NAFTA "renegotiations" - My response to this action.

[mac2]

http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5175
http://americas.irc-online.org/updater/5188

Re: Your recent article about Marcy Kapture,etc. wanting to renegotiate NAFTA instead of expanding it. Included are the representatives from Mexico and Canada.

Marcy Kapture (D-OH) is giving her constituents some power over trade. However the Congress has given trade power to the President. Which is illegal under their duties in the Constitution. So no one in this country is doing what is their power under the law of a democracy.

As representatives of our country is it good to give decisions such as this to other country leaders? We should be acting in our own best interest. Prior to NAFTA we had a trade excess with Mexico and Canada. Now that it has turned and they are unlikely to give up anything soon. They are taking our resources, dumping their waste, selling our energy sector (like Niagara Falls Mohawk power once a WNY public owned facility), sending their poor here, and prospering off our down fall. That is not trade. It is treason.

Our trade deficit is huge and that includes Mexico and Canada. A NAFTA road is to bypass us in the future. Who pays? A private foreign owned firm from another country? We have no control over it in our own country? They profit. This could be a danger to our security as well.

Wouldn't it better to just get out of these bad trade agreements and start over as Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) proposes? We can do trade as we always did in the past. However it should be trade not in the best interest of another country more than our own. As Senator Clinton (D-NY) has complained, we haven't won one case against a violation yet. It has cost us millions of dollars in fees. The American public is unaware of it. That argument should be mentioned in that article.

Public Citizen has fought NAFTA over the years and has many interesting facts and arguments against the NAFTA agreement.

I sounds like Kapture ,and her fellow Congress people, are doing something revolutionary. You do trade negotiations not the President. The people get to listen to the trade discussions and actions not in secret behind closed doors by the President himself or his "unelected trade representative" but in a public forum. If the constituents approve, they say so. If not it fails.

If citizens don't know what is going on in their name how can they plan their future and their prosperity? It is not democracy but Fascism.