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In reply to the discussion: Passage Of TPP Will Be A Disaster For Dems Just Like NAFTA was. I'm Really Pissed. [View all]nadinbrzezinski
(154,021 posts)you are defending the indefensible. You keep defending the indefensible. So I will ask. HAVE YOU DIRECTLY BENEFITED IN INVESTMENTS from NAFTA? Then it would make perfect sense.
Nor are you getting this, SINCE NAFTA the Mexican Economy has actually been more stagnant, with a slight bump early on when AMERICAN FACTORIES left for the free trade zones, maquiladora regions, and then all that crashed when those same companies took their portable factories, and moved to Vietnam and China. Some are now coming back to both Mexico and the US, but not enough to make up for the losses, and that was dependent on the cost of moving finished goods across the pacific.
These trade agreements have made this far easier to do this. Corporations follow cheap labor, and Mexican labor was too expensive, so now there are efforts afoot to make it cheaper again. Don't you love neo liberalism? I know you do.
In the meantime, and this is why the Mexican economy is quite sluggish, in particular in the industrial sector, the native Mexican textile industry disappeared, almost overnight. The same happened to the shoe industry, and leather works. Some of that is starting to come back. So you know I know people personally who had to close their factories, businesses built over the course of 40 + years who had to close. You know how many thousands of union workers lost their jobs? Instead they had maquiladoras, where their job protections and ability to a union was greatly diminished. Since you are so damn concerned about workers... really.
Now let's talk field workers. Many of them moved to the US in a well known migratory wave in the 1990s, because they could not find a job in those factories that came and left. So they came to the United States, at times illegally recruited, for the record, by corporations like Tyson foods.
So as I said, you do not get to play pin the tail on the chart. Not without getting an education in the process.