Aside form personal insults, this is a blatant lie. the US has always been a free trade zone...the same free trade zone that served as the basis for the EU.
aside from the fact this is wrong (see thunda's post), the flipside of this is that people started buying Japanese cars because they were more economical (during the gas spike in the 70's, the Japanese were the only ones offering fuel efficient vehicles). People found they were both cheaper and more reliable. The Big 3 had assumed people would just keep buying their crappy cars. Today cars are far more reliable and there's more choice for consumers, win one for free trade. It's true that thousands of US auto workers have lost their jobs (many more than were gained in non-union areas of the country) but labor inflexibility and conservative management are the root causes.
A distinctly Adlerian statement. all bluster.

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I'd like to thank you for your patience. I waited until I had time to respond to your post appropriately. the link above is saddening but certainly not simply driven by NAFTA. there's no assurance that Ohio wouldn't be losing jobs to other states Ohio, with its entrenched unions, simply hasn't been competitive even within the US (which is and always has been a free trade zone). You could argue that if each state had its own set of tariffs and protections, then Ohio wouldn't be losing jobs to other states. but Ohio wouldn't have those jobs to lose without free trade. You can't have it both ways. Lastly, Food stamps is proof that people are on food stamps. the cost of food is through the roof, but that has little to do with trade.
I've never stated that life is fair nor have I ever said that trade benefits all people equally. Some people get new jobs, others lose jobs. It's important to make the process of moving from one career to another as easy as possible. Sometimes it can be a blessing in disguise. I was just reading about a guy who had a manufacturing job he but he took a paycut for office work but said he was much happier because he didn't mind going to work anymore.
you showed that people in OH used food stamps, some jobs moved to mexico, and that we might be entering a recession...you haven't linked all three to NAFTA. China has had a hand in keeping employment in manufacturing down. their currency manipulation has allowed the federal government and consumers to live beyond their means.
H1B isn't free trade but immigration so it's off topic. ..although there seems to be a lot of tech jobs and all of my friends in tech jobs get paid pretty well.
So, how was the poverty pre-NAFTA? How were the job protections? Mexico has a lot of problems that won't be solved by trade alone nor were they caused by it.
http://www.worldfund.org/index.php?q....htmlAccording to Monterrey they have advantages otherthan geography
http://www.mexconnect.com/mex_/trave...reyreport.html
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/...5652545.column
The dollar devaluation isn't necessarily being driven by "free trade." I'm not sure that unfree countries like Argentina are evidence of the strong currencies in planned economies. the Fed's easy credit policies as both government and consumer addiction to debt have more or less forced it. the alternative of living within our means isn't politically popular.
If that's true, that's not free trade, that's government subsidies putting poor Mexican farmers out of business. However, the same process happened in the US and is happening in China without the corn price argument. young people moved off family farms in great numbers for better paying jobs and personal independence. It's likely the same process is happening in Monterrey and that the "overpopulation" is a result of the relative success of Monterrey.
It's also as a result of making drugs illegal, which has made it much more profitable.
that's only one interpretation of course. the US' manufacturing peak post WWII could be driven by lack of competition. Europe and Japan were smoldering runs, Argentina and Spain had fascists, and russia and China had fallen under the pall of communism. The world began to change and the US failed to adapt to it. Additionally, much of the growth since the Depression (when the US became socialist) has been driven by debt...whether it be government and consumer debt or lowering reserve requirements or subsidizing mortgages so people could buy homes with less and less money. It's possible that the socialist utopia that the FDR fables talk about never existed. And the transnational argument overlooks the improved standards of living in former hotbeds of cheap labor like SK and Japan.
actually, people from unfree trade countries like bolivia are pouring into chile where job growth and wages are pretty good.
which is a good argument to move away form pensions which lessens people's dependence on corporations.
that's assuming they were adding $40/hour in value...an assumption that can't be made of course. perhaps they should have negotiated $20/hr. the cost of living in detroit can't be that high. you have no proof that the person will make $10/hr and you are assuming they will need food stamps. the cost of food is going up both because of the devaluation and because of environmental policies
As is the Apple business model. You are correct. Argentina borrowed billions of dollars and misspent them, often distributing through the corrupt provincial system and buying votes with short term spending sprees (after government officials took their cut). when the bill came due on the debt, they couldn't pay it because they hadn't invested in productive assets. they've continued their century long decline and their decidedly unfree trade practices have resulted in rising crime and food shortages. this is simply a rant. Mexico was unfair long before NAFTA, which is why my grandfather immigrated here more than 70 years ago.
you mean for free?
so the FARC is an innocent populist movement? colombia made up the drug war?

