When it came to sex, Bill Clinton made us debate the definition of “is.” Now, when it comes to economics, Hillary Clinton wants to debate the definition of “long,” claiming this week in Ohio that “I’ve long been a critic of the shortcomings of NAFTA.” True, Clinton has recently criticized NAFTA — the 1993 trade policy whose lack of labor… return to article
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Reader Comments (3)Page 1 of 1 pagesRoss Perot saw this coming and so did I. He got my vote because of this one issue and his being the one candidate with enough imagination to be concerned. (To be fair, perhaps others also saw it, but were more concerned with electability and realized people don’t want to hear bad news.)
My life as a graphic artist and designer required a good imagination. While it is a gift that enables one to take what doesn’t yet exist, ask “What if?” and by-pass the least favorable ideas while choosing the better — that ability is also a curse — since it causes early and continued worry as the future results of poor choices become clear.
While I feared the loss of U.S. business (My client base was 95% manufacturing companies.) I thought it would take far longer than it did and that by adapting to digital technology, I could survive it until my retirement.
I didn’t exactly retire — I stayed to turn out the lights when my last good customer moved out. (And began spending my retirement savings a bit early.)
Our city of 150,000 rapidly lost over 10,000 manufacturing jobs as long time employers either shifted production to cheap labor, went out of business or sold to larger corporations which absorb their client list and spit out the people and local facilities. (If anyone knows an economical way to plow under hundreds of thousands of brick and mortar, we could make a bunch in the soil bank.)
The question is not whether free trade is good or bad for the U.S. The question is: Will we ever truly try it?
While our companies are carrying the load of all those good things which took decades to gain — child labor laws, retirement and health benefits, safety protection, quality controls, environmental concerns… our foreign competitors are favored with our jobs.
Has it occurred to anyone watching the Fed’s Kabuki, played out in Washington and on TV, just how much tinkering of the controls is required to operate these “free markets”?
Posted by whattheheck on Feb 29, 2008 at 8:27 AM A Gallup poll in seventeenth century London once proclaimed: “Peasants mourn passage of Idyllic, Bucolic and Pastoral Age. Demand return to Famine, Pestilence, Ignorance and Oppression by King and Clergy. Enlightened Aristocracy predicts that Industrial Revolution and Colonial Imperialism will produce Utopic Material Paradise for middle-class Europeans whose descendants survive transition to Modern Democratic Age.”
Posted by Major Major on Feb 29, 2008 at 1:31 PM Page 1 of 1 pages -
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