The NAFTA scam

It puzzles me how easily people entrust their security or large amounts of money to strangers and then cry foul when they lose it. Usually, they are victimized by their greed.

The news reports how a man handed over $24,000 to a stranger who promised him a huge profit in return. It said that a stranger wanted to make a $40,000 charitable donation in another city, but didn't want to drive there. So, he promised to pay the man $10,000 if he delivered the cash for him. The catch - there is always a catch in these scams that should warn the victim - was the man had to entrust the stranger with $24,000 of his money to prove trust or goodwill. The man gave the stranger the $24,000 goodwill money, and allowed him to leave with all the money, promising to return shortly with the $40,000 charitable donation. Now, the man is $24,000 poorer, because he never saw the stranger or any of the money again.

Most people probably don't understand how anyone could be that gullible. I have some candidates. How about the U.S. Congress and American labor organizations?

American and Mexican workers are losing billions of dollars because of a scam named the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). NAFTA's supporters promised hundreds of thousands of new high paying jobs in the United States and improved living standards in the three nations signing the agreement - Canada, Mexico and the United States. However, like all other scams, NAFTA's promise had a catch.

NAFTA required the three member nations to remove their protective import taxes. Some foreign manufacturers pay their workers less than a living wage, while American labor laws require certain pay minimums. Therefore, those foreign manufacturers can export products into the United States cheaper than American companies can sell them. The United States levied import taxes on those cheap products to bring their price to U.S. levels and protect American jobs. The dullest person could have predicted what would happen if the United States joined NAFTA and lifted those protections.

United States manufacturers would have to reduce labor expenses to remain competitive with products made in Mexico. They could do this by reducing what they pay their American workers to Mexican levels. Or, they could move to Mexico. The government reports the U.S. lost an estimated three million manufacturing jobs since Congress approved NAFTA. So, many American manufacturers obviously chose to move to Mexico.

The trade deficit with Canada increased since NAFTA and the former trade surplus with Mexico became a deficit. A deficit means the U.S. is buying more products from those nations than it's selling to them. It also means that America is losing part of its assets to those nations.

Why did members of Congress approve this flawed agreement? A better question is why American workers didn't protest hard enough to prevent it. Greed and probably some arrogance played a role. They wanted something for nothing and NAFTA supporters convinced them that Mexicans, if anybody, would be the losers.

Poorer Mexican farming laborers did suffer losses and so did small American farmers. NAFTA and other laws gave large farming conglomerates advantages over small farmers. Statistics show that roughly 38,000 small American farms have gone out of business since NAFTA. Hundreds of thousands of Mexican farmers could no longer support themselves on the farm. Many of those former farmers migrate to Mexico's cities and cross into the United States as illegal immigrants.

NAFTA is making corporations and wealthy owners richer at the expense of Mexican and U.S. workers. Few Americans worry that about two percent of the population owns forty percent of the nation's wealth and are gaining more each year. Most of them don't know about the democratic protections they lost when NAFTA gave trade commissioners the power to override national laws that protect workers and the environment. They should worry that NAFTA and similar trade agreements hasten conditions where all workers will be at the mercy of a few aristocratic families that own most of the means of production.

Congress passed NAFTA with at least the tacit agreement of labor. Historically, American labor groups tolerated agreements that promised prosperity for the majority skilled group while leaving women, workers of color, and unskilled workers vulnerable to abuses.

The Congress agreed to NAFTA expecting a huge undeserved payout of prosperity for skilled labor at the cost of other American jobs. They showed their good faith by willingly surrendering valuable national protections against job destroying cheap imports. They didn't protect themselves from fraud. Now they don't have the promised new skilled jobs or the old protections against job destroying imports. Ethical and fair-minded people are not so easily fooled by the lure of easy prosperity.

Kenneth Brooks is a freelance writer and speaker. Contact him at Post Office Box 882, Vallejo, CA 94590 or kenbrooks@ethicalego.com.

NAFTA'S SMOKING GUN:
WHO DUNNIT AND WHY ?

Can you think of any nation on Earth that would sit idly by and watch its factories and jobs move offshore, and put its own taxpayers out of work? Name one nation on the planet that uses its taxpayer's funds to assist factories to move or expand offshore, and then close operations back in the homeland, and then fire its own workers? There is only one. The United States of America.

Turn the clock back to the early 1970s. Henry Kissinger was flitting around the globe and spending time in the Middle-East. U.S. policy was providing aid and comfort to the various warring enemy factions in the explosive region. OPEC was raising oil prices, and putting a stranglehold on the USA at the gas pump. David Rockefeller at the Chase Manhattan Bank, and the others on Wall Street, lusted to get their hands on the vast sums of surplus petro-dollars held by the oil sheiks. They soon did. That's when the problem began.

Soon the New York bankers were taking in mountains of dollars from the Middle East, and loaning them back out to "Third-world" countries in Latin America. While the international rich elite understood the "art of the deal," the peasant classes in Mexico and Latin America were only one step above the stone age. Ambitious industrial projects failed and the massive debt could not be repaid. Mexico alone defaulted on over $100 billion owed to New York Banks, and the banks were under pressure by the Middle East sheiks who wanted their money back. What to do ?

