Stopping the loss of even MORE freedom

The U.S. government is currently in negotiations with other nations around the world over another trade agreement - this one far-reaching, covering all sorts of international trade, communications, freedoms and more. The agreement inb question could dramatically impact our everyday lives, including our freedoms on the Internet. The treaty is called TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) and if you have any interest at all, you should research it online.

The article below takes a look at the last big treaty we trusted our government on and the fact that it didn't work out very well except for the very wealthy.

20 years of NAFTA show why TPP must be stopped (Click on this heading to read more)

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The post-NAFTA era has been marked by growing inequality, declining job security and new leverage for corporations to attack government regulations enacted in the public interest.
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But it wasn’t supposed to be that way. Back in 1986, when the leaders of the US, Canada and Mexico began talks on a regional trade deal that eight years later would culminate in the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), they sold the pact to the public as an economic win-win for all parties involved.
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On signing the treaty in 1994, then-President Bill Clinton said, “NAFTA means jobs. American jobs, and good-paying American jobs. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t support this agreement.” He promised that NAFTA would result in “an export boom to Mexico,” and claimed that such trade deals “transcend ideology” because support for them “is so uniform that it unites people in both parties.”
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Twenty years later, we can test how those claims panned out in the real world. And Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch did just that, releasing a comprehensive study of NAFTA’s impacts.
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Last week, Global Trade Watch Director Lori Wallach spoke to Moyers & Company about NAFTA at age 20, and what it portends for other trade treaties like the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Below is a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity.
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Joshua Holland: Last Wednesday was the twentieth anniversary of NAFTA going into effect. Has it at least led to an increase in the trade of goods and services between the US, Canada and Mexico?
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Lori Wallach: That is the only measure where you can show that the promises of NAFTA’s proponents were met. The flow of goods has increased. Unfortunately, that flow has been a huge surge of imports into the United States, from Mexico, and, interestingly, from Canada, so that we’ve seen the displacement of one million jobs on net because of the huge increase — a 450 percent increase — in our trade deficit in the 20 years since NAFTA went into effect.

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