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That is a great support of free trade. If we didn't have such high tarrifs and regulations on importing sugar cane and beets from other countries, they could be used for ethanol instead of corn which would have a minimal effect on the price of staple foods like breads, beef, poultry, etc.

Instead, by restricting trade and subsidizing corn for ethanol, the government has actually made matters worse. We have actually increased the cost of living for everyone, even those that don't consume a lot of energy ... typically the poor.

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Eldondre....Your logic here escapes me.....Ohio..a U.S. State is losing jobs to MEXICO another country! Unless you consider Mexico a U.S. state which some nativist types do..you need remediation in basic geography. Your understanding of NAFTA and it's implications is flawed. I'm not talking about free trade in relation to interstate commerce. We are talking about NAFTA..The North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994 which established a free trade zone between the U.S., Canada and Mexico. It was expanded to include Chile under Clinton.

In 2001 Bush formalized the proposal of expanding NAFTA to a Free Trade Area of the Americas, encompassing 34 countries and 800 million people by 05. Obviously, this hasn't happened completely although CAFTA, an extension of NAFTA, has brought more latin american countries in the fold under Bush. Additionally, the U.S. is negotiating FTA's with Colombia as we have noted and I believe still ironing things out with Peru and Panama although they are pretty much in the FTA fold. Ecuador and Bolivia are no longer in the picture b/c their governments are leaning towards the Mercosur route (Full members- Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and eventually Venezuela). In fact, Chile, Colombia and Peru are associate members along with Bolivia and Ecuador in this regional trade agreement (RTA)...Mexico is just an "observer" member...

A free trade zone means goods can cross these INTERNATIONAL borders in either direction supposedly without tariffs or taxes of any kind. However, I'm not sure how you can characterize this trade pact as free when the U.S. government is providing U.S. taxpayer subsidies to U.S. Agribusiness? Is not a government subsidy essentially a protective tariff? Does this not disadvantage the trade partner who is trying to play by WTO rules and not imposing protective trade tariffs of their own in the form of subsidies?

Moreover, if the loss of jobs in Ohio to Mexico is not related to NAFTA and free trade as you suggest, why don't we ship those Ohio jobs mentioned in the article to Sweden? Oh yeah, they are not a signatory of NAFTA, not a North American country, nor are they willing to subject their population to free market serf wages. They actually believe in providing their people with a living wage, equitable labor standards, pension, healthcare etc etc. Around 80% of the Swedish labor force is unionized and instead of legislating minimum wage they do it by collective bargaining. This has not had any negative effect on them as their inflation rate is low 1.4% (2006 est.) and their GDP growth is 4.2% per year as opposed to our negative growth. Indeed, after their economic crisis in the 90's (their own real estate bubble) they have become a unique economic model characterized by close cooperation between the government, labor unions and corporations. The government has run surpluses every year except a couple since 98. They have created a succesful model in which extensive social benefits can be maintained in a global economy. They haven't joined the Free trade race to the bottom and they are not even part of the common Euro currency yet their people are experiencing a high standard of living.


By taking a look at how free trade works, we can see why virtually every labor, ecological and anti-poverty organization in Latin America is strongly opposed to the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas.

The critics see things this way: Let's say that the Newcastle mining industry in Britain can produce a ton of coal at the cost of $10, which it sells on the domestic market. The industry thrives. At the same time, coal mining in Pennsylvania is just as efficient, but with transportation and British import tariffs the cost to export coal to Britain would be $15 a ton. No deal. But the Pennsylvania mining interests, desperate for export markets, have powerful lobbyists in Congress, which in turn enacts the "Coal Law," providing a government subsidy of $5 a ton. Further, with a free-trade agreement between the U.S. and Britain abolishing the $2-a-ton tariff, there would be a net gain of $7 a ton for the Pennsylvania mining industry. Now its actual — if artificial — cost of production is $8 an exported ton, $2 cheaper than the $10-a-ton Newcastle coal. Voila! Coals to Newcastle. Goodbye Newcastle mining industry. Hello massive British unemployment and FOOD STAMPS.

The logic is simple. There are two ways to "protect" local industry: import tariffs and export subsidies.

