Thread: Heritage Foundation Drafted NAFTA, President Trump Can Scrap It

HERITAGE FOUNDATION DRAFTED NAFTA, PRESIDENT TRUMP CAN SCRAP IT



By Kelleigh Nelson

December 5, 2016


In 1992, President 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 would leave this country. Most Americans chose to believe Bill Clinton. Well, it is 24 years later and it turns out that Perot was right and Clinton was dead wrong.


United Technologies (Carrier) is staying in Indiana, all because Mr. Trump made it beneficial for them to stay! He used the direct approach and went right to the head of Carrier and asked what they needed to remain in America.



Our newly elected president has stated time and again that NAFTA was the cause for American jobs being decimated. The North American Free Trade Agreement has done far more than destroy over 30% of our manufacturing. Our economy (jobs), our healthcare, and academic education have all suffered. William F. Jasper, summarized what NAFTA was really about: “The planet is quietly being divided up into regional blocs ruled by an unelected and unaccountable cabal.”


NAFTA is seen by globalists here as a step toward a North American Union (NAU). Robert Pastor, professor of international relations at American University, and a strong supporter of NAFTA’s ultimate goals, wrote in Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the globalist CFR, “NAFTA was merely the first draft of an economic Constitution for North America.”


Big Business, Big Finance, Big Media, ex-presidents, and former secretaries of state all supported the deal. Murray Rothbard was right when he said, “The fight was about foreign policy, about the globalist policy that the United States has been pursuing since Woodrow Wilson, and certainly since World War II. It was about the Establishment-Keynesian dream of a New World Order. NAFTA was a vital step down the road to that order.”


Our President-elect has promised to do something about it, and the best thing he could do is to scrap NAFTA in its entirety! Chapter 22 of NAFTA permits each chief executive of the three members of NAFTA (the United States, Canada, and Mexico) to exit the deal, simply by giving six months' written notice. Trump should do it the very first day in office!



Scott Miller of the Center for Strategic and International Studies admitted that Trump has the power to take the United States out of NAFTA, on his own, without any approval by Congress: “Congress has delegated authority [on trade] to the president over the last 100 years.”


Let’s hope Trump has the courage and fortitude to save us from this horrid trade deal!


Who started these trade deals anyway?


Heritage Foundation and NAFTA


The 1993 Annual Report of the Heritage Foundation of Washington, D.C., dedicated to their twentieth-year celebration, stated the following:


The idea of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) originated with Heritage Fellow Richard Allen and has long been advocated by Heritage policy analysts.... The idea of creating a North American free trade zone was first proposed by Heritage Distinguished Fellow Richard Allen in the late 1970s, refined by then Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, and further developed in a major 1986 Heritage Foundation study.


Please note that Richard V. Allen is a member of both the rightwing Council for National Policy, and the globalist Council on Foreign Relations.



Former Heritage President, Ed Fuelner


In Lee Edwards’ 2013 book,Leading the Way: The Story of Ed Feulner and the Heritage Foundation, on page 233 Edwards states,


"Heritage played a crucial role in the debate on NAFTA, signed by President George H.W. Bush, Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney on December 17, 1992. Consistent with its belief in free trade and with Ed Feulner personally involved, the foundation supported NAFTA from beginning to end; Heritage's support came naturally inasmuch as the idea of such an agreement had first been broached by Richard Allen, Ed Feulner's long-time colleague, before Reagan was elected president. Ed Feulner invariably describes the passage of NAFTA as one of Heritage's most important 'scalps' or victories."


“One of Heritage’s most influential papers was a state-by-state survey compiled by analyst Doug Seay. The survey showed that forty-two governors, Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative, strongly favored the agreement because it would create thousands of new jobs and improve the economy of their states.”


They were wrong, and they knew it.


Jobs, Living Standards, and the Economy


NAFTA was the door through which American workers were shoved into the neoliberal globalist 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



Despite the pro-Trade rhetoric of Heritage and our politicians, the central goal of NAFTA was not “expanding trade.” After all, the U.S., Mexico, and Canada had been trading goods and services with each other for centuries. NAFTA’s central purpose was to free American corporations from U.S. laws protecting workers and the environment. Moreover, it paved the way for the rest of the neoliberal agenda in the US—the privatization of public services, the regulation of finance, and the destruction of the independent trade union movement.




The inevitable result was to undercut workers’ living standards all across North America. First, it caused the loss of some 700,000 jobs as production moved to Mexico.


Second, NAFTA strengthened the ability of U.S. employers to force workers to accept lower wages and benefits.


