NAFTA

The days of closed and "exclusive" nationalistic manufacturing and trade are a thing of a past. The notion that INTERSTATE commerce will provide the so-called "sustained economic expansion" that unfettered and unregulated capitalism ---and the "consumption for consumption's sake--- purports is possible is simply untenable - Only INTERNATIONAL commerce offers the possibility of some reasonable prospects of "long-term and sustained" economic growth for this and other industrialized nations. It has been that "buy 'stuff' " just for the sake of keeping-up with what the person next to you have mentality that has put millions of people in debt and crashed most of the economies in the industrialized world back in 2007 and that we are still trying to recover from today. The problem is not the co-called "major trade deal[s]" that people want to complain about - It is some of the provisions in those trade deals ---intentionally built-in by those forces wanting to destroy the collective bargaining process and an end-run to get around environmental regulations in this Nation--- that are the real problem.

All you have to do is go back and read the legislative debates that took place in Congress and the various State legislatures to see that the biggest boosters of the so-called "free trade" agreements are ---and always have been--- the Chamber of Commerce and their Republican allies in Congress and the legislatures of "the 'several States' " and the Corporations that have gotten rich as a result of them and this has been the case since the dawn of the industrial revolution. The problem in not "free trade" itself. The problem is the provisions in those deals ---which can be changed or modified--- that were intentionally placed in those trade agreements for nefarious reasons. We cannot say that we were not warned about the consequences of these "free trade" agreements either. When the "North American Free Trade Agreement" (NAFTA) was first proposed, the National Chamber of Commerce and the various corporations were busy falling all over themselves telling the Nation how it would benefit us because it would open up "emerging markets" where our products could be sold and many in this Nation believed that but did not pay attention to the fine print and the footnotes in that agreement.

The large corporations in this Nation did not start closing factories in this Nation and moving them to China and India and Mexico, et alia, until these trade agreements came along and that was not "accident" at all. There is a reason that Donald Trump manufactures all of his products overseas. The "cheaper labor costs' " bullshit that corporations always parrot when they talk about the reasons for moving overseas? Nothing more than code-speak for "a measure to break the Labor Unions". And those Labor Unions told that too. We cannot say we did not know this was coming - We were warned. My vote is with Hillary Clinton in 2016.