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Intent...
Made in the USA
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Related
Links:
World
Trade Orginazation
National Non-Profit Public Interest Organization
United States Business and Industry Council |
In
recent years, “Free Trade” agreements, such as NAFTA,
the WTO and Most Favored Nation (MFN) status for China, have produced
some very unfair results—thousands of American companies closed,
millions of American jobs lost to Chinese, Mexican, or other foreign
factories. National defense and high-tech work is now “outsourced”
overseas! Privately-held firms and middle-class workers are
paying the price for unfair “free” trade.
Although
warnings about the crisis engulfing American manufacturing have been
intensifying for several years now, the sector’s woes continue
to be significantly underestimated – certainly by official Washington
and even by many manufacturers themselves. The nation, in
short, faces a manufacturing emergency. Unless drastic measures
are taken quickly, this emergency will turn the United States
into a second-class manufacturing power, greatly diminishing
its own future economic prospects. Further, national security and
flexibility in foreign affairs will be severely compromised. Finally,
the international imbalances being created by the manufacturing crisis
will likely push the world into a major dollar crisis and could cause
a protracted depression.
In part, the manufacturing crisis reflects the economy’s latest
cyclical downturn and the deflating of the bubble of the 1990s. Likewise,
the manufacturing employment portion of the crisis stems in part from
the increases in productivity in recent years. But neither of these
factors sufficiently explains the root cause of manufacturing’s
current troubles, which are the worst by many measures since the end
of World War II, and that is the cumulative and continuing effects
of two decades of misguided, ill-advised, and weak-willed
U.S. trade and globalization policies. (For more information
go to www.usbusiness.org
)
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