Should be very interesting.

So, +1 to Barack America.

Your reputation as a Fox News contributor speaks for itself... which isn't a kind thing to say, I know. Sorry about that.

Thank you for the post.

Still others of our family members were hired back at half what they were making under tiered agreements.

I will never forget my husband saying, as the ink dried on that law,"Let's make hay while the sun shines. We're going to need it."

We were in healthcare. Once the medical benefits got slashed, guess what happened to the doctors offices and hospital systems? Mergers and downsizing. That was in 2001, for my family, and is still happening region-wide.

As far as automotive jobs. My BIL's job is in Mexico (pre-bailout), and uncles and cousins forced into early retirement.

I had to flee Michigan due to the economy. I wasn't trying to get a job in the auto industry either. But, when one industry starts blowing in the wind others quickly follow and if people don't have money they don't spend money so there goes the economy.

In the South, we refer to it as closing the barn door after the horses are gone.

Another gift primarily for the owner class in America.

Most everyone else got scraps, if anything, and nearly the whole country has less because of it. How pitiful that they would be grateful for that.

Both were bad, and designed by out-of-work purse snatchers. Your purse.

that NAFTA was the second wave...I remember the old Chrysler (may have been Ford) plant on Jefferson when it closed in the late 1970's.

What Detroit (and Michigan) needed to do (even before NAFTA) was to get other industries in the state (much the same thing happened to northwestern Indiana).

I still think that it is wrong to blame the entirety on NAFTA, it was happening before NAFTA...

There's the rise of import cars, flow of jobs to the south, etc. but the most harmful is definitely NAFTA because it hits us at every level from engineering, parts production, to assembly.

People often focus on assembly plants as the "auto industry", when it is so much more.

that's where northern Indiana was hit hard

there were serious issues with foreign competition in the '70s and '80s and the US automakers were not making the best product either.

The spread of the auto industry outward from Detroit proper in the 1950s was the beginning of a process that extended much further afield. Auto plants, and the parts suppliers associated with the industry, were relocated to the southern U.S., and to Canada and Mexico. The major auto plants left in Detroit were closed down, and their workers increasingly left behind. When the auto industry's facilities moved out, there were dramatically adverse ripple economic effects on the city. The neighborhood businesses that had catered to auto workers shut down. This direct and indirect economic contraction caused the city to lose property taxes, wage taxes, and population (and thus consumer demand). The closed auto plants were also often abandoned in a period before strong environmental regulation, causing the sites to become so-called "brownfields," unattractive to potential replacement businesses because of the pollution hang-over from decades of industrial production.[9] The pattern of the deteriorating city by the mid-1960s was visibly associated with the largely departed auto industry. The neighborhoods with the most closed stores, vacant houses, and abandoned lots were in what had formerly been the most heavily populated parts of the city, adjacent to the now-closed older major auto plants.[9]

By the 1970s and 1980s the auto industry suffered setbacks that further impacted Detroit. The industry encountered the rise of OPEC and the resulting sharp increase in gasoline prices. It faced new and intense international competition, particularly from Japanese and German makers. Chrysler avoided bankruptcy in the late 1970s, but only with the aid of a federal bailout. GM and Ford also struggled financially. The industry fought to regain its competitive footing, but did so in very substantial part by introducing cost-cutting techniques focused around automation and thus reduction of labor cost and number of workers. It also relocated ever more of its manufacturing to lower cost states in the U.S. and to low-wage countries. Detroit's residents thus had access to fewer and fewer well-paying, secure auto manufacturing jobs.[9]

We are all Americans, and just because you live somewhere doesn't mean you know every thing about what is happening. We are all aware of the low information southern voters who keep voting in Republicans, who enact policies that impact their lives in a negative way.
So, just because they LIVE in the south, does that mean they comprehend what is happening to them.

You guys ELECTED your governor who is ruining your state, you OBVIOUSLY have low information voters who need some 'splainin', cause they didn't get that one did they?

so, apparently NAFTA was just fine with them.

but I was born and raised in Michigan.

Michigan was already far gone before Snyder and even before B. Clinton.

What, does that mean that voters in Illinois are "low-information voters" because out governors can't stay out of jail.

What paradise do you live in?

downward spiral. So the problems were absolutely rolling prior to NAFTA. That means those problems should have been addressed at some point in the last 27 years. NAFTA rather obviously made things worse rather than better. Also rather obviously, DC and the nation as a whole failed to address the issues mounting in Flint. Now everyone's acting as if the lead in the water is the first big problem in Flint. Fact is, as you say, Flint was in need when Bill Clinton went into office and those needs were compounded by the time he left office. In the time since no administration has focused on Flint. The Clinton Foundation did not seek to assist that community.

I'm not from Michigan, had no relatives there back then (do now) but I knew how bad things were in Flint decades ago because of Moore, not because of Bill Clinton or any program done by the government. Because of reporting of the problems, not because any actions were taken by those in power to address those problems....

My own town was devastated by job losses. Ball Glass moved it's factory to Mexico. 4 other major plants shut down and many smaller ones.

So yeah....

I have family in Southern Ontario who watched their jobs go to Mexico too. Absolutely I'm aware that manufacturing throughout the U.S. has been impacted.

Sorry about your town too.

it wasn't simply Rust Belt cities that were hit like this...Dresden, Germany and Minsk in the Ukraine look very much like Detroit as well (as does Birmingham, England) though Dresden has been recovering for about a decade