The Importance of Linking

I’m linking here to Mike because that’s what we bloggers do. We link to one another. Mike will pick up on the link, and he’ll come here and read what I say, and he might comment. It’s only fair. He put up something really interesting, and I commented over there. If he comments here, the circle will be complete.

Mike’s a smart guy, but when it comes to politics, it’s really hard to tell about people. As with religion, some very smart people can believe some very weird stuff. But Mike, for all his weirdness, is having a revelation of sorts, and it is one so important that I hope other bloggers link to me as I link to him, or bypass me and link directly to him. What he has discovered (and he is not surprised, I must emphasize), is that Obama is being duplicitous about NAFTA. Obama really supports NAFTA in its current form. He’s just trash-talking it because he wants to win the Ohio primary. Ohioans, in their dense stupidity, think they’ve been hurt by NAFTA.

Go and read Mike’s post, please, so I don’t have to repeat everything here.

Sometime I’m going to read more about NAFTA. All I have is vague impressions. I assume that the treaty was written by and crafted to benefit American corporations, and that no one spoke for Mexican campesinos at that time. They don’t matter. I assume it was merely a continuation of our old habits – imperialism, we used to call it. We need two things from backward countries, mainly those to the south of us – cheap labor and cheap commodities. We do not, repeat, do not, want them to develop. Quite the opposite. If they try to do so, we will fight them every step of the way. At the same time, there are things we need to protect – “intellectual property”, we call it – our ideas and patents on seed technology and our weapons technology and, of course, our movie and music industries, but not our jobs, as our leaders and our corporations don’t care about our jobs, and think we are overpaid anyway.

So NAFTA, if crafted correctly, would give us access to their cheap labor and commodities while protecting our most important assets. But not our jobs.

So I assume that when NAFTA was crafted, it would be done so with hardly any input from workers here, none from those abroad, and when the expected fallout occurred, that economists working for American corporations and the universities and think tanks they support would tell us how really good NAFTA is for us. That’s how it’s done – it’s a circle back-pat, to be delicate. (They did negotiate “side agreements” on labor and the environment in response to public pressure fourteen years ago, but that was just window dressing.)

Fallout from NAFTA? Loss of jobs here. Mexican farmers have been devastated by cheap corn going down there, and in turn are coming here in droves to work the underground economy undercut our wage structure. And our corporations hire them for less than they would have to pay Americans. Win-win.

But it’s all theoretical – I mean, Ohioans really aren’t that stupid, and might know a thing or two, and there really is a massive migration from south to north going on since NAFTA passed. But our economists tell us that this is all good, or that if it is bad, that it wasn’t caused by NAFTA.

(Just a side note – in Mike’s links, they talk about how good NAFTA has been for us, and give NAFTA credit for every positive thing that has happened these last fourteen years since its passage, assuming if two things happen at once, once caused the other. Much of that is probably devil-in-detail kind of stuff, some of it just professional manipulation of statistics, but the interesting thing is this – they only talk about what is good for the U.S. – not Mexico or Canada. And they don’t talk about the migration.)

Anyway, here’s something critical – our politicians of both parties are supported by the corporations who crafted NAFTA, and are not going to do anything to change it. In fact, they will support its expansion to every other backward country foolish enough (or whose politicians are bought enough) to go along. So Clinton and Obama, who are bashing NAFTA in public in Ohio, are not serious. So it would make sense that they would reassure Canadian leadership by back channel not to pay attention. And that’s what they did. That’s what Mike wrote about.

Do yourself a favor, link to Mike, link to me, let’s make a circle link. Let’s spread the word amongst ourselves. Obama and Clinton are lying about NAFTA. Mike exposed them.