E-Balla wrote:ToastinKP wrote:E-Balla wrote:He might also want to stop acting like Trump when it comes to foreign policy. Voting against a trade agreement with Panama a country we spoonfed to become healthy economically? Not a good look.
Trade agreements do not favor the American people and are signed into law to help corporations and their bottom line. Why do you think the middle class is shrinking and more and people are living in poverty or on the edge of falling into poverty???? Bill Clinton was the POTUS who ushered in the Third way, Republican lite party which is what the Democratic party is now. Hillary Clinton will do more of the same while the American people will continue to suffer. IMO Fascism be it in form of boots or bottom lines is still fascism.....
Free trade agreements actually do help as they add demand and increase employment. Prior to NAFTA the unemployment rate was around 7% and since (excluding the crash of 07-12) its been around 5%.
After 20 Years, NAFTA Leaves Mexico’s Economy in Ruins
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/01/10/after-20-years-nafta-leaves-mexicos-economy-ruinsThe North American Free Trade Agreement (NATFA) was the door through which American workers were shoved into the neoliberal global labor market.
By establishing the principle that U.S. corporations could relocate production elsewhere and sell back into the United States, NAFTA undercut the bargaining power of American workers, which had driven the expansion of the middle class since the end of World War II. The result has been 20 years of stagnant wages and the upward redistribution of income, wealth and political power.
NAFTA affected U.S. workers in four principal ways. First, it caused the loss of some 700,000 jobs as production moved to Mexico. Most of these losses came in California, Texas, Michigan, and other states where manufacturing is concentrated. To be sure, there were some job gains along the border in service and retail sectors resulting from increased trucking activity, but these gains are small in relation to the loses, and are in lower paying occupations. The vast majority of workers who lost jobs from NAFTA suffered a permanent loss of income.
Second, NAFTA strengthened the ability of U.S. employers to force workers to accept lower wages and benefits. As soon as NAFTA became law, corporate managers began telling their workers that their companies intended to move to Mexico unless the workers lowered the cost of their labor. In the midst of collective bargaining negotiations with unions, some companies would even start loading machinery into trucks that they said were bound for Mexico. The same threats were used to fight union organizing efforts. The message was: “If you vote in a union, we will move south of the border.” With NAFTA, corporations also could more easily blackmail local governments into giving them tax reductions and other subsidies.
Third, the destructive effect of NAFTA on the Mexican agricultural and small business sectors dislocated several million Mexican workers and their families, and was a major cause in the dramatic increase in undocumented workers flowing into the U.S. labor market. This put further downward pressure on U.S. wages, especially in the already lower paying market for less skilled labor.
Fourth, and ultimately most important, NAFTA was the template for rules of the emerging global economy, in which the benefits would flow to capital and the costs to labor. The U.S. governing class—in alliance with the financial elites of its trading partners—applied NAFTA’s principles to the World Trade Organization, to the policies of the World Bank and IMF, and to the deal under which employers of China’s huge supply of low-wage workers were allowed access to U.S. markets in exchange for allowing American multinational corporations the right to invest there.
http://www.epi.org/blog/naftas-impact-workers/NAFTA at 20: One Million U.S. Jobs Lost, Higher Income Inequality
My New Year’s celebrations this year were haunted by memories of January 1, 1994 — the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect. I remember crying that day, thinking about the proud men and women in union halls across America, the Mexican campesinos and the inspiring Canadian activists I had met during the fight against NAFTA, and hoping desperately that our dire predictions would be proved wrong.
They were not. In short order, the damage started. And, we started to document it.
For NAFTA’s unhappy 20th anniversary, Public Citizen has published a report that details the wreckage. Not only did promises made by NAFTA’s proponents not materialize, but many results are exactly the opposite.
Such outcomes include a staggering $181 billion U.S. trade deficit with NAFTA partners Mexico and Canada and the related loss of 1 million net U.S. jobs under NAFTA, growing income inequality, displacement of more than one million Mexican campesino farmers and a doubling of desperate immigration from Mexico, and more than $360 million paid to corporations after “investor-state” tribunal attacks on, and rollbacks of, domestic public interest policies.
The study makes for a blood-boiling read. For instance, we track the specific promises made by U.S. corporations like GE, Chrysler and Caterpillar to create specific numbers of American jobs if NAFTA was approved, and reveal government data showing that instead, they fired U.S. workers and moved operations to Mexico.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lori-wallach/nafta-at-20-one-million-u_b_4550207.htmlCorporatism/fascism
Enough is enough!!!! 