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 illegal alien 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. In other words, the corporations got rich, and the workers got shafted. Thus, NAFTA is both symbol and substance of the global “race to the bottom.”


Talk about the American worker getting royally screwed! I remember listening to talk radio at the time, and Chuck Harder worked endlessly to inform the American people of the imminent dangers of NAFTA.


NAFTA and American Health Care


The dramatic increase in illegal aliens, caused by NAFTA, has put such a strain on hospital emergency rooms on our southern border and in California, that many of them have closed.


The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA)is an act passed by Congress in 1986 as part of the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA). It requires hospital Emergency Departments that accept payments from Medicare to provide an appropriate medical screening examination to individuals seeking treatment for a medical condition, regardless of citizenship, legal status, or ability to pay. There are no reimbursement provisions. Participating hospitals may not transfer or discharge patients needing emergency treatment except with the informed consent or stabilization of the patient or when their condition requires transfer to a hospital better equipped to administer the treatment.



The good side is that patients with emergency conditions are being taken care of; they must have an evaluation exam, and they have to be stabilized. The negative side is that EMTALA is the largest unfunded mandate [on providers] that the government has ever instituted. Congress, through Medicare, gave $1 billion of our tax dollars to help these Medicare hospitals, but that has now expired.


Who is picking up these costs? Every American taxpayer — not to mention medical facilities and insurance companies who turn around and raise their rates for everyone else. The Center for Immigration Studies estimates that the current cost of treating uninsured immigrants who entered this country illegally at all levels of government to be $4.3 billion a year, primarily at emergency rooms and free clinics. This doesn't take into account the billions being absorbed by in-patient care delivered by hospitals.


In March of 2016, Newsmax claimed there are 61 million illegal aliens in America, and Breitbart mentioned 30 million in August of 2015. Whatever the case, we know that for 20 years the media has said 11-12 million illegals are in America, and it is far more.


NAFTA and American Education


Illegal aliens cost America’s states over $761 million per year in our school systems, and six chapters of NAFTA have a direct impact on the public education system.


Under NAFTA, education in all three countries was to be privatized.
Privatization is the transfer of a government organization to a private entity.


The rise of charters is the prime example, touted by both the left and right. The privatization effect of charters goes much further, both for-profit, and not-for-profit charters conform schools to principles of privately run enterprises. Despite much evidence to the contrary, competition is touted as the high virtue that makes charters superior. Their very ability to exclude is an important factor in the success, for the few charters who actually are successful. Remember that charters are tax funded! Yet, they do not report to local school boards!



Should taxpayer dollars intended for schools be permitted to generate a private profit? I don’t think so!



Educators knew from following the NAFTA negotiations that turning public education into a commodity for sale in the capitalist marketplace was a central component of the agreement. They understood that at stake was not just public education, but the very idea of the “public.”


Part of the dialogue that has come out of NAFTA was from United States Information Agency Director, Joseph Duffey. In a September 12, 1993 Washington Times article, he stated that he expects the North American countries to succeed in achieving a sense of regional community(regionalism is communism) where the quest for a common community of nations in Western Europe has foundered. He’s talking about a North American Union (NAU), just like the European Union.


He went on to say, “We’re trying to reverse the tradition of nationalism and people, who in looking to their identity, look backwards to the past. Instead, we want them to look to the future.” In other words, Americans should no longer think of themselves as Americans whose founders were for freedom, liberty and individuality, but rather as world citizens, or citizens of the NAU.


Chapter 11 of NAFTA establishes the principle that foreign investors should be granted the same facilities as national investors, without any restrictions.
Chapter 12 of NAFTA (cross-border commerce of services). The new NAFTA rules have accelerated the imposition of new evaluation methods in education, developed by private institutions and based on standardized tests. Such tests are an effective means to restrict access to higher education and to assign young people coercively to technological schools that are not their vocational choice.



Key words are “education reform,” “standardized tests,” “state standards,” all of these are part and parcel of the destruction of education via Common Core, which actually started in the 1960s with mastery learning, and which was accelerated with NAFTA.


The Free Trade Agreement got the ball rolling for the development of skills standards by the newly formed National Skills Standards Board. It was endorsed by the U.S. Labor Department Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) study originated under Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole. This eventually led to the School-to-Work Opportunities Act and the dumbing down of American education curriculum for global workforce training.


With all of this emphasis on “standards” it should be pointed out that NAFTA allows exchanges of all categories of professionals, with those coming from Mexico and Canada having met their own countries’ standards, not necessarily equal to those required in the United States.


