"Free Trade" Only Benefits Large Corporations

These two charts show what has been happening to this country (and the American worker) thanks to the "free trade" agreements. Those agreements were supposed to benefit American workers by providing more markets for products produced in the United States. But what they really did was hurt American workers by allowing corporations to shut down plants in this country, so they could abuse workers in poverty wage countries -- and then let those corporations ship those products made in other countries back into the U.S. without tariffs or penalties.

The chart on the left shows the trade deficit of the United States between 1962 and 1992 -- before the "free trade" agreements. The chart on the right shows the ballooning trade deficit of the United States after those "free trade" agreements were passed. Those agreements allowed foreign companies (and American corporations making products overseas) to ship much more into this country, while very little more was shipped from this country to other countries (and American workers continued to see their jobs outsourced to other countries).

Now a new trade agreement is being worked out -- the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). And believe it or not, it is even worse than the other trade agreements (like NAFTA and CAFTA). It will give multi-national corporations the power to defy American laws, promote even more outsourcing of American jobs, and balloon the U.S. trade deficit to even greater heights.

The TPP must be stopped. We cannot afford to give even more power to the corporations and lose more American jobs.