"Kucinich: New Hampshire Jobs Depend on Ending NAFTA"

[ThirdWheelLegend]

http://www.kucinich.us/statements.htm#NHNAFTA

1/23/04

snip>>
"The unemployment rate in New Hampshire was 4.3 percent in November 2003, up from 2.8 percent in January 2001 - a 53.57 percent increase. In total, 11,255 more workers in New Hampshire have become unemployed under the Bush Administration.

"The national unemployment rate in December of 2003 was 5.7 percent, up from 4.1 percent in January 2001. We have lost nearly 3 million private sector jobs. In the third quarter of 2003, America's gross domestic product surged at a rate of 8.2 percent, and corporate profits grew at an annual rate above 40 percent. But during this same period, wages and salaries grew by less than 1 percent. When someone calls that a recovery, they're telling you more about themselves than about the economy.
snip>>>
"When NAFTA was signed in 1994, it was hailed by the national media and by CEOs for ensuring American 'global competitiveness.' Since then, America's trade deficit has exploded to $418 billion, and NAFTA has cost America 525,000 jobs, most of them in manufacturing. Tax cuts for millionaires have failed repeatedly to create jobs. Making permanent the tax cuts that were temporary, the ones that were supposed to give the economy a quick boost, would cost us another $1 trillion, but it won't create jobs. The Bush Administration's idea that the 'No Child Left Behind Act' or the new energy bill or limiting medical liability will somehow create jobs makes clear that jobs for this Administration are an afterthought."

"We must repeal NAFTA and the WTO and stop chasing jobs out of the country. I will make this my first act in office, and I will replace these with fair bilateral trade agreements that protect jobs. I will also create a WPA-style jobs program to provide 2 million Americans with work restoring our infrastructure."
snip>>>


NAFTA needs to go, replaced with FAIR trade. This is a very important issue and Dennis leads once again.

TWL

[redqueen]

1. CAFTA is coming, too

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040112/pl_nm/trade_dominican_usa_dc_1

U.S., Dominican Rep Begin Free Trade Talks
Mon Jan 12, 1:46 PM ET

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (Reuters) - The United States and the Dominican Republic began talks on Monday to include the Caribbean nation in a U.S.-Central American free trade agreement struck last month.

Despite a last-minute plea from Dominican businesses to delay entering any tariff-eradicating accord, President Hipolito Mejia said his country of nearly 9 million was ready and willing to ratify a deal.

An agreement would add the Dominican Republic to the Central America Free Trade Agreement, or CAFTA, reached in mid-December between the United States and El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. Costa Rica backed out of the accord but expects to conclude further negotiations with Washington this month.

The Bush administration hopes to submit CAFTA to the U.S. Congress this spring.
--------

I thought they were submitting it this month.

Hopefully the free-trade issue will be getting plenty of attention close to the convetion. :)

[redqueen]

2. teeny little gratuitous kick for the workers of the world

:kick:

[redqueen]

3. Just some links

CAFTA: Part of the FTAA Puzzle

The Central American Free Trade Agreement (known as CAFTA) is a proposed agreement between the United States and five Central American nations (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica and Nicaragua). Offical negotiations began in January of 2003, and negotiators hope to have an agreement completed by the end of the year. CAFTA is a piece in the FTAA jigsaw puzzle and is likely to be based on the same failed neoliberal NAFTA model. It would serve to push ahead the corporate globalization model that has caused the "race to the bottom" in labor and environmental standards and promotes privatization and deregulation of key pubic services.

CAFTA fact sheets



North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)

Department of Labor Certified Trade-Related Job Loss
***
http://www.citizen.org/publications/release.cfm?ID=7295">NAFTA at Ten Series

January 1, 2004 marks the tenth anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement’s implementation. NAFTA promoters - including many of the world’s largest corporations - promised it would create hundreds of thousands of new high-wage U.S. jobs, raise living standards in the U.S., Mexico and Canada, improve environmental conditions and transform Mexico from a poor developing country into a booming new market for U.S. exports. NAFTA opponents - including labor, environmental, consumer and religious groups - argued that NAFTA would launch a race-to-the-bottom in wages, destroy hundreds of thousands of good U.S. jobs, undermine democratic control of domestic policy-making and threaten health, environmental and food safety standards.

Why such divergent views? NAFTA was a radical experiment - never before had a merger of three nations with such radically different levels of development been attempted. Plus, until NAFTA “trade” agreements only dealt with cutting tariffs and lifting quotas to set the terms of trade in goods between countries. But NAFTA contained 900 pages of one-size-fits-all rules to which each nation was required to conform all of its domestic laws - regardless of whether voters and their democratically-elected representatives had previously rejected the very same policies in Congress, state legislatures or city councils. NAFTA required limits on the safety and inspection of meat sold in our grocery stores; new patent rules that raised medicine prices; constraints on your local government’s ability to zone against sprawl or toxic industries; and elimination of preferences for spending your tax dollars on U.S.-made products or locally-grown food. In fact, calling NAFTA a “trade” agreement is misleading, NAFTA is really an investment agreement. Its core provisions grant foreign investors a remarkable set of new rights and privileges that promote relocation abroad of factories and jobs and the privatization and deregulation of essential services, such as water, energy and health care.

Remarkably, many of NAFTA’s most passionate boosters in Congress and among economists never read the agreement. They made their pie-in-the-sky promises of NAFTA benefits based on trade theory and ideological prejudice for anything with the term “free trade” attached to it. Now, ten years later, the time for conjecture and promises is over: the data are in and they clearly show the damage NAFTA has wrought for millions of people in the U.S., Mexico and Canada. Thankfully, the failed NAFTA model - a watered down version of which is also contained in the World Trade Organization (WTO) - is merely one among many options. Throughout the world, people suffering with the consequences of this disastrous experiment are organizing to demand the better world we know is possible. But, we face a race against time. The same interests who got us into NAFTA are now pushing to expand it and lock in 31 more countries in Latin American and the Caribbean through the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and five Central American countries through a Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).


NAFTA and Democracy

[ThirdWheelLegend]

4. thanks much for the links, this is very important

Candidates who fail to stress these issues must not have the common person's interests at heart.

TWL

[snoochie]

5. I know this is a duplicate thread (or the other one is)

But these links are great.