NAFTA?
March 3, 2008 | 9:01 am | by t-blender |Rate It:
laTimes.com: MEXICO CITY — Four campaign seasons have come and gone since presidential hopeful H. Ross Perot warned that NAFTA would create a “giant sucking sound” of jobs going to Mexico, and the trade pact is still generating plenty of noise. Calls to renegotiate the 14-year-old deal are rising from both sides of the border.
Thousands of protesters paralyzed traffic in Mexico’s capital in January to demand a redo of the pact, which they said had hurt Mexican farmers. In the U.S., the North American Free Trade Agreement looms large in states such as Ohio, which hosts a crucial presidential primary Tuesday.
The Rust Belt has shed hundreds of thousands of factory jobs since 1994, when the U.S.-Canada-Mexico trade bloc was implemented. Ohio alone had lost a net 50,000 jobs as a result of NAFTA, according to a 2006 analysis by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, who are campaigning for the Democratic nomination, say the deal needs to be retooled to protect American workers.
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