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Free trade should not mean free labor.
Likewise, free trade does not, as evidenced in CAFTA, mean fair trade.
I always thought a very strong anti-drug policy was a good thing for my union members.
Hey, I'm a former union president myself and also an attorney that represented a lot of unions.
Since NAFTA was put in place, Mexico has lost 1.9 million jobs and most Mexicans' real wages have fallen.
Average real wages in Mexican manufacturing are lower than they were 10 years ago, if you can believe that.
I am told that the clinical definition of insanity is the tendency to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results.
As for the expected boon to the Mexican economy, we have seen none of these gains, and instead we have seen NAFTA's detrimental impact on the Mexican workers.
Instead of trade policy that is beneficial to American businesses and workers as well as our trade partners, we have a flawed trade policy that hurts all parties.
Trade reform has also been linked to increased income disparity as skilled workers have captured more benefits from globalization than their unskilled counterparts.
The biggest share of U.S. exports to the six CAFTA nations is not the traditional job-creation kind. These are products that are not consumed in the purchasing nations.
If you consider that a typical Central American consumer earns only a small fraction of an average American worker's wages, it becomes clear that CAFTA's true goal is not to the increase U.S. exports.
Amnesty International continues to report that extra judicial tortures and murders continue. This is not democracy that we are exporting to Mexico, and this is certainly not what the Mexican workers signed up for.
The one thing that I have been struck with, after coming here to Congress is, how many people in Washington, D.C. talk about job loss like they are talking about the weather, or a natural disaster like an earthquake.
You do not export democracy through the Defense Department or the Defense Secretary. You do it through trade agreements, through the Department of Commerce and favorable agreements with our friends and neighbors across the globe.
Proponents of the Central America Free Trade Agreement have conveniently ignored this fundamental fact: the effect of trade on incomes in Central America and how to alleviate the adverse consequences of trade liberalization on the poor.
Now, given the experience that we have had thus far, with our subsequent trade agreements with NAFTA and others, you would think that with our experience of job loss that we have had there that when you find yourself in a hole that you might stop digging.