NAFTA

...are many, unless you are a multinational corporation like, let's say, WalMart, who currently has in excess of 500 factories operating in China (yes, WalMart has factories/subcontractors) employing thousands upon thousands of people who work in extremely abusive conditions manufacturing products to be sold to WalMart customers back in America undercutting the traditional circles of trade and commerce operating within the our nation. Read this article exposing the flaws of U.S. Trade Policy and quoting Peru's President Alan Garcia "Come and open your factories in my country so we can sell your products back to the United States."

http://www.americaneconomicalert.org/view_art.asp?Prod_ID=2911

NAFTA and other trade agreements, blocs, partnerships, etc. attempt to circumvent our constitution by giving legal authority to an international body organized and supervised by the United Nations... not the United States. When a new trade agreement is enacted with a foreign government it provides great powers to the U.S. Corporate interests as they continue to shut down their U.S. operations and relocate their production and manufacturing to these new "Business Shelters", much like the tax shelter nations of the caribbean where many of these unethical manufacturing companies are now headquartered. Just look at Haliburton... Our nations largest defense contractor by far and they are now headquartered in the Persian Gulf region with no extradition back to the U.S... how crooked is that... and HOW can they be allowed to continue to be given our billion dollar military infrastructure contracts... they are no longer an American-based corporation... they are no longer American!

The root problem is that these agreements primarily favor the needs of the wealthy corporations over the needs of the peoples of either of the nations encumbered by the entanglements.

Regardless of what the acronym implies...NAFTA is not a free trade agreement. A document that gives true free trade could be written on the back of a napkin...the NAFTA document is thousands of pages and 20+ chapters long.

What this is...it's managed trade. It's a document that says x amount of this type of goods can be shipped duty free, under these circumstances, and only on the second Tuesday of the month.

The reason people feel it's bad for American manufacturing jobs is this. Imagine a textile company making blankets in Yuma, AZ. They pay their workers $8 per hour. They could move to Mexico, where they could pay their workers $0.80 per hour. The only roadblocks to doing this would be the cost of moving the factory, and the cost of importing the blankets to be sold in the states.

When NAFTA was approved, the duty put on Mexican made blankets was lifted, so many manufacturing companies shut down US operations and moved them to Mexico, where they can now pay next to nothing in wages, benefits, let alone the lack of regulations and taxes they are subject to in the states.

With NAFTA, the feds now can pick and choose which US industries they can destroy by selectively making certain goods free of import duty, and also can protect industries they choose by keeping high duties on some things.

Basically...it gives more control to a government that has wayyy too much control over US business. They can take bribes to protect a certain industry at the expense of another...and we trust them with too much power already.

that have been exported, so I'm not sure what the problem is.

Dr. Paul is for open borders as far trade is concerned. He's very much a free trader. I know he opposes NAFTA as being "managed trade" that gives special privileges to some business. I'm also wondering about specifics.