Free trade eliminates tariffs, giving the economic advantage not only to those producers that are more efficient production-wise (largely because they are more capitalized) but also to those industries blessed with governments capable of delivering massive subsidies. In other words, to the already industrialized and wealthy nations.

Coal miners in Newcastle may not have to worry about my hypothetical example, but corn growers in Mexico have every reason to panic.

Grains are to Mexico as coal was to Newcastle. Since the initiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement among the U.S., Canada and Mexico in 1994, the earnings of Mexican growers of corn, wheat and rice, along with beans, have plummeted, while the cost to the Mexican consumer has risen by 257%.

Mexico, the land where corn was first domesticated centuries ago, is now importing "cheap" subsidized U.S. agribusiness corn. Coals to Newcastle indeed.

With a dramatic difference in industrialization (70 U.S. tractors, for example, for every Mexican tractor) and the powerful agricultural lobby in Washington maintaining enormous subsidies, it is no wonder that Mexican farmers cannot compete once protective tariffs are eliminated.

In theory, free trade should make everyone more competitive, replacing the inefficient with the efficient. The idea is that everyone should do what they are best at and purchase from their neighboring countries what those countries do best. Everyone gains.

In theory......

In reality, for historical and geopolitical reasons, what Third World countries are "best at" is having their natural resources extracted and exported to the industrialized nations (which in turn sell back manufactured products at a high cost) and having their populations exploited for cheap labor. This is what I'm talking about in regard to Mexico and it's oil..it's not free but it comes at a cost to their own people in lousy labor standards....(social cost in exchange for access to Mexican oil..)

Advocates of free trade — the already developed industrialized nations and those in the Third World countries who do their bidding — argue in the abstract, taking advantage of words with positive connotations such as "free" and "trade." In the real world, however, economics is not a matter of ideology but rather of production and markets and the intervention of government. Bilateral agreements between unequal partners are inherently biased in favor of the stronger — and the greater the disparity, the greater the bias.

This is exactly the situation that exists between the U.S. and Latin American republics...and yes the reverse situation exists between the U.S. and China...thank you! ...you just proved my point that "Free" trade is a myth and is harming american workers and compromising our sovereignty...

The World Trade Organization's treaties and the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas are characterized by undemocratic processes, such as secret and semisecret pre-agreements and unrealistic deadlines, and economic blackmail including threats to withhold the International Monetary Fund and World Bank funding upon which the weaker nations' governments have become dependent. This is why Mercosur has arisen..they are not going to play by U.S. trade rules any longer or subject themselves to bad loans...

As far as the FARC....the Colombian Government's illegal paramilitary forces are not exactly benign angels...

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB217/index.htm

And if Mexico didn't exist, it woudl be losing jobs to Arizone, Texas, and Tenn.
is it any different? free trade is free trade.
Chile, Canada, and Mexico have all done fairly well, despite NAFTA's shortcomings.
we agree on the point the subsidization does not constitute free trade.
I suggested it's not solely related to NAFTA.
we do purchase goods from Sweden and their population is well educated (and thus earn more). They don't have to earn lower wages. you seem to imply that Mexcians lived in some highly paid heaven until NAFTA. that's simply not true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden
inflation rates are set by monetary poilcy, not necessarily CBA's. If wage increases are offset by productivity enhancements, you'd have no inflation. Sweden isn't without problems and their homogeneous population and model of large corporations may not be a good fit. Indeed, there has been arguments over the country's real unemployment rate and whether the too many people are employed in the wrong industries (lack of flexibility). It's also worth noting that Sweden is part of the Euro free trade zone.
as I've pointed out, they have joined the free trade race. Their model is simply one of many a country can adopt. It's frequently cited by socialists but it's not clear it coudl work for the US nor is it perfect.

I think you are confusing the colonial model with trade. The US and Sweden were both exporters of natural resources that have moved on to other industries. then you go to say we sell back manufactured goods, but already said they were made in Mexico.
FARC isn't a terrorist organization?

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And if you didn't exist we wouldn't be having this debate..and if the United States didn't exist NAFTA wouldn't be an issue etc. etc. This is silly straw man reasoning...Mexico, the U.S. ,NAFTA, you and I all exist last time I checked....

No it is not....

Thank you..your own contradiction just confirmed the main premise of my argument that free trade is not free trade when subsidies exist. The specific FTA between Mexico and the U.S. is a farce because of U.S. subsidies to agribusiness...

This is simply not accurate particularly with respect to Mexico. It is just a hollow statement that doesn't stand on it's own as you like to believe.....

