Tapsearch Com EditorPress mute about the real Free Trade story
September 9th 2008 22:44
Bizarre Politics Reports:
Muted Press trys again
Noted Cleveland Plain Dealer Journalist Elizabeth Auster trys to define what NAFTA
is all about and Elizabeth Sullivan trys to define protectionism that virtually never existed. They write great articles but ignore the core of Free Trade story.
Millions did not make it through the economic storms in the Free Trade cyclone but no one in the press wants to talk about it
Top Journalists at the Cleveland Plain Dealer know that Free Trade and Globalization did not start with NAFTA, GATT, CAFTA or the WTO. NAFTA was just the "eye of the economic storm" that has caused so much damage to human dignity in the workday with the lives of millions of families were hit. Many are missing in action with no statistics covering their plight.
Nothing can be defined until history reveals what really happened and the media begins to finally report it. Here is part of the real story.
The U.S. Federal Government sponsored the moving of factories outside the USA starting in 1956 and funded relative programs since then. This evolved into the Maquilador factory program in Mexico. It took a long time but by 1992, prior to the passing of NAFTA, more than 2,000 U.S. factories were moved to Mexico alone. This numbered quickly doubled to more than 4,000 after President Clinton steered the passage of NAFTA in 1993 and about a year later rushed billions of dollars to Mexico to save the peso which could easily be interpreted as a payoff for the Free Trade deals.
How can there be any real statistics when the defintion of what exports and imports are these days ?
During the most massive dislocation of jobs in U.S. history, it is difficult to even define what an export and import are since products that once were made entirely in the USA were and are being sent back to America as imports and the parts sent to places like Mexico are called
exports. The U.S. has many foreign assembly factories now. How do they compute with the definitions of import and export since so much is going back and forth.
I also know from experience that U.S. manufacturers sent their "dirty" manufacturing cycle to Mexico and then sent the item back to the USA for final production. What is an export or import with these conditions in place? Overall how can anything be called an export if the product is sent to the factory that was once only in the USA.
This I do know and do not need any statistics to know it. I lived it -
like millions of other Americans. Prior to the passing of NAFTA, about
400,000 already had lost their jobs related to the auto industry due to
Free Trade and Globalization. About 700,000 already had lost their jobs
related to the steel industy due to Free Trade and Globalization. Then,
more than a million lost their jobs in the computer and high tech
industries in the pre and post NAFTA era. This was what the Y2K crisis
was all about. No one was left to tend to the updates and upgrades.
Here is what I know from living through it. My example represents
millions of others in the same boat. I had about 1000 accounts in my
customer list with most being in manufacturing with my main accounts
being industrial computer manufacturers. Virtually none have survived.
I had about 1000 competitors in similar businesses like mine in a
tri-state area surrounding my location. Virtually none have survived.
I had hundreds of distributors and manufacturers in my supply channels.
Virtually none have survived. Most of these companies played a part in
our Northern Ohio region leading the way in high tech innovations. They
were smashed apart in the economic storms of our times.
I and all of the above do not need any statistics or debates about
protectionism because we lived through these storms as many lost
everything they worked an entire life to accumulate. And there really no
programs to help anyone.
It is now apparent that the economic storm is now hitting newspapers
like the Plain Dealer who are shrinking in size and shrinking the words
one needs to tell the real stories of our times. This is self- evident
as we read the newspapers and listen to the major media channels.
The newspapers now depend on news services for their news without
local verification. The seem to accept any story but the the real stories of
our times.
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