An Example Of How Free Trade Sucks

But in 2005, the globalization that had begun to chip away at the rest of the Midwest’s industrial core came to Greenville. Electrolux, like so many firms of the era, announced that it would be shuttering its Greenville plant and leaving for Juarez, Mexico, taking 3,000 jobs with it, a devastating blow in a town of 8,000 people.

“I cried all the way home,” Patty Hoisington said of the day the announcement was made. “We worked our butts off for that place and we got zilch.”

The company had been toying with the idea for years and may have eventually made the move anyway, but many believed that the North American Free Trade Agreement, enacted in 1994, made the proposition irresistible, with its provisions designed to incentivize foreign investment in Mexico’s still-developing economy and scant labor regulations.

In the following weeks and months, as hundreds of Greenville workers lost their jobs, the city came to be a visceral representation of the pain of a new type of global economy. Jim and Patty Hoisington's replacements in Mexico would be making $1.57 an hour, plus lunch and bus fare — a cost-saving maneuver that would mean millions of additional dollars for Electrolux. 

Now, as President Obama makes the hard sell for fast-track authority from Congress to ratify the Trans-Pacific Partnership, what happened to Greenville and families like the Hoisingtons in the last decade opens a window into why resistance is so fierce among labor unions and some members of the President’s own party. Past experience has shown that the tides of prosperity promised by trade agreements have not always washed ashore for all, even as a majority of economists argue that free trade deals are a net positive for the economy.

Most of the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which impacts policy areas ranging from intellectual property rights to environmental protections to how corporations settle disputes with government, remains hidden from public view as negotiators work out the final details. President Obama insists that this time will be different.

“You need to tell me what's wrong with this trade agreement, not one that was passed 25 years ago,” he said in a recent speech. “We can't just oppose trade on reflex alone.“

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/5/4/when-greenville-losts-its-refrigerator-plant.html

Dear Mr. Obama ad-Dajjal: We cannot tell you what's wrong (or right) with TPP because you won't let us read it.

You are a dumbass ... or a jackass. Take your pick.

Please go back to being a "community organizer". You can organize the dumbass community all you want, but please leave the rest of us alone.