Welcome to Gaia! :: US Lawmakers consider NAFTA repeal | Forum

The bill spearheaded by Rep. Gene Taylor, a Mississippi Democrat, would require President Barack Obama to give Mexico and Canada six months notice that the United States will no longer be part of the 16-year-old trade pact.

"At a time when 10 to 12 percent of the American people are unemployed, I think Congress has an obligation to put people back to work," Taylor said.

He argued NAFTA has cost the United States millions of manufacturing jobs and hurt national security by encouraging companies to move production to Mexico.

The high unemployment rate makes it the "perfect" time to push for repeal even though past efforts have failed, he said.

"You'll see the American people rally behind this, in my humble opinion," said Rep. Walter Jones, a North Carolina Republican who is one of about 28 co-sponsors of the bill.

Business groups like the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce strongly support NAFTA, which they say has spurred U.S. economic growth by tearing down trade barriers between the three countries.

The repeal proposal comes as Obama says he wants to resolve problems blocking congressional approval of long-delayed trade deals with South Korea, Panama and Colombia.

The strongest opposition to those agreements comes from Obama's fellow Democrats.

The United States also will begin talks later this month with Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Chile, Peru, Vietnam and Brunei on an Asia-Pacific regional free-trade agreement.

Obama criticized NAFTA during the 2008 presidential election campaign but has not followed through on threats to withdraw from the agreement if Canada and Mexico did not agree to revamp the pact's labor and environmental provisions.

But many Democrats are pushing for that and other changes to existing trade deals before considering any new deals such as the deals with South Korea, Colombia and Panama.

The House of Representatives is expected to vote later this year on whether the United States should remain a member of the World Trade Organization.

U.S. law allows House and Senate members to request a vote on that issue every five years. In 2005, 86 of the House's 435 members voted to withdraw from the world trade body.

Budget and trade deficits averaging more than $200 billion a year eventually quadrupled the U.S. national debt to $2 trillion. Meanwhile, family incomes stagnated, income inequality worsened, and unemployment and poverty increased.

On the first day of 2003, protective tariffs on imports of sorghum and most other farm goods will disappear under NAFTA and cheaper U.S. imports are expected to flood into Mexico and dominate market share.

Producers see a death sentence in the agricultural chapters of NAFTA, signed a decade ago and implemented since 1994, and blame the Mexican government for not preparing them for free trade.

"The governments of the recent past and of the present have refused to assume the commitment of rural development; they have refused to assume the responsibility of promoting agricultural activities, as it has been much more comfortable for them to be simple spectators," legislators said in a recent document sent to Mexican President Vicente Fox as part of a petition for more protection of the agriculture sector.

some 1.8 million family farmers had been forced to migrate since NAFTA went into effect on January 1, 1994.15

Let me ask somebody worth listening to: what's wrong with NAFTA?

Well many manufacturing jobs in the US were sent to Mexico where labor is cheaper.

Companies that didn't move to Mexico threatened too, which allowed them to pay their employees less. This also made it harder to unionize the company.

Many farmers in Mexico got hurt because of subsidized in the US. This caused the imported agriculture to be cheaper then the domestic made agriculture.

It also caused an increase in pollution for Mexico, as well as increased deforestation.
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Then reform NAFTA to deal with that crap instead of outright repealing it. Perhaps include labour and environmental standards. Perhaps include provisions to get rid of agricultural subsidies or enact a ban on exporting subsidized goods.

Either that, or replace NAFTA with another regional free trade agreement, which includes much of the Caribbean and Central America.

Repealing NAFTA is essentially a regressive move that will lead us backwards.