Letter: Expansion of trade agreements a destructive idea

Tuesday, Aug. 3, 2004 | 9:12 a.m.

With great delight, Bush administration personnel announced that 248,000 jobs had been created during May. Left out of the rash of self-congratulating hoopla was the fact that more than 70 percent of those jobs were low-paying domestic-service positions that can't be farmed out overseas.

As for manufacturing and high-tech employment, the drain in these professions continues. Retiring Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., recently noted that "the world power that loses its manufacturing capacity no longer is a world power."

The Bush administration is planning larger and more destructive trade agreements of the kind that have already decimated our nation's manufacturing base. Those plans, if implemented, will only deepen this attack on our nation's strength and, ultimately, on its independence. Trade agreements, such as NAFTA and the proposed CAFTA and FTAA, are deceptively labeled to mislead. They promote socialist bureaucratic controls over trade, not the free market, and they generally do not lower barriers to American exports, except for the export of American capital, industry, manufacturing and quality jobs.

We must persuade Republican congressmen that the public will not accept an expansion of NAFTA as good for the economy and does not trust our leaders to make decisions in a vacuum regarding hemispheric integration.

KEN HOVEY