First Obama flipflops on the war, now it comes to NAFTA. From Fortune News:
In an interview with Fortune to be featured in the magazine’s upcoming issue, the presumptive Democratic nominee backed off his harshest attacks on the free trade agreement and indicated he didn’t want to unilaterally reopen negotiations on NAFTA.
“Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified,” he conceded, after I reminded him that he had called NAFTA “devastating” and “a big mistake,” despite nonpartisan studies concluding that the trade zone has had a mild, positive effect on the U.S. economy.
The free trade zone NAFTA creates is a special benefit to certain big businesses while a detriment to their up and coming competitors. Any free trade agreement that takes thousands of pages is not a free trade agreement, but a special interest agreement.
How long does a free trade agreement need to be? Sixteen words.
Regulated trade between the individuals, companies, and institutions within our respective countries will be illegal henceforth.
Filed under: Barack Obama, Economics, Election 2008, Media, News, Politics | Tagged: Free Trade
IThe ‘Under the Bus’ Executive Summary has been updated appropriately.
Free Trade is a noble idea and you have written a very short and complete sentence. If there are no regulations however and completely free trade, then say… any armament company can sell any weapons platform to anyone they choose? Including WMD? Nuclear power to any country with no regulation? Surely Lance you’re not implying that we should sell the F-22 Raptor to China and Russia just because free trade demands it and they are awash in excess dollars?
For true free trade would also surmise that the labor and material costs are identical everywhere. For instance, wouldn’t it make more economic sense for agribusiness in the U.S. to buy up farmland in Africa to grow crops cheaply and then sell the farmland in American for development? We could invade Zimbabwe, rid the world of Mugabe and grab all that fallow land for free. It’s a win-win all the way around. They would make much higher profits and finally rid the Bitter Hinterlands of all those pesky farmers that get paid not to grow crops. Blacktop for all! That’s our rallying cry.
As for Obama, we’ve said it before and we’ll say it again.
It’s Chicago.
“We don’t want nobody that nobody sent and we’re cashing our markers.”
What is the purpose of our EPA, our 8 hour workday, our child labor laws, our required safety regulations, if other countries aren’t required to have these burdens and we end up offshoring all of our jobs to polluting, child labor utilizing, government subsidized, nations.
FairTrade, is a much better practice. Who decides what is Fair is where the problems come in.