I've posted articles like this many times, but we need to keep the pressure on and spread the word. Actually, Bernie is a little low in his job loss estimates. The real number is in the millions when you add lost service and spin-off jobs. Then you have the falling wages and increased social costs created by what is nothing more than an investment scam for the rich masquerading as "Free Trade".
From Rep Bernie Sanders......
http://bernie.house.gov/documents/opeds/20040127181128.aspPublished on 1/27/2004 in the THE NATION
NAFTA: A DISASTER FOR MEXICANS AS WELL AS AMERICANS
by Rep. Bernie Sanders
Last month, along with six other members of the U.S. Congress, I visited Mexico on a Teamster sponsored trip in order to assess what NAFTA has done to Mexico. What we saw and heard was not pretty. We encountered horrendous poverty, environmental degradation and a lawless and corrupt environment. We talked with mothers who couldn't afford to send their kids to school, workers who were fired for the crime of trying to organize a union and religious workers who were trying to protect young women from the mass murders and rapes which were taking place in Ciudad Juarez, right across the border from El Paso. We also met people who displayed enormous courage and tenacity.
It's pretty well accepted that in the ten years since its enactment, NAFTA has been a disaster for workers in the United States. A small pre-NAFTA trade deficit with Mexico and Canada has exploded to an $85 billion trade deficit. NAFTA has cost us almost 900,000 jobs, many of them in the manufacturing sector that paid decent wages. With cheap labor available around the corner, NAFTA has enabled companies to suppress wages, contributing to the (much ignored) reality that millions of Americans are now working longer hours for lower wages than they used to.
But at least, say NAFTA apologists, the trade agreement has been a boon to the Mexican economy and has improved the lives of our poor neighbors to the south. If only it were true. Since NAFTA, poverty has increased in Mexico, real wages have declined and the minimum wage there has lost almost 50% of its purchasing power. Perhaps most significantly, Mexico's agricultural sector has lost 1.3 million jobs over the last ten years. Mexican farmers, unable to compete with subsidized, cheap corn from American agri-business corporations, have been forced off the land and into Mexico's larger cities or across the border as an illegal immigrant. As stark as these statistic are, they cannot begin to convey what our delegation witnessed in Mexico -- the true human price being extracted from the Mexican people by our trade policy.
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