Treacherous Sucking Sound
“We have got to stop sending jobs overseas,” the somewhat loony Ross Perot presciently warned back in 1992. The third-party Presidential candidate was bashing the then-pending North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) before most Americans had a clue what he was talking about. They still don’t.
“[It’s] pretty simple,” Perot explained during a debate with incumbent George H.W. Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton. “If you’re paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers, and you can move your factory south of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor…have no healthcare… have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don’t care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.”
Clinton took the ’92 election. A year later he signed NAFTA into law with the support of Republicans and the world’s largest corporate lobbyist—the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Perot was absolutely correct. The deal sucked. Specifically, it sucked millions of manufacturing jobs out of the United States, helped to explode our trade deficit with foreign nations and stagnated domestic middleclass wages for decades while allowing the owners of all those businesses that now make their products elsewhere to amass a fortune. The rich got way richer, and everyone else slid farther down the economic ladder.
Today it’s Democratic President Barack Obama who seems to want more of the above in his effort to enact the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with 11 countries in the Asia Pacific region. “NAFTA on steroids,” critics have called the pact, which is being secretly negotiated by the U.S. Trade Representative and hundreds of corporate lobbyists. Even lawmakers allowed to review the latest draft are barred from talking about its provisions.
