Republican candidate 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 left this country. Most Americans chose to believe Bill Clinton. Well, it is 20 years later and it turns out that Perot was right and Clinton was dead wrong.
But now history is repeating itself, and most Americans don’t even realize that it is happening. As you will read about at the end of this article, Barack Obama has been negotiating a secret trade treaty that is being called “NAFTA on steroids”, and if Congress adopts it we could lose millions more good paying jobs.
It amazes me how the American people can fall for the same lies over and over again. The lies that serial liar Barack Obama is telling about “free trade” and the globalization of the economy are the same lies that Bill Clinton was telling back in the early 1990s. The following is an excerpt from a recent interview with Paul Craig Roberts…
“I remember in the 90′s when former Presidential candidate Ross Perot emphatically stated that NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) would create a giant “sucking sound” of jobs being extracted away from the U.S. He did not win the election, and NAFTA was instituted on Jan. 1, 1994. Now, 20 years later, we see the result of all the jobs that have been “sucked away” to other countries.”
According to an article by the Economic Policy Institute on 1/3/14:
“Clinton and his collaborators promised that the deal would bring “good-paying American jobs,” a rising trade surplus with Mexico, and a dramatic reduction in illegal immigration. Considering that thousands of kids are pouring over the border as we speak, well, how’d that work out for us?
Many Americans like to remember Bill Clinton as a “great president” for some reason. Well, it turns out that he was completely and totally wrong about NAFTA. The following are 20 facts that show how NAFTA is destroying the economy…
1) More than 845,000 American workers have been officially certified for Trade Adjustment Assistance because they lost their jobs due to imports from Mexico or Canada or because their factories were relocated to those nations.
2) Overall, it is estimated that NAFTA
has cost us well over a million jobs.
3) U.S. manufacturers pay Mexican
workers just a little over a dollar an hour to do jobs that American workers
used to do.
4) The number of illegal immigrants
living in the United States has more than doubled since the implementation of
NAFTA.
5) In the year before NAFTA, the U.S. had a trade surplus with Mexico and the trade deficit with Canada was only 29.6 billion dollars. Last year, the U.S. had a combined trade deficit with Mexico and Canada of 177 billion dollars.
6) It has been estimated that the U.S.
economy loses approximately 9,000 jobs for every 1 billion dollars of goods
that are imported from overseas.
7) One professor has estimated that
cutting the total U.S. trade deficit in half would create 5 million more jobs
in the United States.
8) Since the auto industry bailout,
approximately 70 percent of all GM vehicles have been built outside the United
States. In fact, many of them are now
being built in Mexico.
9) NAFTA hasn’t worked out very well for Mexico either. Since 1994, the average yearly rate of economic growth in Mexico has been less than one percent.
10) The exporting of massive amounts of
government-subsidized U.S. corn down into Mexico has destroyed more than a
million Mexican jobs and has helped fuel the continual rise in the number of
illegal immigrants coming north.
11) Someone making minimum wage in
Mexico today can buy 38 percent fewer consumer goods than the day before NAFTA
went into effect.
12) Overall, the United States has lost
a total of more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001.
13) Back in the 1980s, more than 20 percent of the jobs in the United States were manufacturing jobs. Today, only about 9 percent of the jobs in the United States are manufacturing jobs.
14) We have fewer Americans working in
manufacturing today than we did in 1950 even though our population has more
than doubled since then.
15) Back in 1950, more than 80 percent
of all men in the United States had jobs.
Today, only 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.
16) As I wrote about recently, one out
of every six men in their prime working years (25 to 54) do not have a job at
this point.
17) Because we have shipped millions of jobs overseas, the competition for the jobs that remain has become extremely intense and this has put downward pressure on wages. Right now, half the country makes $27,520 a year or less from their jobs.
18) When adults cannot get decent jobs,
it is often children that suffer the most.
It is hard to believe, but more than one out of every five children in
the United States is living in poverty in 2014.
19) In 1994, only 27 million Americans
were on food stamps. Today, more than 46
million Americans are on food stamps.
20) According to Professor Alan Blinder
of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over
the next two decades if current trends continue.
So if NAFTA is so bad for American workers, then why don’t our politicians just repeal it?
Well, unfortunately most of them are not willing to do this because it is part of a larger agenda. For decades, politicians from both major political parties have been working to slowly integrate North America. The eventual goal is to turn North America into another version of the European Union.
Did you know that the Obama administration is negotiating a super secret “trade agreement” that is so sensitive that he isn’t even allowing members of Congress to see it? The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is being called the “NAFTA of the Pacific” and “NAFTA on steroids”, but the truth is that it is so much more than just a trade agreement.
Initially, twelve nations will be a party to this treaty including the United States, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. Together, those nations represent approximately 40 percent of global GDP. It is hoped that additional nations such as the Philippines, Thailand and Colombia will join the treaty later on.
Unfortunately, most Americans are as uneducated about these issues as they were back in 1994. That is why we need to get this information out to as many people as we can.
(Blogger’s Note: On 22 November President-elect Donald J. Trump has
said he will pull America out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal
the day he takes office, in a major policy announcement. In a first direct
address to the country about what his policy priorities would be in his first
100 days, Mr Trump said he would immediately cancel the partnership, describing
it as a "potential disaster for our country". The US president-elect
had been clear during his election campaign about his opposition to the trade
deal, President Barack Obama's signature trade initiative, which was signed by
12 countries in February and covers 40 per cent of the world's economy.)
Happy 20th anniversary, NAFTA, on You Tube.
