Deanna Spingola -- Economic Woes, a Consequence of Free Trade, Part 2

ECONOMIC WOES, A CONSEQUENCE OF FREE TRADE
PART 2 of 2

Deanna Spingola
October 9, 2010
NewsWithViews.com

Promoters sold NAFTA, trade with Mexico, by promising new job creation in the U.S. Yet, research studies and historical examples in other countries provided adequate information and experience to discourage any kind of free trade with two inequitable countries. Labor-intensive manufacturers, encouraged by NAFTA, relocated to Mexico where Mexican nationals were willing to work for less. To get it passed, the Mexican government spent millions on lobbyists and public relations.

U.S. capital, about $70 billion, went south with American jobs. New companies emerged in Mexico, along with debt in the form of interest for loans. There are about 90,000,000 people in Mexico, out of which 200,000 people control the entire wealth of the nation – thirty-two families.

Unfortunately, Mexico, along with many other third world countries, became victims of the economic hit men. John Perkins recently revealed their tactics in his Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Mexico was generating about $30 billion a year towards paying the debt service or interest on its international banking cabal loans. Yet the actual cost amounted to $40-45 billion per year. Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the privately owned Federal Reserve increased the interest rates in late 1994 which deliberately “devastated the Mexican Economy.”[12] In December 1994, Mexico devalued the peso by about 40%.[13] Congress immediately approved a $40 taxpayer funded billion-dollar loan despite debt-burdened Mexico’s inability to repay it. That loan was merely a transfer from our pockets into the international bankers’ coffers. The recent bailouts and Obama’s stimulus package, disguised as assistance to the populace, is a huge transference of wealth – again from the taxpayer’s pockets into the banker’s pockets.

After NAFTA, the Clinton administration hammered through 200 additional trade agreements. The World Trade Organization (WTO) replaced the GATT.[14] The WTO opened the world to corporate predators and further diluted environmental, labor and human rights. The Bretton Woods Agreement (1945), an amendment to the Federal Reserve Act, ultimately led to the establishment of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the GATT, a global economic system that managed free trade with the dollar as the world’s basic currency. The elite designed the system to ensure British and U.S. hegemony over monetary and trade issues. The Federal Reserve, a private enterprise, became master of the economic system.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is located in Geneva, Switzerland. Congress created the WTO as “a policeman, a global free trade enforcer, and a battering ram for the trillion dollar annual world agribusiness trade.” The WTO was devised “to advance the interests of private agribusiness companies.” It is not accountable to any nation’s laws. The WTO may impose disciplinary penalties or other measure on member countries that violate their regulations. The WTO may also force countries to accept genetically modified crops. The WTO is a product of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Seventy-five GATT members and the European Communities founded the WTO on January 1, 1995 as a result of Uruguay Round of trade liberalization talks, held in del Este, Uruguay, in September 1986, and concluded in Marrakech, Morocco, in April 1994.[15]

According to Ian Fletcher, “The U.S. should seek strategic, not unconditional integration with the rest of the world economy. Economic openness, like most things in life, is valuable up to a point – but not beyond it. Fairly open trade, most of the time, is justified. Absolutely free trade, 100 percent of the time, is an extremist position and is not.” Free trade is certainly not inevitable. A former British colony, the U.S., for decades, protected their manufacturing base through protectionist tariffs. The regulation of commerce was included in the Constitution, Article I, Section 8 authorizes Congress “to regulate commerce with foreign nations,” a mandate that is in the best interests of the nation and its people.[16] Nation states are economically essential and relevant as most people, according to Fletcher, live in the country in which they were born. Consequently, their “economic fortunes depend upon the wage and consumption levels within that one society.” When trade laws, to benefit large firms, alter the economic nationalism of a nation, it impacts every resident.[17]

Free trade, as currently practiced with chronic US deficits and a plethora of cheap imports, can actually “seduce” a population into “decadent consumption.” People have abandoned the tradition of saving and frugal living. Business owners often fail to reinvest profits and instead depend on bank loans. Seemingly, individuals in their personal or business circumstances prefer to mortgage their futures in order to obtain immediate gratification. Fletcher claims that Americans are addicted to debt as evidenced by the incidence of consumer credit. America’s combined household and government debt totals 243% of GDP as opposed to China where the government discourages personal debt. At least 500 million Chinese people have a cell phone but only one million Chinese residents have a credit card.[18] China is the world’s largest mobile telephone market.[19] I visited China in 2007 and was amazed at its thriving economy, the huge building projects throughout the country, and the presence of large US-based corporations, like Motorola, in Beijing.

