If our economy's so good, why does another manufacturing plant have to close? Why are So many more out of jobs? While the closing of this plant is clearly a result of NAFTA, it centers on another free trade pact pending. Read more @ http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/5/4/when-greenville-losts-its-refrigerator-plant.html
for 16 years people have been protesting the WTO while mainstream America has ignored the protests as fringe left-wing whackos. Now mainstream America will pay the price for that ignorance. The future of the American worker is not making ipads or refrigerators, but integrating ipads and refrigerators into a kitchen app that allows you to place an item in a drawer of the fridge and having it defrosted at the moment you get home or building designing devices that combine freezer/fridge/cook capabilities into a single unit. There is no turning back. The only think that would reset the board would be a global economic collapse in which nobody would have anything to lose by engaging in protectionism.
Ross Perot tried to warn you all. NAFTA and all these other free trade agreement has cost this nation a ton of jobs.
[video=youtube;Rkgx1C_S6ls]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rkgx1C_S6ls[/video] Neoliberal economists told us 20 years ago all these manufacturing jobs would be replaced with higher paying jobs in service and finance. Well where are all these higher paying jobs? Economists and lobbyists told politicians that America needed to compete with the rest of the world. What that actually meant was that America needed access to low cost labor. We have seen the effects of globalization.
[video=youtube;Rkgx1C_S6ls]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rkgx1C_S6ls[/video] Neoliberal economists told us 20 years ago all these manufacturing jobs would be replaced with higher paying jobs in service and finance. Well where are all these higher paying jobs? Economists and lobbyists told politicians that America needed to compete with the rest of the world. What that actually meant was that America needed access to low cost labor, and that in turn meant outsourcing any jobs that could be done in a foreign country, and bringing in foreign workers for any jobs that could not be outsourced. Particularly in agriculture, America is blessed with plenty of fertile land, and the big agro corporations wanted to increase exports to the rest of the world, but they needed illegal low-cost migrant workers to do this. We have seen the effects of globalization.
That clip brought back many a fond memory. On this latest free trade deal, let me quote another presidential candidate, "There you go again." Seems that giant sucking sound is not only being heard from the south, it will be heard from the west pretty darn quick.
And what Perot said in that video has indeed happened, 20 years later. Wages in Mexico have risen, and wages in the U.S. have fallen—only the wages in the U.S. have fallen more than the wages in Mexico have increased.