The Rothschild family

Some of the same treasonous scoundrels that voted for NAFTA are currently appearing on the privately owned media busily blaming the current administration for not fixing the economy, a direct result of NAFTA. Some of those neo-cons include Newt Gingrich, John Boehner, Tom DeLay, Dick Durbin, Jeffrey Flake, Thomas Foley, John Kasich, Dick Armey, Dennis Hastert, and on the left, Nancy Pelosi. She, as Speaker of the House, pushed through the disastrous healthcare bill in the same manner. These politicians count on the fact that the US public has forgotten who voted on NAFTA and what it did. They are now blaming the bulk of the country’s economic woes on others, such as people who shouldn’t have borrowed money to buy homes (now in foreclosure) and a number of other issues – never on the fact that they imposed a treaty on the US that was deliberately designed to de-industrialize the country and cause an economic catastrophe. Neo-con Republicans continue to maintain that NAFTA was a good policy, but for who? Mexico, now a slave-wage corporate slum-burb from which desperate citizens attempt to escape is a direct result of NAFTA. Meanwhile, jobless, middle-class Americans struggle to stave-off foreclosure.

In March 2010 Rep. Gene Taylor, a Mississippi Democrat, lead a small group of twenty-eight lawmakers who introduced legislation that would require President Obama to relinquish our participation in NAFTA, the 16-year trade agreement that began the de-industrialization of America, a process that has created the current joblessness (10 to 12%) and the economic fallout. The National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, organizations that represent the elite, have always supported NAFTA. If Taylor’s legislation passes, Obama would have to give Canada and Mexico six months’ notice of the U.S. intentions to vacate the pact.²²

In his campaign speeches Obama opposed NAFTA but now is in the process of negotiating with officials in South Korea, Panama and Colombia to implement trade pacts with those countries. In March 2010, U.S. officials also began trade negotiations with Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Chile, Peru, Vietnam and Brunei in what would be the Asia-Pacific regional free-trade agreement. Members of the House of Representatives are supposed to vote before the end of the year whether the U.S. is to retain their membership in the World Trade Organization.²³

Ian Fletcher says, “Free trade is inexorably bleeding our economy and preventing it from returning to true health. Nobody in the Obama administration wants to talk about the economics of free trade, because as soon as one seriously scrutinizes this doctrine, one begins to discover that free trade may be the biggest myth in American economics.”²⁴