Sur

Sunday November 6, 2005 - 1:18PM EDT

So today I distrubingly read about how President Bush and the administration wants Brazil to back his free trade proposal for the western hemisphere. Ross Perot called out this tactic back in 1996. What free trade does to america. Jobs my ass. What happened with NAFTA is that massive amounts of jobs were moved to mexico depleting. What you get a massive amounts on low level jobs in other countries to produce goods for the US market. This is disgusting and I don't know why people don't see it. Reduce poverty? Are you kidding. Sure it will create jobs. Create a whole bunch of low level manufacturing jobs so that americans can have cheaper goods. Improve quality of life? Improve it to what? Just barely above the "poverty line". The whole aim of this free trade is to make it easier for companies to produce goods by outsourcing the production to places where quality of life is so low that it is substantially cheaper to make them there and import them to the US, tax-free mind you. They don't want to raise quality of life to something like the US that would defeat the whole purpose of the plan. The plan feeds of the fact that there are millions of people in south america that have crappy ass lives. Same thing is happening in China. It is cheaper to make things in China. Why is that? It is not a complex answer, it is simple. The standard of living in most of China is deplorably low compared to the U.S. and there are a ton of people willing to endure those conditions just to eke out a meager living. Don't give me that there are more people excuse and that creates competition. There are so many people in China in dire situations that they are willing to work for such crappy wages. They are used to it. They don't demand a better life comparable to the U.S. because they don't know any other life. But that shit won't last forever and it will begin to catch up with people.

Its pathetic that some people think this is a solution or that it is helping greatly. It raises the standard of living slightly then locks them into that slight raise because anything higher would make it too expensive to make goods. I don't hear anything about plans after their standard of living is raised. This may be a first step to something but no one talks about the integral next step. Because there is no next step to them. They want to keep this monstrous policy locked in forever.

This issue has connections to the whole border dispute that is going on today. Now some want to build a fence. That is ludicrous. Do policy makers not see the connection. All they see is people crossing the border and putting a fence there to block them seems like the best thing to do. They will bemoan danger of border crossing and its illegality but I never hear serious discussion on the factors that lead to border crossing and mitigating them. What happened the NAFTA making things better for Mexicans. That has proven to be a load of crap.