Trade deals hurting US
Recall the Ebola outbreak in West Africa a few years ago? Because of this outbreak, our Congress took action last spring and passed a law that labels on food products containing the country of origin.
Canada and Mexico balked at this law because such a law went against the North American Free Trade Agreement); and quite recently, Congress repealed this labeling law.
Last week, Canada had decided to sue the United States for $13 billion because this is the amount of money Canada believes it would have made had the Keystone XL Pipeline gone through. This is another derivative of the NAFTA accord. Shut or close a project down (no matter what the reasons are), the owner must be compensated with the same amount of money the owners would have received had the pipeline project been completed. For the amount of years the pipeline would have lasted, this is roughly $5-6 billion a year for at least 50 years. This is assuming Canada’s pipeline would last at least as long as our Alaskan Pipeline, which has been pumping oil for 40 years.
This is what happens to trade agreements that are put on fast-track, to prevent the bill from being read and amended and to prohibit any future amendments from being added.
This now leads me to the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership), which is designated to become law by March of this year.
Notice the trade is called free trade, not fair trade. After all, how can we have fair trade with TPP when five of the 12 members are third-world countries, which I may add, we will soon become.
This trade deal was drawn up by roughly 600 people who are CEOs of banks and trading houses in New York. Does anyone believe a trade deal drawn up by Wall Street could ever be for the greater good of the United States? If you do, then you must also believe the sun is cold!
Obama also mentioned increasing our exports to TPP members which leads us to ask: How can the United States export any goods made here to third-world countries unless they make the same wages we do or we make the same wages they do? Which is it? Is this beginning to sound like a Shakespeare comedy?
The third-world countries in the TPP are Mexico, Chili, Peru, Malaysia and Vietnam. I don’t mind trade agreements with countries that have an income ratio within $5,000 (more or less) of our own GDP which presently stands at $53,000 per capita, but Vietnam has a GDP of $4,000. What could we possibly export to Vietnam when their income is 7.5 percent of ours?
Fair trade to me means for every ton of goods we import from a country, we also export a ton of goods to that same country. But it doesn’t work that way. For every car we export to Japan, we import 99! That’s free trade, but not fair trade.
You’ve all seen the effects of these trade, all of which happened at the request of Wall Street.
I personally believe that 50 percent of our congressmen will do what Wall Street wants them to do or tells them to do.
It’s been apparent, at least to me, that our elected officials in Congress no longer have an allegiance to their constituents. Their allegiance is to Wall Street. The trade agreements listed above are proof of that.
Randy Warnick is a resident of Smock.