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this is today is the second anniversary
the US Correa free trade agreement this while
you know the administration is pushing and there's all this
the hope to do but bout Shafter the
the southern hemisphere Asian free trade agreement also known as the track as the
trans-pacific partnership TPP so they're pushing Shafter the TPP
abut it's the second year love the
cake after the Korean free trade agreement or
kofta maybe we should call her kafka yeah
ahead certainly kafka ask and this was the Korean free trade agreement was sold
to us on the idea that
arts water bowl be able to explore all list after career will make all kinds a
money it'll help our trade barbells a trade deficits
which is actually the worst that's the deficit we need to worry about
there are two deficits so we need to worry about one is all the money
that american companies are stashing offshore we discovered today it's almost
two trillion dollars
they add another couple hundred billion
dollars as last year this in today's New York Times I get to that more detail in
a moment and the second
is are trade balance because when we buy more than we sell
other come countries end up sitting on a plot of our dollars and they've gotta
spend them
ultimately here in the united states where the country country creates the
dollar's
and so they end up coming over here and buying up our
businesses buying our buildings by in our
of forests by you know basically by a nice
and eventually the
there's not much was left plus one were binding some overseas were not bind them
from domestic manufactures are not bind them for manufacturing companies here in
the United States
I i think i mention our friend Richard
from from Melbourne from Australia spent the day Sunday with Louisa me
he was in a new york two days before on Friday
speaking at a conference on a rollin G II packets actually president of the
Society to put on the conference
and he came down spent the day with a Sunday and
and and he's to amtrak's New York down to DC
and he said my god that's that's so
I don't from the exact phrase he used but just it's devastating
if you've never taken the the train from New York to DC
and you have an opportunity to go for it
first off you take your cell it's not a bad train ride and it's a very nice
train ride in fact so i three hours it's faster than flying
when you consider the time that you have to get to the airport go through
security and stand in line and check your baggage bed and all that stuff
and get to and from the airport something else and the train stations
are both downtown in New York and DC
to go from Union Station has been station it's just you know
from downtown to downtown in three hours roughly but beyond that
this is an educational experience every American should have
because when my dad was a kid
in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties when he was young man even in
the nineteen sixties
if you took the train from New York to Washington DC you passed reeve nearly 90
even the 1970s
you passed mile after mile after mile of factories
and housing of that was filled with people who work in the factories
prosperous neighborhoods
factories just banging out stuff left and right all kinds of things from
precision tools to
to to blue jeans furniture how many you name it it was being made along the
Northeast Corridor
and people manufactured right up to in factories that ran right up to the
railroad line
because they ship things by rail
and they're all gone now
its absolutely astounding it's like wow its cycle a moonscape in some places or
II actually it's more like something out a blade runner
mean is you're taking that train up there you see these factories
huge factories that haven't been occupied since the Middle the reagan
administration
where the middle love the urged the bush or Clinton administration offers
bush-clinton mister they have been occupied 10 15 20 25 years
as a result of these insane free trade agreements we've entered into
and the windows are smashed out there's graffiti all over them in some cases the
the ropes have been burned out caved in
Hall most people have have lived in them they've been used for his
as drug warehouses there there datya the gay gang graffiti on them
and and you pass miles have housing
beautiful two and three-story brownstone kinda via rowhouses
become almost right up to the tracks
that that where the you know they're prospers neighborhoods have
blue-collar workers who had good union jobs who worked in these factories in
middle-class schools the whole thing
and its all empty the rough sir burned out in caved in the windows are boarded
up
or not that's the northeast corner
so the numbers are out: about the need two years into the experiment with
Correa
we just tried it with one country
you think we would've learned after thirty years this insanity
but we tried it just two years ago and this was you know at the
at the strong suggestion to President Obama hate let's
cut a deal with Korea
and public citizen has issued a news release on this
Laurie Wallace group citizen .org is the website
and I get citizen .org slash trade for their trade watch Beauty just got a
citizen dorgan you can click into it
the headline up their press release says
on the second anniversary us-korea Free Trade Agreement
US exports down 11 percent
imports for crime Korea up and the deficit with korea balloon
balloons 47 percent
we have lost 46 thousand
good pain US factory jobs
as a result adjust these two years to your experiment over free trade deal
with Korea
we've lost an average of 300 $85 million dollars every month
in exports to Korea accumulative 9.2 billion dollars in exports to Korea
our agricultural exports to Korea fallen 41 percent
our trade deficit with Correa has grown by nineteen percent
and here's what's most amazing career has actually increase their imports
from every other country except the United States by 22 percent
so buying less from us they're selling more to us there by more from other
countries
my probably most images China
which doesn't have I mean they have theoretical free trade deals but the way
that they work them they're not really free trade deals
any so there's that