Below is why: Source: http://www.startribune.com/business/11050476.html

Business Forum: NAFTA helped increase flow of illegal immigrants
By By David Morris
May 7, 2006
The debate about illegal immigration rarely mentions the North American Free Trade Agreement, known as NAFTA. That's regrettable, since the flood of illegal Mexicans in 2006 empirically challenges the philosophy that guided NAFTA's design.

The slogan of those who championed NAFTA was, "Trade, not aid."

The pact would solve our problems with little or no transfer of funds from richer Canadians and Americans to poorer Mexicans, it was widely believed.
By raising Mexican living standards and wage levels, Attorney General Janet Reno predicted, NAFTA would reduce illegal immigration by up to two-thirds in six years. "NAFTA is our best hope for reducing illegal migration in the long haul," Reno declared in 1994. "If it fails, effective immigration control will become impossible."

NAFTA succeeded, at least on its own terms. As Jaime Serra Puche, Mexico's former trade minister and chief NAFTA negotiator recently observed, "When you look at NAFTA in terms of what NAFTA was made for, which were trade flows, investment flows, and in general technological transfer and so on, you can say that NAFTA has been a successful enterprise."

Trade now constitutes 55 percent of Mexico's gross domestic product, up from about 30 percent in 1990. Foreign investment in Mexico has increased by more than 225 percent since 1994.

So when you look at the pact in terms of what it was intended to do, based on what those who wrote it said it was intended to do, it has been a smashing success.

At this point, bringing up an old medical adage might be appropriate: "The surgery was successful, but the patient died." NAFTA achieved its intended goals. But the flood of illegal immigrants to the United States is up, and the standard of living of the average Mexican is down.

[Exactly! If NAFTA has been so great for Mexico why has illegal immigration spiked upwards instead of down? I never said Mexico was an economic nirvana prior to NAFTA but NAFTA has worsened the social conditions of Mexicans when it comes to labor and wages]

Real wages for most Mexicans are lower than when NAFTA took effect. And Mexican wages are diverging from rather than converging with U.S. wages, despite the fact that Mexican worker productivity has increased dramatically. [this is what I talked about in my previous post detailing my experiences in Monterrey with my girlfriend...not armchair social history but from actually speaking to the people and seeing it for myself]

As NAFTA intended, Mexico has become an export-dependent economy. But this has not benefited most Mexicans. Sandra Polaski of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace points out that Mexican manufacturing increasingly is based on a production model in which component parts are imported, then processed or assembled and then re-exported. [This is what I was referring to]The spillover effect of such operations on the broader economy is very limited. Ironically, one might argue that illegal migration is the only thing saving Mexico from the ravages of NAFTA.

Illegal migration serves as an important safety valve. In the past 10 years, Mexico's working-age population has expanded by about 1 million per year, but the number of jobs has expanded by only half as much, according to a Carnegie study. The annual exodus of 500,000 to 1 million Mexicans reduces labor unrest inside the country.

Migration serves another even more important function: national financial safety net. In 2005, Mexicans in the United States remitted some $20 billion home, about 3 percent of Mexico's national income, according to a March story by Knight Ridder's Washington bureau. Remittances now exceed tourism, oil and the maquiladoras as the country's top single source of foreign exchange.

NAFTA boasted that trade, not aid, would boost the lot of Mexico and Mexicans. Ironically, the only thing that is keeping the wolf from Mexico's door is aid from the United States, via Mexicans living in the United States, not trade.

[Seems to be working for the Europeans just fine as noted below]


The European model
It didn't have to be this way. Consider the recent history of the European Union. Europeans realize that the flow of migrants increases when the income gap between countries widens. Thus the European Union invested hundreds of billions of dollars in its poorer countries to reduce the income gap and intra-European tensions between farmers and workers.

This massive investment enabled the E.U.'s four poorest members -- Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain -- to boost their per-capita GDP from 65 percent of the overall E.U. average in l986 to 78 percent in l999.

Unlike Americans, Europeans knew that both trade and aid are needed to make economic integration work.

I would add only one other ingredient to this recipe for success: internally generated development. Sustainable economic development comes from within, from expanding internal markets and internal production that supplies those markets.

Sustainable economic development comes from strengthening, not weakening, local and regional trade networks. And this, in turn, depends on strengthening and not weakening local and regional social networks.