If this process evolves the way most of these exchange processes have in the past, that disparity will be addressed in one of two ways—by changing U.S. standards to match foreign standards, or by altering both NAFTA nations’ standards to align with international standards like ISO 9000 or ISO 1400 monitored by UNESCO. This should be of concern to professional organizations in the United States. See page 315 in The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America to see the impact on education in the US by the signing the North American Free Trade Agreement.


Conclusion


As Murray Rothbard explained at the time NAFTA was passed, “In the first place, genuine free trade doesn’t require a treaty or trade agreement. NAFTA is called a trade agreement so it can avoid the constitutional requirement of approval by two thirds of the Senate. If the establishment truly wants free trade, all it has to do is repeal all our numerous tariffs, import quotas, anti-dumping laws, and other American-imposed restrictions on trade.”



No wonder Trump carried Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio. One way he could now repay those voters who put him in the White House is to cut out the sovereignty-killing cancer called NAFTA, and help restore the American Dream for millions of American workers.


President-elect Trump, dump NAFTA your very first day in office!



http://www.newswithviews.com/Nelson/kelleigh376.htm

That's a lot to take in - not that we didn't know most of it.

Why does our government pay any attention to think tanks? They are people bought and paid for to come to the conclusion someone wants to announce.

The US government dumped grain into Mexico and put many small farmers out of business - they fled to the US.

One of my son's employees when he had his business, had extended family in Mexico. His family also had a lot of land holdings in Mexico. Every year he made a trip to Mexico as every one with any interest in these holdings had to sign papers agreeing they would not grow crops on their land. Truthfully, I don't know if it was just grain, or other crops.
For that he, as third generation, received a check for $40,000 - each year.

The kicker - the check was from the US Dept of Agriculture.

That was his story and I believe him.

One of the things I disagree with PE Trump about is school vouchers.
I believe that to be a very bad idea.

I think charter schools are also a bad idea and I can't there believe there hasn't been lawsuits about them. Maybe they have - I don't know.

Private schools paid for with tax dollars - wrong on so many levels.

Read up on the charter schools run by the Turkish man, Fetullah Gülen.
He operates 130 charter schools in the US - 45 of them in Texas. I cannot believe there isn't something very wrong with that and don't know why our state is allowing it - well, money.

This is the man Turkey has accused of fomenting the recent revolt, uprising, etc., in Turkey.

No school vouchers, no charter schools, clean up our public schools and and truly educate our children - equally.

Heritage Foundation is another 501 C 3 funded by donors. Pass the FairTax, shut it down. See how deep and far this 501 C 3 "charity" fraud goes? The Heritage Foundation has used tax-exempt charity money to devise schemes to put our own citizens out of work. Under the FairTax, these outfits will be shut down or at least funded at someone else expense besides US taxpayers.

See why I like the FairTax? And this is just one reason. Many more. But this is one of my favorites.

I still don't see how the fair tax will make a difference in this.

The big guys who give money to these people will find a way around it - they always do.

What we need to do is expose these people for the dastardly things they are doing.

These people are beyond wrong and they are funded by very powerful entities - there is no way our tax system will make a bit of difference.

This isn't said because I have misgivings about the Fair Tax - it bears looking into, but we have to be reasonable and give it some thought.

If the Fair Tax would truly destroy, undermine, or have any detrimental effect on these people, trust me, it will never be passed.

Oh it will shut them down, put them out of business. Well, the FairTax has 76 bill Sponsors in the US House of Representatives including the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. It will pass the US House of Representatives in a heart-beat and I think in 2017 it will pass the US Senate. I think Trump will sign it into law in a New York Minute. The stars have aligned for passage of the FairTax. Hope it happens, you'll love it, believe me. You'll be wondering why it hadn't passed sooner. And the reason for that is simple. We need a majority in the House, Senate and the White House with a President who understands taxes. This will be our first real chance to pass it in 2017. We'll see how it goes.

What we need to understand is these people who are operating these organs of propaganda and subversiveness are not bothered by our laws not now and certainly not some tax law.

These are not just some organization that is getting donations from the 'little people' - they are funded by the really,really big guys and I believe, to an extent, not American big guys

We have to be realistic. If that is the, or even part of the reason to support Fair Tax, it just isn't going to happen. They are not going away until we shine the spotlight on them.



I remember people telling me Obamacare would get the insurance companies out of the equation and that's why they wanted it. My observation was insurance companies have more money than God, not only would they remain in the equation, they would benefit or it wouldn't get passed.

