The Long Arm of NAFTA and The WTO:

Good Morning Middle America, your King of Simple News has another dose of reality this morning.

In my little neck of the woods here in rural Western Colorado, we are fortunate to be removed from the painful issues of our businesses picking up and moving to China; we wish.

In the serene village of Paonia, lying in an idyllic mountain valley along the banks of the North Fork of the Gunnison River, and surrounded by peach, apple and cherry orchards, Chaco Sandals rose to fame. The company was an American success story, the one that really did start in a garage with a good idea and eventually gained world distribution for an exceptional product.

As business grew, new facilities were constructed and good quality jobs were created for the local citizens. The new found commerce became so brisk, that a former super market was purchased in the nearby town of Delta to serve as a distribution hub which employed even more of the local citizens. Life was good for employer and employees.

This is the way that America should be. The opportunity to live and work in a beautiful unspoiled environment, away from the crime, pollution, corruption and congestion of the city, after all, isn’t this what America is all about; the freedom to start a business and prosper?

And then came NAFTA and the WTO.

At first, the owners and managers of Chaco confirmed that they were here to stay; after all, the company wasn’t built in Paonia by accident.

But then, once an American company’s American made competition goes to China…how do you compete? “We can,” was once more the attitude.

The end of next month, July, 2008, will mark the closure of Chaco Sandals production; in the U.S.

When I wrote “The Biggest Lie Ever Believed,” I pointed out that a U.S. company cannot under any circumstances compete with labor that is being paid at 50 times less. You didn’t read that wrong, fifty times less.

There is a great difference between free trade and fair trade. What William Jefferson Clinton signed on both NAFTA and the WTO were free trade agreements, there was never anything fair about it. Ask the more than 8.5 million people who are now unemployed in the U.S. whether it was fair.

Our current government is totally unfit to govern. They are complete and total failures and have led us to a place that we may never recover from. When I say our “current government,” I’m not talking about George Bush. While George Bush has been a total failure at his leadership, it isn’t his signature on the bottom of NAFTA and the WTO.

Leadership has known that our system of exponential growth would fail from the time this growth oriented society began. But those who were vocal and pointed out the obvious cracks in the foundation were marginalized as “Chicken Little’s.”

In 1971, the U.S. was forced to go off the gold standard permanently. From that time forward, our system of growth beyond natural limits has been supported by “The Biggest Lie Ever Believed.”