Thread: The Consequences of Economic Treason

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Joe Murray: The Right Time
The Consequences Of Economic Treason
By: Joe Murray, The Bulletin
02/26/2008

While the sun is setting on the great manufacturing economies of Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and the other states that once served as the poster boys of American manufacturing and presumptive Republican nominee John McCain is telling U.S. workers in those rust-covered states their jobs are not coming back, America is standing at a crossroads with her pockets empty and her thumb extended.

Recent numbers from the Commerce Department show the U.S. juggling a $711 billion trade deficit, 3 million manufacturing jobs lost since 2001 and an import/export balance sheet of a third world nation. America has ceased being the world's largest creditor and is now its largest debtor. All thanks to free trade.

In the decades since our economic punch has been spiked with a free trade elixir, what benefit has America enjoyed? Twenty-dollar sneakers and toxic toys. The cost, however, has been much greater.

While the normal instinct would be to point to China as exhibit A in the case against free trade - Beijing constitutes close to half of the $500 billion U.S. trade deficit in goods in 2007 (the largest ever recorded between two nations) - there is a better example much closer to home.

Ever since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was passed in 1993, America has run a string of trade deficits with Mexico totaling in excess of $500 billion. In the years before NAFTA? Trade surpluses.

Pushing aside the fact that NAFTA rolled out the red carpet for drug smuggling, human trafficking and Mexican trucks, the greatest cost of NAFTA is the transfer of U.S. manufacturing might south of the border.

Detroit, once the heartbeat of American manufacturing, is barely surviving on life support, and the family is ready to the sign the order pulling the plug. In 2006 the U.S. exported a grand total of 600,000 automobiles to the world, an anemic number that signals an economy in decline.

As for Mexico, she exported 900,000 automobiles to the U.S. alone in 2006. It does not take a Harvard educated economist to figure out the source of Mexico City's booming auto industry.

"Free trade results in giving our money, manufactures and our markets to other nations," quipped William McKinley in 1892. More than a century later, Mr. McKinley's rhetoric is now reality.

America's willingness to sacrifice manufacturing for cheap goods has resulted in the retransformation of the Mexican economy. While media outlets still focus on the bleeding border and the blossoming drug industry, the Mexican economy is witnessing record setting growth in manufactures, the key to national power.

Mexico's inflation rate is now lower than America's. Last year 950,000 Mexican jobs were created and Mexico's economy grew 3.3 percent, slightly faster than predicted. Foreign investment rose 21 percent to $23.2 billion, a record setting number, and half of that investment was geared toward Mexican manufactures.

The economic developments have not been lost on Mexico's leaders, as Economy Secretary Eduardo Sojo gleefully told reporters the investment signaled "a supply of well-paid jobs, and that there is trust in the administration of President Felipe Calderon." Those "well-paid jobs," the very ones Mr. McCain writes off, once belonged to Americans.

And can it really be said there is trust in Mr. Calderon's government, or are investors flocking to an industrial oasis where wages are low, environmental concerns are nonexistent, and the government is not known for cracking down on corruption?

The fact remains that free trade has pilfered U.S. manufacturing, effectively replacing Rosie the Riveter with Ronald McDonald, and has done nothing to offset the plight of the Mexican worker and release some of the pressure on the border.

Over 100 million Mexicans still live in poverty, while millions more are underemployed. The exodus to America continues as illegal immigrants continue to pour across the border to feed at America's benefit trough. In return these folks turn around and send $23 billion back to the mother country in remittances.

In this deal, America gets it both coming and going as she has lost her manufacturing base and has inherited the poor Mexico exports. And while Mexico continues to grow, America continues to struggle.

Free trade is anything but free. The Achilles' heel in this utopian ideology is that many of its adherents cannot see that exporting production is not free. Where exporting goods adds to America's GDP, thus improving her situation, sending factories from Michigan to Mexico takes away from America's GDP and adds to Mexico's.

Somewhere along the way America's economic elite divorced itself from the wisdom of founders in order to enter into an unholy matrimony with an ideological mistress who stands to undo centuries of tradition, values and economic understanding. The end result: the fleecing of the American economy so warned by Mr. McKinley.

Left facing a recession, bracing for a mortgage meltdown and battling a falling dollar, America is setting herself up to become the Mexico of mañana. This Wilsonian waltz cannot last forever and if those in Washington don't stop this dance with its free trade devil, the music will end and the scorching will begin.

Joe Murray can be reached at jmurray@thebulletin.us.

Just think... If we could talk our Congressmen into letting Canada & Mexico know, THAT WE NO LONGER WISH TO COMPLY W/NAFTA, we could secure our borders, regardless of what Mexico says, and start rebuilding our own country. Say take our jobs back our government gave away for FREE, w/their so called FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS.

And if we can't talk them into that, let Mexico know that we will be trading our government's representatives FOR FREE, and will drop them off out of Air Force-1 from 37,000'.

Of coarse, if we want some kind of compensation or justice for all they've done for US, maybe we should make sure their parachutes don't work before take off ....

To A Better Day America !

______________________________

Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death ~

Just think... If we could talk our Congressmen into letting Canada & Mexico know, THAT WE NO LONGER WISH TO COMPLY W/NAFTA, we could secure our borders, regardless of what Mexico says, and start rebuilding our own country. Say take our jobs back our government gave away for FREE, w/their so called FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS.

And if we can't talk them into that, let Mexico know that we will be trading our government's representatives FOR FREE, and will drop them off out of Air Force-1 from 37,000'.

Great ideas patrickhenryjr!