According to the July 25, 1989 edition of "FINANCIAL WORLD" magazine, meetings to rescue Mexico and get the banks paid, had been held off-and-on in New York since 1987. The investigative article titled, "Sweat Equity" indicates that the most favored scheme was to industrialize Mexico into a low-cost, export-producing giant. The banks would then get a piece of the overall export profits to be paid toward their principal and interest. The unpaid principal balance would be rolled-over each year and whatever could be paid against it credited. Such a system would let Mexico pay the debt painlessly from new income streams. Even better, the banks would be paid! No consideration was given to the devastation this policy would cause to the American worker and middle-class. They were the source to provide the needed wealth from their everyday consumer spending and thus an expendable factor.

This concept was further promoted in the book, "LATIN AMERICA AT A CROSSROADS," which was written and published in August of 1990, by David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission think-tank based in New York and Washington. It was easy to get the book accepted as USA policy because Jimmy Carter, George Bush and Bill Clinton were all members of the elite club. In fact, the Trilateral Commission member list reads like a WHO'S WHO of government and politics. White House insiders are also often members of the Council On Foreign Relations, which is also nurtured by, and serves the same international and New York financial interests.

Shortly after the Trilateral book was published, a momentum developed to implement the scheme in a legalized method. While congress could not sit still for such a transfer of wealth and jobs by official treaty, another idea was developed. To give the scheme a slim chance at all, the power elite called it an "Agreement" which needed only a simple majority of Congress to pass, and could be "Fast Tracked" to avoid the normal scrutiny. To that end, the thousands of pages of the North American Free Trade Agreement were kept secret from the citizens and press until long after it was signed. Lawmakers and the press were instead given a 45 page "Summary" that was upbeat and filled with happy-talk. Most of the lawmakers on Capitol Hill, financial columnists, and economists who support NAFTA have a curious common denominator. They haven't read it!

Once "released" by the Government, the massive two-volume work was priced at $41.00 and only available through the handful of U.S. Government Printing Office outlets. These stores are not a favorite of "Window Shoppers," and only a few hundred beltway insiders even wanted the document. They naturally wouldn't say much against the policy that had been established earlier. A few voices such as Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Chuck Harder, Pat Buchanan, Jerry Brown, and Rev. Jesse Jackson soon spoke out with concern, but the media was able to filter them out and keep most of them from reaching large audiences.

Ross Perot also soon found it difficult to buy good TV time and he became a target of ridicule for his actions against NAFTA. While the "curtain of silence" fell upon anti-NAFTA voices, a strange round of "Shotgun weddings" took place as big media suddenly got merger-mania. Radio crackled with activity, and Westwood One, the owner of NBC,

Mutual, The Source and Talknet, married New York's Unistar. TV soon pictured romance, and a mega-deal cooking with Bell Atlantic, TCI and Liberty Media was the big story. Word was quietly out in the boardrooms that the USA consumers would soon take a monster hit-in-the-pocket-book over NAFTA, and only the strong media would survive. Providing a futuristic metaphor, "USA TODAY" newspaper even revamped its colorful back weather page this summer to include all of Canada and Mexico, while the outline of the continental USA shrunk.

The biggest USA national media corporations also fell in love with the deal after being promised expansion into Mexico to reach new audiences. New American technology to offer 500 channel cable-TV loomed as another threat to take more domestic audience with shrinking bank accounts away from the big network media players. Soon deals were

cooking in the boardrooms to have more USA media merge, and also take positions in the Mexican press and broadcast industry. The big banks, Wall Street, and the stockmarket loved it!

Remember that NAFTA is not a new invention. The banker/politician combine had quietly created policy years ago to allow the set up of the "Maquilladora Region" as a pilot-program along the US-Mexican border. Soon over 2,200 USA factories moved into that 12 mile strip of Mexico during the period from the late 1980's onward. Much had been learned from the early years of operations, and new procedures using low-skill Mexican peasants had been perfected. Industrial engineers learned new designs for assembly operations, and USA trade magazines now report these techniques ready for the expected thousands of new plants and expanded facilities in Mexico as soon as NAFTA becomes law and expands deep into the Mexican continent. Recent financial and real estate conventions held in Washington with capacity-crowds, have also focused on the massive "get rich" Mexican opportunities to soon be created under NAFTA.

To seal the deal, the Mexican billionaire families put up millions of dollars to assist the Salinas government to buy the best lobbyists in Washington. The list of highly paid Mexican agents reads like an "Alumni Roster" of Capitol Hill. The Clinton administration has also announced that, "The store is open." The White House will hand out necessary goodies to sway the undecided members of Congress. The "Fix" is in!

Left out of the deal are the American people. Nobody can explain to them how it's good for America to have millions of jobs move to Mexico? How can USA workers compete with frightened Mexican peasants making 58 cents or a dollar an hour? Government retraining programs have been exposed as multi-billion-dollar-hoaxes because new high-tech jobs don't exist! Unemployed USA workers with families to feed, and mortgages to pay, can't find replacement jobs at the same pay scale, if at all! A permanent underclass is developing and crime is on the increase. In 1994, government regulations will require heads of welfare families to go back to work. Where will those millions of jobs be found ? The NAFTA scheme to pay back the New York banks makes Charles Keating, (the convicted S & L crook), look like Peter Pan. Willing co-conspirators on Capitol Hill don't personally fear the anticipated financial ruin, as they all are vested with government pensions and "Golden Parachutes." The Middle-Class will be affected. They could be retrained to become docile peasants. The "American Dream" and "Rule of Law" is at risk.

Source: http://www.forthepeople.org/NAFTA.htm

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