Free Trade – the Kiss of Death for Our Economy

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If an enemy was seeking to hire someone to destroy America he might have hired the political leaders who created the foreign, undemocratic World Trade Organization (WTO), job killing North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the pending disastrous Korean-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA).

In 1994 there was NAFTA; an agreement that set out to reduce trade barriers and promote “free trade” between Mexico, Canada, and the United States (which turned out to be a disaster for Canada and the U.S.) Ross Perot’s comments “a giant sucking sound” turned out to be true.

In 2005 the US ratified CAFTA. Similar to NAFTA, this agreement attempted to eliminate trade barriers and widen the trade community. CAFTA included the Central American countries of Costa Rica, El Salvador Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and later the Dominican Republic.

Now the Korean-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, or KORUS FTA, will be even more damaging as it will not only further deplete our manufacturing base, it will also take international trade, banking and finance out of our control.

If this passes, every aspect of our economy will be controlled by foreigners. Most of our legislators are not even aware of what is in this agreement – it is hundreds of pages long! Write your representatives or visit their offices with your friends, relatives and this article, and demand that they not let the Korean Free Trade Agreement pass.

To understand the effects of this newly proposed job killing free trade agreement, we should focus on what has happened under NAFTA. According to the Economic Policy Institute, NAFTA has increased trade deficit between Mexico and Canada and crippled US jobs.

NAFTA has allowed corporations to move their companies to less-regulated production facilities abroad. The truth is NAFTA has exploited America, increasing the trade deficit, exporting manufacturing jobs to the lowest bidder and helping to support stagnant blue-collar wages.

America’s recent trade history with South Korea is also filled with serious problems. In 2007, the U.S. sold 7,000 American vehicles in South Korea, or less than one percent of the entire market. South Korean automakers, on the other hand, sold 615,000 vehicles in the U.S. that same year. In the first 10 months of 2010, South Korean auto exports to America totaled $7.41 billion. U.S. auto exports to Korea, on the other hand, totaled just $536 million in the same period – just 7 percent. That is a difference of over $6.8 billion. How would we run anything but a trade deficit with those numbers?

The Korean Free Trade Agreement will export jobs and increase our trade deficit. We are being promised that the KORUS FTA will create more American exports, but in reality it will only export American jobs. According to the Economic Policy Institute’s estimates, in the first seven years of the agreement, the KORUS FTA could cost as many as 159,000 American jobs and increase our trade deficit by $16.7 billion. Obama has promised that this deal would create 70,000 low-paying insourced jobs (Americans working for foreign bosses), which would not even be half of the high paying jobs we would lose. As more foreign products enter our country, our trade deficit will continue to rise out of control.

We must tell Congress that the KORUS FTA is not what the United States or its workers need. To even consider this disastrous proposed trade agreement is to contemplate economic suicide. Click on the link below to contact your representatives in Washington.

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