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To: Willie Green
All the free trade pact I have seen this country make have been total pants downers for the middle class.
3 posted on 04/07/2004 10:17:00 AM PDT by TXBSAFH (KILL-9 needs no justification.)
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To: TXBSAFH
All the free trade pact I have seen this country make have been total pants downers for the middle class.

In this case, you are more correct than you may know. Honduras and Costa Rica make most of the underwear worn in the US today. Most of the garment companies in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua are Chinese owned. This was China's way of getting around garment quotas. The irony is, many of those plants are owned by the PLA and were first established during Reagan's Caribbean Basin Initiative - an attempt to stem the flow of communism in Central America by beefing up their economies in the 1980s.

The plants in Costa Rica tend to be US owned, unionized and have decent health and safety environments. Their counterparts in the rest of Central America are often just big tin sheds surrounded by razor wire fences, with their own diesel generators, a few overhead lights and a lot of sewing machines.

If you support CAFTA this kind of treatment for workers, along with higher profits for the PLA, is what you are supporting.

The good news for the US economy is that, with the exception of Costa Rica, the business climate in Central America is so corrupt and the economies are so week that I don't think any free trade agreement could make them a threat to the US economy.
40 posted on 04/07/2004 2:55:36 PM PDT by InABunkerUnderSF (Where there is no vision, the people perish.)
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