As I wrote about
recently,
one out of every six men in their prime working years (25 to 54) do not have a job at this point.
#17 Because we have shipped millions of jobs
overseas, the competition for the jobs that remain has become extremely
intense and this has put downward pressure on wages. Right now, half
the country makes
$27,520 a year or less from their jobs.
#18 When adults cannot get decent jobs, it is often children that suffer the most. It is hard to believe, but
more than one out of every five children in the United States is living in poverty in 2014.
#19 In 1994,
only 27 million Americans were on food stamps. Today, more than 46 million Americans are on food stamps.
#20 According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University,
40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades if current trends continue.
For much more on this, please watch
the video by Charlie LeDuff posted below. It is well worth a few minutes of your time..
So if NAFTA is so bad for American workers, then why don't our politicians just repeal it?
Well, unfortunately most of them are not willing to do this because
it is part of a larger agenda. For decades, politicians from both major
political parties have been working to slowly integrate North America.
The eventual goal is to turn North America into another version of the
European Union.
Just check out what former general and CIA chief David Petraeus
had to say about this...
“After America comes North America,” Petraeus said
confidently in answering the question about what comes after the United
States, the theme of the panel discussion. “Are we on the threshold of
the North American decade, question mark? I threw that away — threw away
the question mark — and boldly proclaimed the coming North American
decade, says the title now.” He also boasted about how the three
economies have been put “together” over the last 20 years as part of
the “implementation” of the North American Free Trade Act.
The “highly integrated” forces of Canada, the United States, and
Mexico, Petraeus continued, will become the world’s powerhouse for
energy and science. “There are four revolutions that are ongoing at
various levels in each of the countries but foremost in the United
States,” said the former CIA chief, who now serves as chairman of the
KKR Global Institute. “The energy revolution is the first of those,
which has created the biggest change in geopolitics since the rise of
China since 1978.” The other “revolutions” include IT, manufacturing,
and life sciences, which, “as highly integrated as they are, allow you
to argue that after America comes North America,” he added.
When you hear our politicians talk about "free trade", what they are
really talking about is integrating us even further into the emerging
one world economic system. And over the past couple of years, Barack
Obama
has been negotiating a secret treaty
which would send the deindustrialization of America into overdrive.
The formal name of this secret agreement is "the Trans-Pacific
Partnership", and it would ultimately result in millions more good jobs
being sent to the other side of the planet where it is legal to pay
slave labor wages. The following is a description of this insidious
treaty
from one of my previous articles...
Did
you know that the Obama administration is negotiating a super secret
"trade agreement" that is so sensitive that he isn't even allowing
members of Congress to see it? The Trans-Pacific Partnership is being
called the "NAFTA of the Pacific" and "NAFTA on steroids", but the truth
is that it is so much more than just a trade agreement. This treaty
has 29 chapters, but only 5 of them have to do with trade. Most
Americans don't realize this, but this treaty will fundamentally change
our laws regarding Internet freedom, health care, the trading of
derivatives, copyright issues, food safety, environmental standards,
civil liberties and so much more. It will also merge the United States
far more deeply into the emerging one world economic system. Initially,
twelve nations will be a party to this treaty including the United
States, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New
Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. Together, those nations represent
approximately 40 percent of global GDP. It is hoped
that additional nations such as the Philippines, Thailand and Colombia
will join the treaty later on.
Unfortunately, most Americans are as uneducated about these issues as they were back in 1994.
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