FINAL WARNING: Ready to Spring the Trap
Canadian Free Trade Agreement (CFTA), makes the United States,
Canada, and Mexico unequal partners in trade. On December 31, 1988,
President Ronald Reagan signed Executive Order #12662 which said,
that regardless of the constitutionality of decisions made by the bi-
national committees of the CFTA, the United States had to accept it.When NAFTA was approved by Congress, more of our national
sovereignty was given up to Mexico. Since Mexican workers do not
have minimum wage protection and do not have the right to bargain
collectively, the agreement has made Mexico fertile territory for
American companies to relocate, thus creating a huge loss of
American jobs, and the exploitation of the Mexican workforce. That is
only part of the inequities that are contained in this agreement.Since the inception of NAFTA (January 1, 1994), some of the initial
results, were that net exports to Mexico had fallen by nearly $500
million, our trade surplus with Mexico had been cut in half, more than
230 companies had moved to Mexico, and there had been a
tremendous increase in America’s investment in Mexico. Mattel, the
toy manufacturing giant, said that NAFTA would create more American
jobs, yet the Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch reported that they
laid off 520 workers at their Medina, New York facility. The report
further stated that “As of mid-August 1995, the Department of Labor
had certified 38,148 workers as having lost their jobs to NAFTA.”
Months later, the Clinton Administration reported that 127,000 jobs
were created by NAFTA (as of 2001, according to Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda,
research director of the North American Integration & Development
Center at University of California at Los Angeles, only about 100,000
new jobs have been added), but what they didn’t reveal, was that a
report by the Joint Economic Committee of Congress indicated that
the nation had lost 137,000 jobs (this total had risen to 316,000 by
2001).During the first nine months of 1994, our trade surplus with Mexico
shrunk by 27 percent. This report further said that this was “only the
tip of the job displacement iceberg.” According to Rep. Marcy Kaptur
(D-OH), NAFTA promoters said that 60,000 American manufactured
cars would be exported to Mexico in 1994, but only 28,000 were. Not
only that, we ended up importing 278,000 cars from Mexico.