Why Gringos Need NAFTA

In the cult classic movie �Office Space,� protagonist and cubicle slave Peter Gibbons says to his obese hypnotherapist something that summarizes every DNC presidential nominee for the last few decades. Peter summed up his life by saying that every consecutive day is worse than the last, and that just when he thinks that life cannot get any worse, the next day takes the taco.

Barack Obama makes me cringe and run to John Kerry, even if he is a Frenchie foo foo. And John Kerry makes me run�and skip over Al Gore� and flee all the way back to Clinton�s bosom. And Clinton makes me run back even further to monoliths like JFK, and so on. Each presidential nominee from the DNC consecutively frightens the !@#$%>> out of me and makes me yearn for the prior with fond remembrance. Is that normal? Have these new oppressors, in the words of Homer, made the whips of Egypt seem sweet?

I am especially terrified of Community Organizer Obama this time around because I see in living detail how his administration could impact my life�personally. To be brief, I work in the international export of American-built technology, and I spearhead an International B2B Solutions Sales Division, building high-end enterprise equipment to export to Latin America, and in my case, M�xico. Given that I speak fluent Castilian Spanish, I have some job security. I am the only one who can delineate the IT specifications on a server in Spanish. I feel like the center of the universe; like an MIS Buddha. And for as long as I can remember, I have taken the fluidity of trade to Mexico for granted. I sell American-made products to Latin America (our factory is in Fletcher, Ohio) and guys like me provide jobs and income for talented engineers on the mainland. I have filled out NAFTA paperwork for as long as I have worked.

Now for those of you who do not know what NAFTA is, it stands for the North American Free Trade Agreement. You see, many nations would throw up protectionist tariffs to regulate imports under the delusion that they are protecting workers who are afraid to compete. Go figure that each nation has a parasitic labor union to which they must pander. Americans, for all of our capitalistic might, are no exception.

Under George Bush Senior as well as Bill Clinton (I give credit where it is due), NAFTA was carved out as a trade bloc between the US, Mexico, and Canada. They are currently our closest trading partners. It says, �I will not tariff your good if you don�t tariff mine.� This has been emulated in other places around the world, such as the European Union, merging autonomous republics into a giant superstate and blending the economies under a common exchange. Asia is doing the same thing with the South Asia Free Trade Agreement. Trade blocs are forming, and while I think that we should literally trade freely with everyone but an enemy, NAFTA is better than nothing at all. If we hope to compete with Europe and Asia, the Americas must be united.

While running against Hillary, Barack Obama displayed his sniveling Marxist ignorance of global trade and tried to take a fight to Hillary by stating that he had planned to unilaterally renegotiate NAFTA and, in his callow words, use the �hammer� of opting out of it all together. Pause. Now, for a man who talks about mending international fences, he proposes to ignite trade wars with long-time economic allies. Not only would this wrong-headed policy spark resentment on a hemispheric front, but it would do something else� against me particularly, given my line of work in the export industry.

Now Barack Obama was never a man who had to balance a budget or deal with payroll, and he most certainly never had to export or import anything� at least beyond the blow that he was using at Harvard. For a man who has never run a business operation, the profits that keep me and others afloat are nothing more than a Friedman theoretical. To him, they are not a reality. Obama�s intentions may in fact be good, but they evidence a pandering to labor unions, which traditionally represent dinosaur jobs that are going away and not coming back.

Think of a horse and buggy driver�s union. We all know that the combustible engine foiled the horse as an obsolete mode of transport, and it would behoove (pun) horsemen to retrain and learn how to drive a taxi. But no. Government officials seeking re-election will pander to the buggy union and force an ancient mode of transport on the Americas. Other industries in need of cheap and fast transport, such as meat packers, oil drillers, steel manufacturers�and ultimately consumers, must all pay the price for this protectionist coddling, and drain themselves to keep dying industries on life support. In our service economy, we need to start viewing agriculture and manufacturing with the same forward way in which we criticize the buggy. The only caveat we must maintain is that we monitor our self-reliance for strategic war-time purposes. Other than that, all bets are off. Trade should be fair, and we do need to ramp up pressure on China. Mexico should also be held to the same standards. But don’t kid yourself; Obama disagrees with free trade for entirely different reasons than hardline conservatives.