Originally Posted by Judy

Oh it will shut them down, put them out of business. Well, the FairTax has 76 bill Sponsors in the US House of Representatives including the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. It will pass the US House of Representatives in a heart-beat and I think in 2017 it will pass the US Senate. I think Trump will sign it into law in a New York Minute. The stars have aligned for passage of the FairTax. Hope it happens, you'll love it, believe me. You'll be wondering why it hadn't passed sooner. And the reason for that is simple. We need a majority in the House, Senate and the White House with a President who understands taxes. This will be our first real chance to pass it in 2017. We'll see how it goes.

Geez, isn't it about time to wake up to the reality that the fate of the unfair tax bill has already been determined? For a number of reasons, it will never pass. Anyone that thinks differently is simply fooling themselves. The bill has languished in the Congress for almost two decades. Hello, there's a reason for that. It's not a workable plan. Heck, Trump even realized that and came up with his own proposal. The bill, like so many other bad bills (ideas), will never get out of committee to see a floor vote. No plan that decreases the tax burden on the wealthy and increases the burden on the middle class is going to find much favor with the voting public. I'm not saying our current tax system is a good one, just saying the unfair tax is not all its supporters claim it to be. Catchy soundbites and empty promises just aren't enough to make the plan plausible. I encourage anyone truly interested in this issue do your own research.

http://www.fairtaxfraud.com/fallout.asp

No one thought Trump would win the primary. Then he did. No one thought he would win the General Election. Then he did. We're in a different time now. Americans are in charge again, and we can do whatever we want done.

Obamacare passed the US Congress with only 8 sponsors total. The FairTax has 76 Sponsors in the US House of Representatives including the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the committee it's in. The FairTax has 8 Sponsors in the US Senate including Ted Cruz. The FairTax will pass the US Congress and be signed into law by the 45th President of the United States if that's what Americans want done.

The old "nevers" no longer apply. That's not to say that some Americans may still need to get their minds right about what's got to be done to fix this country.

Originally Posted by MW

Geez, isn't it about time to wake up to the reality that the fate of the unfair tax bill has already been determined? For a number of reasons, it will never pass. Anyone that thinks differently is simply fooling themselves. The bill has languished in the Congress for almost two decades. Hello, there's a reason for that. It's not a workable plan. Heck, Trump even realized that and came up with his own proposal. The bill, like so many other bad bills (ideas), will never get out of committee to see a floor vote. No plan that decreases the tax burden on the wealthy and increases the burden on the middle class is going to find much favor with the voting public. I'm not saying our current tax system is a good one, just saying the unfair tax is not all its supporters claim it to be. Catchy soundbites and empty promises just aren't enough to make the plan plausible. I encourage anyone truly interested in this issue do your own research.

http://www.fairtaxfraud.com/fallout.asp

That's your opinion. I and millions of other Americans including 84 Sponsors in the US Congress disagree with you. Go ahead and attack the FairTax. That's what all the Democrats do, been arguing with them for years about it. I'm just very surprised that I'd be arguing with a Republican about it, especially one who claims he doesn't want to "pick winners and losers" which is all the income tax has done to the disadvantage of the United States and the American People for 103 years. So 18 years, with 2 under Bill Clinton, 8 years of it under Barack Obama, and the other 8 under GW Bush, doesn't surprise me that the FairTax didn't pass yet. 2017 will be the first time since the FairTax was introduced into Congress that we've had control of the House, the Senate, and the White House with a President who understands taxes and cares about the American People.

He's going to work on passing his tax cuts first, then Congress will work on the FairTax, and if Congress passes it which I think it will, then he'll sign it into law. The middle class will always carry the burden of taxation in the United States, because it's the largest group of taxpayers. That's just a mathematical fact.

Under the FairTax, rich people pay the same FairTax on their new goods and service purchases as anyone else, just like they do with a state sales tax. They even get the rebate if they want to mess with it. They will probably pay more FairTax per person because they spend more which is good. Whatever they spend on new retail goods and services, they pay FairTax on it same as everyone else. That's why it's called the FairTax. Everyone pays the same FairTax on whatever they voluntarily decide to purchase in new goods and services at the retail final point of sale.

I'm really shocked that you think rich people should be treated differently in this great country than you're treated. Everyone should be treated the same under the law in the United States. The FairTax achieves that on the issue of taxation, and rightly so.

I am not saying it is a bad idea, but I have reservations.

Just looking at the realities, though, and past history. These people aren't going to give up the hold they have. I didn't even say 'without a fight' because I don't think they will need to fight.

Maybe, if a President Trump gets 8 years, turns us around, and the American get their backbones back and their heads on straight, it might be possible.

Again, the devil is in the details. By the time it makes it to the floor, everyone will have either added to or slice away until it will be unrecognizable.

That's the nature of the beast.