The jobs crisis and the GOP

I used to find it shocking when I found myself agreeing with Pat Buchanan on anything. Nowadays I just take it in stride. :)

http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=37516

(snip)

As Robert Novak reports, North Carolina welcomed Sen. John Edwards home after his unsuccessful campaign as a hero. Why? At the end, Edwards was a fiery adversary of the Bush-Clinton trade deals, a denunciator of NAFTA, a champion of workers. Indeed, just as almost all the Democrats ended up the campaign sounding like Howard Dean on Iraq, on trade they had all begun to sound like Dennis Kucinich.

(snip)

The trade deals the U.S. government then negotiated, at the behest of U.S. corporations, were not really trade deals at all, but enabling acts. U.S. corporations were told: You can now shut your U.S. factories, shed your U.S. workers, build your new plants in Mexico, China and India, and bring your finished goods back to the United States, free of charge. Go for it!

As Paul Craig Roberts writes, what is happening is not "free trade" in the Adam Smith sense where Portugal makes wine and Britain makes textiles and ships. What is happening is the mass transfer of the "factors of production" from First World countries to Third World countries.

(snip)

The GOP is fortunate its opponent in 2004 is John F. Kerry, who is as clueless as they are on the new world economy that has been designed, and is operating, to loot America of her patrimony.
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He also writes in this piece that at a conference on immigration and jobs hosted by The American Cause (which he chairs) that a speaker said that though he voted for Bush in 2000, he would never do so again, and, "The room erupted in applause, though virtually all there were conservatives, and all had once been Goldwater-Nixon-Reagan Republicans."

Thank God for small favors!

eom