Hillary and Barack excoriated NAFTA, taking turns at whacking a pi�ata for the slobbering delight of their leftist base, stating that it had exported jobs to Mexico (the same party that ignores the lost American jobs taken by illegal immigration) and falsely claimed that NAFTA has eviscerated the US manufacturing industry. No! US Manufacturing was obsolesced by robotics technology, cheaper labor in Mexico, and a low-valued peso. Free trade was simply a better way of doing things! What they ignore are the astounding achievements that have come as a result of free trade, such as the NAFTA Superhighway, which has flung out new arteries of trade corridors along North-to-South highways that bisect the Midwestern United States, flowing between Mexico and Canada. These active trade lines have breathed new vitality into towns and cities along these routs, ensuring that Midwesterners can cling to things other than guns and religion. How novel!

Interstate 35, 29, 94, and the CANAMEX Corridor have seen economic boom along their routs since NAFTA, and for that I laud Clinton for finalizing Bush�s work and allying with Congressional Republicans. And for all the talk of turning the faucet off with the flow of illegal immigration, NAFTA is a solution that alleviates the cross-border pressure by allowing the legitimate free flow of goods and services from Mexico to the US, and vice versa. If hardline ideologues like Ron Paul and innocents like Barack Obama get their way, and reject this long-standing staple that has become a fixture of the US economy, the economic activity along these US corridors will dry up, and the wealth disparity between the US and Latin America will widen. Consequently, vast new armies of illegals will flood our borders to come and take what we refused to trade with them. Acting as a whistle on a teapot, NAFTA diverts the pressure generated by this wealth gap and stems it through legitimate, mutually profitable routes. It also gives Mexico an opportunity to create more jobs and productivity in their borders as well, allowing for long-term economic stability and fewer incentives to sneak across the Rio Grande, thereby narrowing the gap between the �haves� and the �have-nots.� For a plethora of reasons dealing with national sovereignty and with economic vibrancy, NAFTA should not be our political pi�ata; it should be a highway to the new millennium, and we should be forging more akin to it.

Now let me take you farther south to Colombia. This is a nation of good, kind, and humble people. I know many of them and enjoy their company and crisp pronunciation. They know firsthand what it means to confront evil head on, dealing with terrorism and leftist guerillas that prey on the innocent by kidnap and ransom. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and others like him have pleaded for help from the US in confronting this threat, and we have trained their army to send those cowards floating down the River Styx with Che Guevara. Good riddance. In context, many FARC guerillas moved into Colombia�s borders to exact terror, and then have fled back into adjacent Venezuela for refuge, a Hezbollah-style attack pattern (perhaps why Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are so buddy-buddy). In fact, after a rampage from mountain guerillas in late February 2008, Colombia had taken enough abuse and shot a cross-border bombardment into Ecuador, killing a bevy of FARC commanders in their rat hole. It almost precipitated a war, but it would have been a just one. In a Latin America that is turning increasingly leftist and Anti-American, Colombia was beginning to occupy a similar position of Israel, only to the south. They are a friend.

Sadly, Nancy Pelosi�s 2006 do-nothing Congress has abrogated a Colombia Free Trade Agreement that was near completion, for the same protectionist reasons they always do these things. This agreement would have bolstered our trade with Latin America, countering what Hugo Chavez threatens to cut off. It would have enriched both our economies, and it would strengthen an ally in a hostile region. Furthermore, new jobs and goods would incentivize Colombian farmers away from cocaine production as a sole source of income, diversifying their economy away from the black market. Smartly, President Uribe was in favor of this. Moronically, Nancy Pelosi was not. I guess botox is a domestic good.

Thought nugget: if we import foreign oil, it is so much wiser to do so through Mexico and Canada, our docile neighbors. Unilaterally canceling NAFTA would shift our import channels to hostile nations like Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and the like. Iran’s first conditionless meeting with our community organizer would be an expression of gratitude!

So I stand alone, a mere cog in the international trade machine. And as I write this, I am praying for the sake of my company and clients in Mexico that Obama does not get into the Oval Office. If he does, my Ohio-manufactured computer systems will take on a new and costly tariff when my client imports them into M�xico. After all, if we charge a tariff, why shouldn�t Mexico? This will create a disincentive that my client will come to despise, and after a term or two, he will decide to opt for his local price gougers, because quite frankly, there would be no difference at that point. How this helps retain jobs in my IT industry, I have no idea. Hope. Change. Whatever.

America has acted with allies in the past militarily, and has gone alone when needed. But Europe is cohering and so is Asia. Acting alone for the long-term on the economic battlefield is more than foolhardy; it�s flat suicide. >>