NAFTA verdict undeniable

"Sure, NAFTA was really a wonderful deal for America. Two years after we negotiated and signed it, our trade surplus is gone, we've got a $15 billion trade deficit with Mexico, 300,000 jobs have gone south, the Florida winter tomato industry is on its back, illegal immigration is soaring into this country, Mexico is the prime source of narcotics and drugs, and my good friend Sen. Dole negotiated a $50 billion bailout with Bill Clinton for the regime that brought this all about. "

In a quintessential cover story in the American Conservative - Death of Manufacturing - Pat Buchanan exposes the fraud of Free Trade. This is a must read, especially for those Libertarians who cling to the abstract notion that intellectual possibilities are viable and practical in the real world. Notwithstanding their fantasies, self interest and national economic independence is the supreme basis for economic policy that benefits citizens. Those who strive to generate profit upon unholy alliances are at best, befuddled accessories or worse case, greedy traitors.

As the saying goes the devil is in the details. The score card is the trade deficit. The burden is carried by those who are unemployed. And the final casualty is the autonomy of the nations economy.

Is economic primacy important to you and your countrymen? A Free Trade Policy has regard only for the business venture. National concerns and the best long term interests of the average American has no stature in a game of systematic dismantling of the self sufficiency.

The Buchanan thesis rest upon the worth of maintaining America as a free society. It’s easy to be deluded into thinking that freedom is enhanced with the vast array of consumer items offered for sale at your local discount outlet. Nevertheless, cheap prices from foreign producers only feeds the trade shortfall. How backward does one need to be to avoid the inevitable? When production leaves for off shore havens based upon a playing field that is rigged to serve only the monopolists, how free can we remain as a people?

The conclusion from this essay is clear: “Free trade is a bright shining lie. Free trade is the Trojan Horse of world government. Free trade is the murderer of manufacturing and the primrose path to the loss of national sovereignty and the end of our independence.”

The NAFTA swindle is a transparent scam. Here is Pat’s summary, the only one you need to remember: “ NAFTA has helped to convert California into Mexifornia and the Golden State into a Third-World country. Ten years after its passage, Mexico’s leading export continues to be Mexicans.”

In the end, the social cost from a conscious dissemblance of manufacturing within our own borders means the loss of high scale livable wage jobs. Let’s be honest and admit the truth. Americans no longer have a work ethic of previous generations nor does the average worker have the stomach to labor for subsistent level pay. However, that is only a consequence of the larger issue. The political decisions to vacate domestic manufacturing from our own people is analogous to running a closed shop that benefits only venture monopolists, international bankers, global money launders, stateless managers and governmental hacks.

The flight out of California illustrates this civic price being paid, but this same syndrome also applies to other former bastions of industry. According to the Census Bureau Report - State by State Migration Flows: 1995-2000 - California, New York and Illinois served as "a trio of gateway states that simultaneously lost migrants to other states while gaining migrants from abroad."

The surrender of manufacturing employment as a sacrifice to the Free Traders, has forced this mass exodus of layed-off Americans - our own displaced persons. If you believe this is an intrinsic result, inevitable and unalterable; your confidence in political elites and their distortion of economic self-interest must mean you only buy Chinese. National suicide is not natural. But for the Free Trader mesmerized by visions of bountiful prosperity, produced under the illusion of backwater cheap labor, just what happens when the cash runs out because jobs left for overseas?

The big picture is confirmed by Pat Choate and cited by Mr Buchanan in his flagship magazine: “In the 1970s, [the United States]mounted a decades-long deficit of $75 billion. . . . In the 1980s, the deficit soared to $843 billion as Japan began to take away our industries. . . . In the 1990s, that trade deficit doubled to $1.7 trillion. . . . At this pace, we’re probably going to have a $6 trillion cumulative deficit in this decade - and that’s probably an understated number given the pace we are losing our manufacturing base.”

NAFTA is the conveyance upon which the outflow hits home in the most visible way. The virtual bankruptcy of California has a fundamental linkage to the damage done by NAFTA. The best test of loyalty to real Americans is demonstrated by one’s attitude about the Free Trade rip-off. Politicians need to follow the wisdom of the economic miracle that built our country. SELF Interest in national economic independence and self sufficiency. If you want solutions, stop the outflow, rebuild U.S. industry and create domestic jobs.

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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