Why I defend NAFTA on DU, in four charts

[MrMickeysMom]

123. Please consider this observation to counter this utter bullshit on NAFTA...

I can only imagine the reason you have thought to present this tripe.Perhaps you've not participated in the U.S. job market since NAFTA sailed through? Perhaps you are flurrying your fingers from across the world?

I recall purchasing a copy of NAFTA volumes I and II, which was quite a read. After seeing that the door would be left open within a few years for outside labor markets to compete for jobs inside health care (regulated, licensed if you grew up in the U.S.), I gave both volumes away at a garage sale. I continued to see the impact on labor forces competition and the race to low wage for a few more decades. Those in the health care sector felt the real effects after Clinton, Bush and now Obama, meanwhile seeing the effects of GATT, and the Pacific Rim.

What kind of labor markets were affected? Immediately after NAFTA sailed through, the NYTimes danced in unison to the boost the new economy would add to investments, banking, and how consumers would be "big winners". But, the real number of jobs that were off-shored showed the opposite. Unskilled work forces decreased for real where I have lived in FL, TX, and PA, regardless of the Clinton administration's fantasies about retraining workers. That was a fantasy. We had already been loosing the manufacturing industries by then late 1980's. NAFTA and GATT exacerbated the giant sucking sound.

The same was true of skilled white-collar workers. So, where the fuck have YOU been?

Tell me, can you get software programmers in India who are very well trained at a fraction of the cost of Americans? You should know this. The answer, "yes". Somebody involved in this business recently told me that Indian programmers are actually being brought to the US and put into what are kind of like slave labor camps and kept at Indian salaries-a fraction of American salaries- doing software development. So that kind of work can be farmed out just as easily.

Look no further than the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Better yet, come back to America.

You know, corporations can operate internationally, but unions can't-so there's no way for the work force to fight back against the internationalization of production.

There already is a net effect - a decline in wealth and income for most people in Mexico and for most people in the US. Those plants along the border that started to "compete" in manufacturing refrigerators and other household appliances could not afford buying one. Compare hourly wages… so much for NAFTA, and so much for your insisting that the giant sucking sound was nonexistent. Maybe you need to move a little closer to the U.S. labor market. Maybe you need to see what kind of upward mobility there is left in a labor force not represented by anyone but the corporate structure they are stuck into. No increased mobility to skilled and non-skilled… No labor presence, WHICH, BTW, was the driving force behind these trade agreements.

Your entire OP is really the giant sucking sound, because it SO will not support the shift of labor markets and ability to support middle class in the U.S. or anywhere that competed with it. What a damned shame that you used this opportunity to present your data. It doesn't convince anyone with an IQ within 1 SD of the norm otherwise what we clearly experience.