[BRIGADE] PJB: The Second Battle of NAFTA
Published: Tue, 03/04/08
"The trade issue is back, big-time. For to blue-collar workers in
industrial states like Ohio, NAFTA is a code word for betrayal -- a
sellout of them and their families to CEOs panting to move
production out of the United States to cheap-labor countries like
Mexico and China..."
Brigade, to help get GOP friends and coworkers up to speed on what
NAFTA is really all about search our website. Here's a snip of one
Pat wrote back in November 1993 [just before Newt Gingrich helped
Bill Clinton ram it through]:
America First, NAFTA Never
"...Why does the Populist Right abhor NAFTA? Because NAFTA epitomizes
all that repels us in the modern state. Though advertised as "free
trade," it is anti-freedom, 1,200 pages of rules, regulations,
laws, fines, commissions-plus side agreements-setting up no fewer
than 49 new bureaucracies.
Henry Kissinger is right: NAFTA is not really a trade treaty at
all, but the architecture of the New World Order. Like Maastricht,
it is part of a skeletal structure for world government. At its
root is an abiding faith in the superior wisdom of a global
managerial class - our would-be Lords of the Universe..."
Read more here: http://buchanan.org/blog/?p=153
See Pat's current column below and please forward this on to all --
across the USA.
For the Cause, Linda
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The Second Battle of NAFTA
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
If Canada and Mexico do not renegotiate NAFTA, said Hillary Clinton
in the Cleveland debate, she would "opt out" of the trade treaty
that was the legislative altarpiece of Bill Clinton's presidency.
Barack agreed. NAFTA is renegotiated, or NAFTA is gone.
Barack went further. He has denounced "open trucking," the feature
of NAFTA whereby Mexican trucks are to be free to roam the United
States and compete with the Teamsters of Jim Hoffa's union, which
just endorsed him.
The trade issue is back, big-time. For to blue-collar workers in
industrial states like Ohio, NAFTA is a code word for betrayal -- a
sellout of them and their families to CEOs panting to move
production out of the United States to cheap-labor countries like
Mexico and China.
Our workers' instincts are backed up by stats. In 2007, the U.S.
trade deficit with Mexico soared 16 percent to $73 billion, a
record. Mexico now ships more cars to us now than we ship to the
world. And where did Mexico get an auto industry?
The U.S. trade deficit with China shot up 10 percent to $256
billion, the largest trade deficit ever between any two countries.
Charles MacMillion of MBG Services has run the numbers.
In manufactures, the United States had a trade deficit of $499
billion in 2007, a slight improvement over the $526 billion record
in 2006. Yet that trade deficit in manufactured goods with the
world is more than twice as large as our $224 billion bill for
OPEC's oil.
Under Bush, the U.S. trade deficit has doubled. Three million
manufacturing jobs have vanished. And America has begun to run a
trade deficit in advanced technology goods of more than $50 billion.
Our trade deficit in advanced technology goods with China is $67
billion, eight times what it is with Japan.
"Free trade is essential to the creation of high-paying quality
jobs," said Bush on Thursday. But if exports create jobs (and they
do), imports displace them. And if we import half a trillion
dollars more in manufactures than we export, is not Bush trade
policy literally slaughtering industrial jobs?
Is there not a correlation between $4.3 trillion in trade deficits
under Bush, the 3 million manufacturing jobs lost under Bush, the
fall of the dollar by 50 percent against the euro under Bush and
the resurgence of inflation, signaled by a quadrupling of the price
of gold, under Bush?
Neither Hillary nor Obama has laid out a new trade-and-tax policy
to deal with the de-industrialization of America and our deepening
dependency on foreign technology, manufactures and the loans to pay
for them. But at least they are listening to the country.
John McCain seems blind and deaf to the crisis. In Michigan, he
informed autoworkers their "jobs are not coming back" and explained
his philosophy: "I'm a student of history. Every time the United
States has become protectionist ... we've paid a very heavy price."
This is ahistorical nonsense. From 1860 to 1913, the United States
was the most protectionist nation on earth and produced the most
awesome growth of any nation in history. In 1860, the U.S. economy
was half of Britain's; in 1913, more than twice Britain's.
In 1920, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge won a landslide, cut
income taxes from Wilson's 69 percent to 25 percent and doubled
tariffs. America went on a tear. When Coolidge went home in 1929,
the United States was producing 42 percent of the world's
manufactured goods.
Who were America's protectionists?
Alexander Hamilton and James Madison moved the Tariff Act of 1789
through Congress. Aided by Henry Clay, John Calhoun, Thomas
Jefferson and John Adams, President Madison enacted the Tariff of
1816 to protect U.S. infant industries from British dumping.
Abraham Lincoln used Morrill Tariff revenue to fight the Civil War.
The 11 GOP presidents who followed, from 1865 to 1929, all
protectionists, made America the greatest industrial power in
history, with a standard of living never before seen. Mocking
protectionism, McCain is repudiating Republican history and all its
achievements up to the era of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon.
America rose to power behind a Republican tariff wall. What has
free trade wrought? Lost sovereignty. A sinking dollar. A hollowing
out of U.S. manufacturing. Stagnant wages. Wives forced into the
labor market to maintain the family income. Mass indebtedness to
foreign nations, and a deepening dependency on foreign goods and
borrowings to pay for them. We have sacrificed our country on the
altar of this Moloch, the mythical Global Economy.
It took Rip Van Republican 20 years to wake up to the disaster of
open borders and five years to realize the folly of igniting wars
in which no vital interest was at risk. How long before the GOP
wakes up to the reality that globalism is not conservatism, never
was, but is a pillar of Wilsonian liberalism, in whose vineyards
our faux conservatives now daily labor.
SOURCE: http://buchanan.org/blog/?p=958
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