Bernie - Latinos and the TPP

[azmom]

Bernie's opposition to the TPP is sweet music to many latino voters and here is why



http://www.latinorebels.com/2015/05/08/tpp-puts-latino-immigrants-at-even-greater-risk-part-2/

The TPP extends the “free trade” malaise that NAFTA and CAFTA and other “job creating, economy-enhancing” treaties promised to do. With Mexico as signatory, a country that went from 99% economic growth in 20 years to less than 1% a year after NAFTA, the prospect of another wave of immigrants displaced by a shattered economy is not probable: it is a certainty. The Mexican economy cannot retool its economy fast enough to absorb the thousands of workers who had previously been left untouched by NAFTA, but will now be subject to an even more poisonous treaty. Those workers, many of them in service industries, will have to choose to head north across the border and take their chances in the U.S. or…

Be hired by a TPP-protected multinational. To get paid whatever the company wants to pay, subject to whatever legal protections the company is willing to offer, under contract for as long as the company wishes and replaceable whenever the company chooses.

The options for Mexican immigrants thus become (a) cross the border illegally, (b) find any job and get a worker visa or (c) get hired as a corporate serf.

[cascadiance]

1. It was NAFTA combined with our farm subsidies that triggered many undocumented workers here...

Many of those who have moved up here to work (and some who have become citizens) were displaced by NAFTA policies that allowed so many companies to build factories down there that gained a lot of cheap labor at the time from displaced farmers who couldn't compete with our "dumping" of exports of corn, etc. that were subsidized and kept them underpriced compared to locally grown products. When NAFTA eventually lead these multinationals to move their "bottom racing" operations to Asia from Mexico and other places in South America, that left many of those that had started working in those operations as a result of this displacement had to move to the U.S. to get work then.

Yep, I'm sure that they don't want many of their families still in these countries to undergo the same struggles they had in the NAFTA years with the TPP and other of these "free trade" deals facilitating the global race to the bottom again.

[aspirant]

2. It's good to know

that the Latino/a community is seeking economic and social justice, right up Bernie's alley.

[azmom]

4. Latinos also want real change and that's

Why we will be working and voting for Bernie.

Solidarity!