We need to kill NAFTA and CAFTA and all the other bullshit too.

Pah, who am I kidding? Never going to happen. We've been sold out by our "own".

I'm so tired of being mad all the time because these sellout fucks have ruined us.

...get it and have had enough.

because he has done positive things and is better than the horrific plans of his opponent, he has been bought and paid for by the globalization lobby. He will sign a bill that offshores American jobs while denouncing the practice, if he thinks he will get $2.00 in campaign contributions.

I wish I were less cynical but when I look at some of Obama's missteps including hiring that thief-in-chief Rahm Emmanuel as Chief of Staff, he is in some areas only marginally better than his opponent.

Free-trade needs to be rescinded and we need to start all over. If a country wants to export its goods into our country then the other country must have the same wage, benefit, taxation, etc. conditions as in this country. Don't want to pay your workers at least a minimum wage? Oh well then your goods are subject to an import duty of 5000%.

This crap has got to stop.

FDR reversed the high republican tariffs of 1921, 1922 and 1930. He believed in low tariffs and in the benefits of international trade.

He could be considered the author of the globalization movement. He pushed for the creation of the United Nations, the IMF and World Bank and GATT (which became the WTO) to create multilateral governance of trade so that it would be more difficult for individual countries to raise tariffs and start the trade wars like those that resulted from those high republican tariffs.

That is about as 'globalist' an agenda as one can imagine. (I'm not sure if he was "bought and paid for by the globalization lobby" or whether he created the "globalization lobby".)

International trade benefited us when we were one of the few advanced manufacturing countries. The U. S. consistently maintained a trade surplus until 1975. Since then we have had only trade deficits and those deficits have expanded. A trade surplus increases GDP and a trade deficit reduces GDP. What benefited us then harms us now.

The "comparative advantage" mutual-benefit rationale for free trade is likewise a quaint relic from another age. Recent decades have witnessed the simultaneous emergence of burgeoning populations resulting in extraordinary third world urbanization (and labor pools) and the expansion of multinational corporations and financial institutions with access to huge accumulations of liquid capital and much more efficient and automated productive methods. Throw in fleets of container ships and you have a new era.

The real point of free trade now is to enable corporations to go tax and wage shopping. FDR did what he thought was good for the American people in the 30s and 40s. I suspect he would have seen a different problem calling for a different solution today.

When reversing the Smoot-Hawley tariffs failed to generate trade expansion, he dropped that tactic and shifted his focus to the new new deal programs.

History didn't end in 1935, pampango.

One of the biggest errors you just made here is that during FDR's time we didn't have monster trade deficits like we have now.

Your posts here are kind of like if the US Chamber of Commerce paid someone to post on DU while using an FDR avatar to ingratiate pro-globalization talking points on a Democratic website.

A repost of my own response to your propaganda from a May, 2012 earlier thread:

So what does NAFTA have to do with it? That is a free trade area with Canada and Mexico (with 5000 pages of regulations, exceptions, and exceptions to exceptions.

admit the O/P does sound cute.

Outsourcing to Mexico and Canada just aren't big in the news. There are plenty of DUers who would talk about it a lot.

Mexicans would not have to migrate to the US to steal US jobs if US jobs were going to Mexico.

agreement?

Here's the ones that have been signed so far:

1994 - North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)

2001 - Jordan – United States Free Trade Agreement
2004 - Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement
2004 - Chile - United States Free Trade Agreement
2004 - Singapore – United States Free Trade Agreement
2006 - Bahrain – United States Free Trade Agreement
2006 - Morocco - United States Free Trade Agreement
2006 - Oman – United States Free Trade Agreement
2007 - Peru – United States Trade Promotion Agreement
2005 - Dominican Republic–Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA; incl. Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic)

2011 - Panama - United States Trade Promotion Agreement
2011 - Colombia - United States Trade Promotion Agreement
2011 - Republic of Korea (South Korea) - United States Free Trade Agreement

Australia?!

Is there any objective proof though that agreements, in which our government was involved with negotiating, always work to our disadvantage? Do we get nothing in these agreements? Do we always lose jobs?

I would like to understand them more, but DU seems to indulge in simple condemnation. Are we supposed to believe then that the government negotiates these agreements to screw us over and benefit some corporations, and that they keep getting away with it and no one notices (except some zealous DUers).

One would think we at least get some ability to break into the markets in those countries.

So, in one sense, they work. They do exactly what they are supposed to do.

If any of these so-called "free-trade" agreements worked to the advantage of middle-class workers in the United States, it would not be necessary to keep these so-called "free-trade" agreements somewhat secretive. All the politicans who favored them would be crowing about them.

We want to break into the markets in those countries? In what way? The military-industrial complex sells war machinery to those in foreign countries. Those that own and/or control commodities sell such commodities to foreign countries. Trees from public land, for example, is being harvested in Alaska and being shipped to foreign countries so that they can manufacture wood products. Coal is loaded on ocean-going ships in Duluth, Minnesota and shipped to foreign countries so that they can manufacture iron and steel, and products made from iron and steel. The big money people are exploiting and selling off resources like owners in third-world countries.

No one is claiming that the pending wage-lowering, let's-send-more-jobs-to-foreign-countries "free-trade" agreement is going to produce more middle-class jobs in this country. It's not going to happen.

How do you know this is the way it is? Are these facts or just regurgitated opinion? What exactly are we shipping to Australia and vice versa? Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Canada?

I recall NAFTA was big in the news - and listening to the Congressional debates on the radio. And what has been the effect of NAFTA in terms of actual facts? The jobs can hardly have gone to Mexico. Mexico got poorer than ever and undocumented migration to the US increased.

Why would even our corporate masters be able to continually get away with just screwing us over in favor of foreign countries without getting us anything to our benefit? Are we really that victimized? And if we are how much so must people in Mexico and Chile and Colombia? I can't picture them getting the benefits of these agreements, just their leaders/elites.

Forget about the theoretical bullshit that lets third-way types whitewash eroding the US industrial base. It's BAD policy. That is all.

I see a class war building... not good. Some people just can't get enough.