Robert B. Zoellick (CFR, TC, Bilderberg, PNAC), current President of the World Bank, as Under Secretary of State for Economic and Agricultural Affairs (1991-1992) helped seal the NAFTA accord with Mexico. He was also instrumental in launching the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. He was a U.S. Trade Representative (2001-2005) who attempted to fast track the Free Trade of Americas Agreement (FTAA) and negotiated the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) in May 2004. He advised George W. Bush on foreign policy during the 2000 campaign as part of a group led by Condoleezza Rice called The Vulcans. Bush nominated Zoellick to replace Paul Wolfowitz (PNAC) as the new World Bank president.[20]

Residents flee when their nation’s economy fails, or when it is devastated by war. Illegals in the U.S. increased from three million in the 1990s to eleven million with about 55% or six million individuals from Mexico. This resulted from Mexico’s economic crisis in conjunction with George W. Bush’s so-called “guest-worker” program, possibly associated with his secretive meeting in Waco, Texas on March 23, 2005 with then Mexican President Vicente Fox and then Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin. They met to discuss the formation of the North American Community which is, by default, a done deal. The U.S. government has been deliberately ineffective in protecting the southern border in order to create a destabilizing cultural and economic crisis in the U.S.

NAFTA Vote by Party and City, Suburb and Rural Location: [21]

                                       Anti NAFTA             Pro NAFTA
Democrats
City                                 67.4%                            32.6%
Suburb                           59.6%                            40.4%
Rural                              52.2%                            47.8%

Republicans
City                                 22.2%                            77.8%
Suburb                           26.4%                            73.6%
Rural                              21.4%                            78.6%

Some of the same treasonous scoundrels that voted for NAFTA are currently appearing on the privately owned media busily blaming the current administration for not fixing the economy, a direct result of NAFTA. Some of those neo-cons include Newt Gingrich, John Boehner, Tom DeLay, Dick Durbin, Jeffrey Flake, Thomas Foley, John Kasich, Dick Armey, Dennis Hastert, and on the left, Nancy Pelosi. She, as Speaker of the House, pushed through the disastrous healthcare bill in the same manner. These politicians count on the fact that the US public has forgotten who voted on NAFTA and what it did. They are now blaming the bulk of the country’s economic woes on others, such as people who shouldn’t have borrowed money to buy homes (now in foreclosure) and a number of other issues – never on the fact that they imposed a treaty on the US that was deliberately designed to de-industrialize the country and cause an economic catastrophe. Neo-con Republicans continue to maintain that NAFTA was a good policy, but for who? Mexico, now a slave-wage corporate slum-burb from which desperate citizens attempt to escape is a direct result of NAFTA. Meanwhile, jobless, middle-class Americans struggle to stave-off foreclosure.

In March 2010 Rep. Gene Taylor, a Mississippi Democrat, lead a small group of twenty-eight lawmakers who introduced legislation that would require President Obama to relinquish our participation in NAFTA, the 16-year trade agreement that began the de-industrialization of America, a process that has created the current joblessness (10 to 12%) and the economic fallout. The National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, organizations that represent the elite, have always supported NAFTA. If Taylor’s legislation passes, Obama would have to give Canada and Mexico six months’ notice of the U.S. intentions to vacate the pact.[22]

