An older column by the late (and very great) columnist, Sam Francis...rng
By Sam Francis
From vdare.com
Feb. 21, 2002
Back in 1993, when the propaganda campaign for passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement was swinging, there were three main reasons offered as to why NAFTA should pass. It would help reduce illegal immigration from Mexico; it would help modernize the Mexican economy, and it would help Americans by removing trade barriers. Not one turned out to be true.
The effect on immigration is obvious enough: Immigration ever since has been bigger than ever. The "Mexican modernization" myth went south during the Mexican peso crisis a few months later. As for the impact on Americans, NAFTA has been pretty much a zilch as well, except perhaps for the mega-corporations that benefit from it. But how much of a zilch NAFTA and similar globalization measures have been is made a little more clear in a recent report in the New York Times. What NAFTA and similar agreements mean is probably the extinction of America's small towns.
"All along the nation's back roads," the Times reports, "hundreds of towns ... are teetering in the recession, and some worry that they may never recover." [NYT, Changes in World Economy on Raw Materials May Doom Many Towns February 16, 2002] The reason the Times offers is sound: "Since the last recession, in the early 1990's [before NAFTA], China, Russia and the former Soviet republics have charged into the world's commodity markets. At the same time, new trade agreements have erased quotas and tariffs that long insulated United States industries from competitors." NAFTA is not explicitly mentioned, but what other "new trade agreements" can you think of that have been adopted since the early 1990s?
As a result, small American towns wither. In Brady, Texas, farmers who relied on the export of angora wool "are victims of low prices and competition from New Zealand and Argentina." For Bartow, Ga., "high production in countries like China have led to an oversupply and plunging prices" and the consequent devastation of the town. In Loving, N.M., which is near the "nation's largest deposits of potash, a basic ingredient of fertilizer," the agricultural recession and Canadian potash competition is destroying the farming economy on which the town relies. "The mining companies say most of those jobs may be gone for good."
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