New Job Opportunities
In America
By Judith Moriarty
Once upon a time: people shopped on downtown city streets, frequented local diners, and had a choice of jobs to choose from. Towns employed parents in auto plants, machine shops, textile mills, ship building, farming, fishing, and every imaginable manufacturing job. A man working in a steel mill or auto plant; could encourage his son/daughter, to go to college, and attain a profession that he had only dreamed of. If not college, a trade, that saw one with a livable wage, was readily available. This country had marvelous craftsmen, machinists, designers of great buildings, bridges, and damns. Now we can't build a simple levee to protect a population.
Today there are more prisons than farmers! Rural Americans - who once farmed, had dairy farms, or were in the timber business etc, now find they are competing for prisons to be built in their communities! Snake oil salesmen, in the guise of Economic Development, promise lucrative wages, and a vibrant community. Grand claims are made for economic salvation, which has many towns giving up a lot, for what they hope to gain? Imagine, locking person up, is now recognized as a "growth industry" in this country! In our state (NH) our former Governor announced that 'garbage was a growth industry'.
So, this is what we've come to - garbage, prisons, ski resorts, malls, and tourist Mecca's and box stores! Many communities across the nation, in order to entice a prison to their community; donate land, invest in costly sewers and water upgrades, and offer all kinds of subsidies and tax abatements (private prisons). Prior to 1980 only 36% of prisons were located in rural communities.
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Charles Seltz remembers when Rochester, NY, was a bustling manufacturing town. Now, all the 58 year old unemployed engineer sees ( just like our town in NH) is a landscape of empty buildings. "There's nothing made here anymore", the former Eastman Kodak employee says, his eyes welling with tears as he talks about his struggle to find a new job. ."Wealth is really created by making things. I still adhere to that." Of course Charles is right, what's created by a prison, a casino, a garbage dump, an incinerator, or a service sector job? Nothing is produced except a person eking out a living; hardly able to afford the gas to travel to work, let alone that college education for his child. Forget a home, a decent vehicle, or ever taking a vacation. All one has to do is look around and note that it is almost an impossibility to buy a product made in America it's all junk that breaks within a month's time. I'd rather never shop then subject myself to a concrete bunker experience of aisles and aisles of slave labor camp trinkets!
http://rense.com/general69/newjob.htm(Did she mean to write more "prisoners" instead of "prisons" in paragraph 2. That would be an awful lot of prisons if there were more prisons than farmers, I should think.)
There was a Frontline documentary on PBS I was watching a few nights ago,
Is Wall-Mart Good for America ( You can watch the program in streaming video here if you haven't seen it yet (well worth it):
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/walmart/view/ The program got into the issue of the declining US manufacturing base and the loss of good, well paying middle class jobs in the US with nothing comparable (salary wise) on the horizon to replace them and noted how this loss of jobs was due in large part to Wal-Mart's emphasis on sourcing low cost merchandise overseas and forcing its competitors to do the same in order to compete.
They showed a brief clip of Bill Clinton prior to signing a trade agreement with China give a little speech about how this would be a win-win situation for both American and Chinese workers, because now US farmers and manufacturers would have new opportunities to sell products and goods in China while Chinese companies would benefit from increased access to the US market. Clinton specifically singled out US manufacturers as would be beneficiaries of this free trade deal. However, during the Frontline show they interviewed a port worker (or manager) at a major US port and asked her what products were being off loaded the ships from China. They were all manufactured products like toys, electronics, plastic products etc, but when the host asked her what was being loaded onto the ships to go back to China, it was all bulk raw materials being sent to China to be processed into goods, i.e. no manufactured goods at all were going from US to China, or at least none to speak of compared to the volume flowing the other way.
I think the Free Trade BS was sold under false pretenses as illustrated by Bill Clinton's pro free trade comments in his speech compared to the actual results as described by the interview with the port manager. This isn't about raising standards for everyone, it's about creaing a new class of semi-slave labor willing to work for peanuts in the West.
The high price of 'free' trade
NAFTA's failure has cost the United States jobs across the nationby Robert E. Scott
Since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed in 1993, the rise in the U.S. trade deficit with Canada and Mexico through 2002 has caused the displacement of production that supported 879,280 U.S. jobs. Most of those lost jobs were high-wage positions in manufacturing industries. The loss of these jobs is just the most visible tip of NAFTA's impact on the U.S. economy. In fact, NAFTA has also contributed to rising income inequality, suppressed real wages for production workers, weakened workers' collective bargaining powers and ability to organize unions, and reduced fringe benefits.
NAFTA is a free trade and investment agreement that provided investors with a unique set of guarantees designed to stimulate foreign direct investment and the movement of factories within the hemisphere, especially from the United States to Canada and Mexico. Furthermore, no protections were contained in the core of the agreement to maintain labor or environmental standards. As a result, NAFTA tilted the economic playing field in favor of investors, and against workers and the environment, resulting in a hemispheric "race to the bottom" in wages and environmental quality.
<snip>
Another critically important promise made by the promoters of NAFTA was that the United States would benefit because of increased exports to a large and growing consumer market in Mexico. This market, in turn, was to be based on an expansion of the middle class that, it was claimed, would grow rapidly due to the wealth created in Mexico by NAFTA. Thus, most U.S. exports were predicted to be consumer products destined for consumption in Mexico.
In fact, most U.S. exports to Mexico are parts and components that are shipped to Mexico and assembled into final products that are then returned to the United States. The number of products that Mexico assembles and exports—such as refrigerators, TVs, automobiles, and computers—has mushroomed under the NAFTA agreement. Many of these products are produced in the Maquiladora export processing zones in Mexico, where parts enter duty free and are re-exported to the United States in assembled products, with duties paid only on the value added in Mexico. The share of total U.S. exports to Mexico that is represented by Maquiladora imports has risen from 39% of U.S. exports in 1993 to 61% in 2002.2 The number of such plants increased from 2,114 in 1993 to 3,251 in 2002 (INEGI 2003a, 2003b).
http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/briefingpapers_bp147 
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