What does every president between Nixon and Obama (except Ford) have in common?
Over the last four decades, Presidents Nixon, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama all shared the same propensity for signing trade agreements that have done nothing but destory the middle class segment of American workers.
No one in the Oval Office in the last four decades, regardless of party affiliation, has been capable of getting free trade right. When one president signed a trade agreement that proved detrimental, the next president signed another to cement the mistakes.
On Tuesday, President Obama headed to Asia to push for another Trans-Pacific trade partnership that would include new agreements with Vietnam, Malaysia, Japan, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Singapore, New Zealand, Chile, Peru and Brunei.
We’ve been down this road before, and all America has to show for past trade agreements are closed factories, lower wages, and the loss of 4.8 million manufacturing jobs, as reported in The New York Times on Sunday. One can’t even call it a trade because the U.S. has constantly earned the short end of the stick. It’s more like a giveaway.
The introduction of China and India into the U.S. trade market has further escalated the demise of job possibilities for the blue collar, middle-class American worker.
As if to pour salt into the wound, The New York Times did a story on the plight of the pervasive poverty found in sections which include Indian reservations in the West; Hispanic communities in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, a band across the Deep South and along the Mississippi Delta with a majority black population; and Appalachia’s, largely white community,
Jobs are practically non-existent in these areas and most get by with government assistance like food stamps, Social Security disability, Medicare, Medicaid, free school lunches and other programs.
Meanwhile, low-wage workers in Asian and middle European countries sit in glorified sweatshops pumping out the clothes and shoes that Americans wear-or high-tech factories constructing the iPhones, TVs, computers, and all sorts of electronic gadgets that Americans buy. Corporations and the countries which house their factories rake in the dough, while many Americans are left to either flip burgers or stock shelves.
Why aren’t these jobs in the American counties identified by the government as “persistently poor” with a poverty rate above 20 percent in each of the past three decades? There is something drastically wrong when our fellow Americans are living lives of desperation and government handouts while the jobs they used to have are far, far away.
Let’s get past the public relations hogwash that Americans can buy things cheaper because of free trade and ask President Obama not to put pen to paper and sign another “trade agreement” that in the long run does more economic damage to middle-class America.
Prosperity, much like charity, begins at home.
