U.S. House should reject CAFTA

07/22/2005

Free trade is good, right? Right, but only if it’s truly free and fair.

Congress passed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993. At
the time I supported it and couldn’t understand why then-Senator Paul
Wellstone, whom I had voted for, opposed it. He said it would put our
manufacturing jobs at risk. He said it would force our small farmers
out of business. He said it would induce U.S. corporations to move
operations to other countries where they could pay lower wages and
not worry about environmental standards.

It’s 12 years later and everything Wellstone said has come true. Now
the president and many members of congress, including Senator
Coleman, want to add the Central American Free Trade Agreement to the
plethora of government-sponsored initiatives that help big
corporations. They claim that CAFTA will open up a 40 million-person
market for American products. But what it really will do is open a
300 million person market - the United States - to large corporate
exporters from Central American countries, jeopardizing more American
jobs, farms, and rural communities. And it will put many small
Central American farmers out of business as cheap American
agricultural products flood their markets.

Free trade is a good idea provided it is truly free and fair. But
right now most trade agreements are written by and for large
corporations with little regard for manufacturing workers and small
farmers.

Until these inequities are resolved we must put a stop to CAFTA and
re-examine the effects of NAFTA. Only when this is accomplished will
we create trade agreements that are beneficial to farmers, workers
and corporations alike.

Leigh Pomeroy
Mankato
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From the Mankato Free Press, July 19th, 2005:

Bush’s policies are sinking economy, future

George Bush, Tom DeLay and their cronies have engineered the biggest
heist in history, transferring trillions of dollars from your
children and grandchildren to their greedy friends. They’ve done it
under the guise of four “tax cuts” which have gone overwhelmingly to
the wealthiest 2 percent of the population.

It is the government’s long-term spending obligations that determine
the real long-term tax burden. Cutting individual tax payments
accomplishes nothing if overall government spending obligations are
not also cut. Borrowing money - running up the deficit - just shifts
the tax burden onto future generations, who cannot protest the ripoff.

Bush has actually increased our long-term tax liability with his
unfunded $1.4 trillion dollar prescription drug bill, the costly
morass in Iraq, his corporate welfare programs and unchecked
government growth. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the
federal government grew more than 10 percent per year during Bush’s
first term (versus 3.7 percent during Clinton’s two terms.)

Despite Bush’s economic double talk and the shifting justification
for these giveaways, this is a straight-up raid on the Treasury to
benefit his campaign contributors.

Congressman Gil Gutknecht has supported these beggar-your-children
fiscal policies, despite his promise never to vote for an unbalanced
budget. He justified his votes by blatantly misstating projected
budget surpluses, thus piling doctored statistics on broken promises.
The reality is that Bush entered office with a $280 billion surplus
which he turned into a $140 billion deficit in just one budget cycle,
and it has grown astronomically since then.

Selfishness and greed. Conservative values.

Tom Maertens
Mankato