Obama Wants Another "Free Trade Zone"

Sometimes I get exasperated with President Obama. It's like he wants to be all things to all people. I had thought he had finally found his backbone recently as he began to publicly fight the Republicans over job creation. He introduced a decent jobs package, and when the GOP defeated it, he promised to break it into smaller parts and make the Republicans embarrass themselves by defeating each part. After giving in to the Republicans too many times , it looked like he was finally ready to fight for some progressive legislation.

But now he has turned around and is trying to do something only the corporations (and right-wingers) could love. He wants to create another "free trade zone". He is meeting with the leaders of several Pacific Rim nations, and said that while details need to be hammered out it looks like the eight nations will join the United States in a trade zone agreement. The nations are Australia, Brunei, Chile, Vietnam, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, and Singapore. Japan has also expressed interest in joining the proposed trade pact.


The president seems to have accepted the corporate right-wing argument that "free trade zones" are good for everyone and creates new jobs for the United States. I wish that was true, but the numbers simply don't bear that out. While the agreements are definitely good for giant corporations, they are not good at creating jobs in America. All we have to do to know this is to look at the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which went into effect in 1994 and the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) that was approved in 2005.

Americans were told that both of these agreements would result in new American jobs because more people would be needed to produce the goods that would be shipped to these other countries. Sadly, it didn't work that way. Between 1994 and 2007 (before the current recession hit) the United States actually lost about 3,654,000 manufacturing jobs. The American corporations decided it would be cheaper to outsource jobs to Mexico and Central America than to hire American workers -- especially since NAFTA and CAFTA would protect them from having to pay tariffs or other penalties for doing so.

For a developed nation like the United States, free trade zones are not job creators. They are job killers, as American jobs are moved to countries that allow poverty wages to be paid to workers. The goods are then shipped back to the United States duty-free. The new Pacific free trade agreement will just allow this process to expand. Too many products sold in America are already made in Malaysia, Vietnam, and Singapore because of the extremely low wages allowed in those countries. Is there anyone that doesn't think the new trade agreement will result in more good American jobs being shipped to those countries?

This is a terrible idea. The president (and Congress) should be penalizing American corporations that outsource American jobs. Instead, they seem intent on following the Republican economic policy of rewarding corporate job outsourcing. This agreement won't create jobs in the United States -- like NAFTA and CAFTA, it will just export more jobs to other countries.

I don't understand why Democrats keep falling for this kind of economic nonsense.