People don't leave their communities, their friends, their families and their cultures because they want to. They leave when they have to.
NAFTA's designers promised it would keep Mexicans at home. Yet its very objectives undermined that possibility. Now leaders in all three countries are trying to pick up the pieces.

One hopes they would use this opportunity to revisit their original premise and model as well.

David Morris is vice president of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, based in Minneapolis and Washington, D.C. His e-mail is dmorris@ilsr.org.


© 2008 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.

Source: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08099/871327-28.stm

Mexican labor leader says free trade deals kill jobs
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
By Ann Belser, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

It was 11:34 a.m. yesterday when President Bush announced he would be fast-tracking the Free Trade Agreement with Colombia.
Half an hour later, at a forum on the North American Free Trade Agreement, Benedicto Martinez Orozco, the co-president of a Mexican trade union, told a filled hall at the United Steelworkers Building just how bad an idea the free trade agreements are.

In the first two years after Nafta was signed, Mr. Martinez said, thousands of small and midsize Mexican companies found they could not compete with the multinational companies that suddenly flooded the Mexican markets.

"In the first years thousands of middle-sized businesses closed, and that left thousands more workers without jobs," Mr. Martinez said through an interpreter. "Bigger companies bought up businesses, and we started to see the concentration of industries."

The result, he said, was that there were many people who became very rich, while now 14 years later, about half the population of the country, is either underemployed or unemployed.

In just the last six years he said, wages have deteriorated by 60 percent; so while the minimum wage is 51 pesos, or between $4.50 and $5 a day, a kilogram of meat, which is about 2 pounds, costs 70 pesos.

In Mexico, Mr. Martinez said, the climate for workers and their ability to organize has gotten more harsh since Nafta was passed, as large corporations have pressured the government to change its labor laws. Recent regulations have limited collective bargaining and restricted the ability of workers to strike. [they aren't killing them yet.....maybe throwing them in jail and roughing them up]

The issue of the Colombia Free Trade Agreement has come up in the Democratic presidential primary with Sen. Hillary Clinton having come out against the agreement while her chief strategist, Mark Penn, was meeting with the ambassador from Colombia and promoting the agreement. Mr. Penn apologized for meeting with the Colombian delegation, prompting Colombia to fire his public relations firm, Burson-Marsteller. He also has since stepped down as Sen. Clinton's chief strategist.

While Sen. Clinton has come out against the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, her husband, former President Bill Clinton, was given the "Colombia is Passion" award by Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe in June, for his faith in the country.


Dan Kovalik, the general counsel for the United Steelworkers, traveled to Colombia in February to talk to President Uribe about the history of killings of trade union organizers in the country. Just this year alone, he said, 17 unionists have been killed by members of the paramilitary in the country. Since 1986, 2,500 union leaders in Colombia have been killed.

"Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists," he said. "We cannot reward a country that continues to suffer this anti-union violence."


[AGAIN the Colombian Government's illegal paramilitary forces are not exactly benign angels...TRADE Unionists are not terrorists..maybe to the Government they are because they want to exploit peasants and squash Marxist labor movements and cover it up under the guise of the "drug war." This is not to say that there aren't FARC rebels that engage in terrorism as well. But state terrorism is not any more justified than non-state actors that engage in terrorism. The problem is that the Colombian government doesn't necessarily distinguish between Militant groups and political groups..just like people who equate Islam and ALL muslims with "terrorism" or "Islamo-Fascism" whatever the hell that means ...

Evidence of Colombian State sponsored terror can be found here...

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB217/inde x.htm ]


While Mr. Kovalik was careful to note that the United Steelworkers has not endorsed a candidate in the Democratic primary, he said when Colombia's President Uribe said he was concerned about the effect a Barack Obama administration might have on trade with his country, he did not express the same concern about Sen. Clinton or presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain.


Ann Belser can be reached at abelser@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1699.

no, I believe a straw man would be made up. the valid point being, OH is suffering from the same issues Philadelphia began to suffer in the 1930's from which it never recovered. Here's some pointers:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...401572_pf.html


no, I think you're too intent on "proving me wrong" to agree to terms. free trade is free trade but when trade is not free, it's not free. we both agree there. there's no contradictions.

It's really managed trade but it was labeled free trade.


You mentioned it and I don;t doubt there's problems but it does seem as though things have improved.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Mexico

I'd be interested to see the impact of china on the mexican worker rather than just the US.

where do the parts come from?


not sure I ever said we shouldn't invest in Detroit or OH.

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