In his campaign speeches Obama opposed NAFTA but now is in the process of negotiating with officials in South Korea, Panama and Colombia to implement trade pacts with those countries. In March 2010, U.S. officials also began trade negotiations with Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Chile, Peru, Vietnam and Brunei in what would be the Asia-Pacific regional free-trade agreement. Members of the House of Representatives are supposed to vote before the end of the year whether the U.S. is to retain their membership in the World Trade Organization.[23]

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Ian Fletcher says, “Free trade is inexorably bleeding our economy and preventing it from returning to true health. Nobody in the Obama administration wants to talk about the economics of free trade, because as soon as one seriously scrutinizes this doctrine, one begins to discover that free trade may be the biggest myth in American economics.”[24]

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Footnotes:

1, There is no Need for Anyone to go to America: Commercial Correspondence and Nineteenth Century Globalization from Papers found by Jessica Lepler, Assistant Professor of American History at the University of New Hampshire, during research into the 1837 financial crisis in the US.
2, The Judas Goats, the Enemy Within by Michael Collins Piper, American Free Press, Washington, DC, 2006, p. 30
3, Rockefeller Internationalism by Will Banyan, Part 1, Nexus Magazine Volume 10 - Number 3, (April-May 2003)
4, Hitler’s Secret Bankers, the Myth of Swiss Neutrality During the Holocaust by Adam LeBor, Birch Lane Press, New York, 1997, p. 73
5, Free Trade Doesn’t Work, What Should Replace It and Why by Ian Fletcher, U.S. Business & Industry Council, Washington, DC, 2010, pp. 158-159
6, Al Gore: A User’s Manual by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Verso 2000, pp. 160-171
7, Organized Labor’s Campaign Contributions after the NAFTA Vote: Rhetoric or Retribution? by Gretchen Anne Phillips and Edward Tower, p. 3
8, NAFTA, GATT Uruguay Round, and Fast Track 1998: a Brief Legislative History, Institute for International Economics, www.iie.com, p. 1
9, Free Trade Doesn’t Work, What Should Replace It and Why by Ian Fletcher, U.S. Business & Industry Council, Washington, DC, 2010, pp. 158-159
10, The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy by Patrick J. Buchanan, Little, Brown, New York, p. 269
11, Al Gore: A User’s Manual by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Verso 2000, pp. 160-171
12, Texas and Mexico, Immediate Impact of the Mexican Crisis.
13, NAFTA and the Peso Collapse, Not Just a Coincidence by Robert A. Blecker, Economic Policy Institute, Briefing Paper.
14, Seeds of Destruction, the Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation by F. William Engdahl, Global Research, Center for Research on Globalization, Montreal, Quebec, 2007, pp. 216-247
15, Ibid, p. 217
16, Free Trade Doesn’t Work, What Should Replace It and Why by Ian Fletcher, U.S. Business & Industry Council, Washington, DC, 2010, pp. 20-21. This is a book that everyone interested in so-called free trade should read.
17, Ibid, pp. 23-24, 25
18, Ibid, pp. 48-49
19, Motorola's Cell-Phone Stumble in China, Telecom August 28, 2008
20, Robert Zoellick
21, Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper, Washington, DC, Political Arithmetic of the NAFTA Vote by Lawrence Mishel and Ruy A. Teixeira, p. 12
22, Reuters, A small group of U.S. lawmakers unveiled legislation on Thursday to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement in the latest sign of congressional disillusionment with free-trade deals.
23, Ibid
24, Free Trade Doesn’t Work, What Should Replace It and Why by Ian Fletcher

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Deanna Spingola has authored two books on quilt design, an activity that required methodical analysis and mathematical exactness. She has also engaged in extensive family history research through which she acquired an understanding of public and private records and an appreciation for accurate documentation and history. An understanding of our past is essential to our comprehension of contemporary events. She Investigates government and corporate corruption as it relates to the faltering liberties of American citizens and the war-targeted population of other countries. She is not afraid to address controversial issues. She is the author of When the Power Elite Rules, a Study in Imperialism, Genocide and Emancipation a three-book series. She also has a new radio show on the Republic Broadcasting Network.