great catch !

♫ . . .whatever Jamie wants ♫ . . . ♫ Jamie gets

This holiday season, veal is harder to find.

Thanks for this post, Jane, and thanks to the Sierra Club for stepping outside the veal pen this time around. I mean it. Thanks for doing that and for standing up for US workers, and for opposing off-shoring US jobs.

Whoa! The Sierra Club better be careful or they’ll be kicked out of the Veal Pen

Jamie is paying me .01% on my savings account. Shhh. He’s a great man.

(/s, in case anyone couldn’t tell)

Jane, thank you for reporting this. Go, Sierra Club. Where the heck are all those steel workers at? We need you front and center with the cameras!

Go work Sierra Club!

Thanks Jane. Just got off the phone with the Sierra Club here in Wisconsin. They did not know about it, but the woman who answered understood the context. She appreciated the call.

Go Sierra Club!

Maybe this break in the Veal Pen fence will enable other little calves escape.

We’ll see — the way is clear now. Can others make the same move?

Only if they don’t have a deal underway for S. Korean unionizing.

anecdotal reportage – Brunes was recently hammered for taking the WH line on fracking being ‘ an environmentally safer’ means for energy on 60 Minutes – Cornell released a white paper factually refuting his claim the very next day – just wondering aloud if they’ve had enough

It was wrong when Bush wanted it and it’s still wrong now that Obama wants it?!? Knock me over with a feather!

I could have sworn that standing by principle was dead and gone, long ago replaced by blind loyalty to the tribe. What’s the catch?

THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
______________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release September 14, 1993

REMARKS BY PRESIDENT CLINTON,

NAFTA will generate these jobs by fostering an export
boom to Mexico; by tearing down tariff walls which have been lowered
quite a bit by the present administration of President Salinas, but
are still higher than Americans.

Hornswoggled again.

Al Gore, on the same occasion:

There are some issues that transcend ideology. That is,
the view is so uniform that it unites people in both parties. This
means our country can pursue a bipartisan policy with continuity over
the decades.

same s$$t different pile.

True – but Clinton was advised by economic common wisdom of his day – in contrast to Bush and Obama who are post the Nobel MIT’s Paul A. Samuelson’s paper on why free trade sometimes loses jobs – as when China was allowed to screw us under Reagan/Bush and all FTA’s since have had the same pattern of our “competitive advantage” being given away to the other guy in return for more corporate profits – albeit made outside the US.

The Korean car non-tariff barriers are con-job “safety” rules that ONLY apply to imports – So we obtain a waiver of the safety rules for 25000 cars from GM, 25000 cars from Ford, and perhaps 25000 cars from Chrysler if Chrysler can claim to be a US car manufacturer – we get less than a 1000 new car industry jobs if everything sells – while Korea ends the 2% tariff and has no limits on its sales in the US – about 300000. For this we give up 2 years of “free trade” on trade in pork – get zero trade permitted in beef from cattle older than 30 months, and indeed get screwed on about every provision just so we can maintain a base in South Korea.

Thanks but I’ll pass on the lower cost for my 3D TV that we can’t make in the US having sent that industry to S.E. Asia.

Just for the record the only analysis I saw on the 10th year of Nafta claimed the job gain/loss was zero but with US jobs gained paying less than US jobs lost. Jane has some very high job loss to 2010 numbers – in the millions – but I can’t find their source.

The last time the Congressional Budget Office studied Nafta, in 2003, it concluded the impact of the treaty on U.S. gross domestic product was minuscule.

Health cost killing exports has been the job killer – but NAFTA gets the blame.

Plus our debt-fueled spending and low savings rate relate to the current account deficit better than NAFTA. While job losses in textile, auto parts, and electronics as production migrated to Mexico is noted, the really big job losses did not occur until Reagan/Bush. But China’s export takeoff has been a far bigger factor in job losses of the past five years. Investment in automation and information technology has led to massive reductions of factory workers everywhere, including China.

Reagan was controlled by a Democratic Congress by “Super 301″ legislation, but Clinton gave normal trade status to China in 1999 (China was just about the last country to have the high US tariffs that we used on countries without “normal” status) and under Bush China joined the WTO to force unfair rules on us.

The WTO – not NAFTA – needs to go. Why we allow non-tariff barriers with no response on our part is beyond me.

Yup, Al Gore seems to have ‘forgotten’ about all the folks that opposed NAFTA. Jesse Jackson, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Ralph Nader…. Is it even possible to get a broader spectrum of opposition?

Back in the early 1990′s, Larry King hosted a debate on free trade between Ross Perot and Al Gore. It’s available in eight parts on youtube. Two quotes from that debate pretty much sum things up. Regarding trade:

[Trade] “is not an athletic contest”
- Ross Perot

“we’ll knock the socks off the workers”
- Al Gore

Perot seems to understand that the proper goal of international trade is not to beat or destroy the peoples of other countries(or our own for that matter). Gore seems to think it is an athletic contest. I suppose I should at least give Al Gore credit for honestly admitting that the real goal of the trade policy which he supported was to “knock the socks off the workers”.

Glad to see that groups like the Sierra Club are opposing current Obama Admin efforts to knock the socks off the workers.

There’s always something in addition to what they are touting, you know, such as the language that was “inserted without anyone noticing” into legislation. (ridiculous)

for instance this:

Xinhua: may 31, 2010.

BEIJING, May 31 (Xinhua) — While regional integration is breaking down the walls dividing adjacent countries, free trade is thickening the web of their economic interdependence between them with potential benefits.

After concluding their third round of trilateral summit on Sunday in Jeju island, South Korea, leaders from China, South Korea and Japan have agreed to complete a joint research task by 2012 on the feasibility of grouping the three nations into a free trade zone.

“Free” trade was, is, and always will be, rigged. Against the worker. as far as studies go, I well remember reports of unions negotiating contracts, while semi trucks and trailers were hauling away plant and machinery to Mexico.

And you can ask the corn farmers of Mexico. (you can find some of them at the carwash you take your car to)

There is a book about Nafta, “the selling of Nafta” which describes the process in detail.

The great sucking sound, of jobs going to Mexico, is now just that bubbling sound that you hear when you’re trying to get the last bit of liquid from the bottom of the can.

It’s also quite remarkable, when you see the same families, and their associates showing up in these matters over periods of decades.

In what is supposed to be a democracy.