This morning US Congressperson Nancy Boyda hosted Jim Cates Topeka call-in radio show and unveiled a hefty smackdown she plans to have with NAFTA - aka the North American Free Trade Agreement. (Many also refer to this as the Non-American Free Trade Agreement.)
Rep. Boyda's new bill the NAFTA Accountability Act requires the US to renegotiate NAFTA. Rep. Boyda has long been an advocate of workers rights specifically in finding ways to stop the slow bleeding of American Jobs to overseas countries where cheap labor is readily available and workers don't demand benifits and health care.
During her 2006 campaign then candidate Boyda promised voters she would fight the NAFTA Superhighway - a giant highway for trucks to transport cheap goods into the US.
Rep. Boyda said,
"Practically every politician in Washington has said that NAFTA has its share of problems. Even supporters admit that NAFTA is deeply flawed, but nobody has had the guts to fix the problem."
Late in the summer you might remember Boyda's bill to fix many loopholes for Mexican Trucks crossing the US border.
Boyda said then that she had hoped to fight these trade agreements when she entered congress but was told by senior members that these were too complex to fix. She has been steadfast in her determination to slowly chip away at trade deals that hoover up American jobs.
Rep. Boyda's legislation requires the President to renegotiate NAFTA to correct trade deficits, currency distortions, and agricultural provisions. If five specific conditions are not certified by the end of 2008, the bill calls for the United States to withdraw from NAFTA:
- Gains in U.S. jobs and living standards (by the Secretary of Labor)
- Increases U.S. domestic manufacturing (by the Secretary of Commerce)
- Improves health and environmental standards, with respect to food imports and to U.S.-Mexico border areas (by the Secretary of Agriculture, the Administrator of the Food and Drug Administration, and the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency)
- Reduces flow of illegal drugs from Mexico and Canada (by the Attorney General)
- Develops Mexican democracy and human freedoms (by the President)
Rep. Boyda added,
"NAFTA is dragging down our economy, weakening our borders, and devastating our manufacturers. After fourteen years, it's time to either fix NAFTA or get the heck out of it."
Syndicated Columnist David Sirota author of Hostile Takeover has long advocated on behalf of populist members of Congress, specifically dealing with trade deals.
In his column last week he asked us if Ross Perot was right when he illustrated the giant sucking sound he claimed could be heard taking American money and jobs, and spanks Hillary Clinton for her flippant and ignorant comments during the last democratic debate which addressed among other things, NAFTA.
"To refresh Clinton's "vague memory," let's recall that Perot's anti-NAFTA presidential campaign in 1992 won 19 percent of the presidential vote -- the highest total for any third-party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt. That included huge tallies in closely divided regions like the Rocky Mountain West, which Democrats say they need to win in the upcoming election.
A Democrat laughing at Perot on national television is a big mistake. Simply put, it risks alienating the roughly 20 million people who cast their votes for the Texas businessman....
In 1993, the Clinton White House and an army of corporate lobbyists were selling NAFTA as a way to aid Mexican and American workers.
Perot, on the other hand, was predicting that because the deal included no basic labor standards, it would preserve a huge "wage differential between the United States and Mexico" that would result in "the giant sucking sound" of American jobs heading south of the border. Corporations, he said, would "close the factories in the U.S. [and] move the factories to Mexico [to] take advantage of the cheap labor."The historical record is clear. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reports, "Real wages for most Mexicans today are lower than when NAFTA took effect." Post-NAFTA, companies looking to exploit those low wages relocated factories to Mexico. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the net effect of NAFTA was the elimination of 1 million American jobs.
Score one for Perot."
Sirota goes on to discuss what it has done for immigration in the US, something else Boyda has fought fiercely to better regulate.
"What about immigration? In 1993, the Clinton administration pitched NAFTA as "the best hope for reducing illegal immigration." Perot, by contrast, said that after NAFTA depressed Mexican wages, many Mexicans "out of economic necessity" would "consider illegally immigrating into the U.S."
"In short," he wrote, "NAFTA has the potential to increase illegal immigration, not decrease it."
Again, the historical record tells the story. As NAFTA helped drive millions of Mexicans into poverty, The New York Times reports that "Mexican migration to the United States has risen to 500,000 a year from less than 400,000 in the early 1990s, before NAFTA," with a huge chunk of that increase coming from illegal immigration."
Heres to hoping Boyda's new piece of December Legislation can fix some problems.
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