Flashback–Joe Biden in 2007: Job-Killing NAFTA ‘Not the Problem’
4:46
In 2007, then-Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) defended the job-killing, pro-outsourcing North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) years after voting in support of the free trade deal that ultimately helped lead to the elimination of nearly five million U.S. manufacturing jobs.
During a December 2007 interview with SentinelSource.com, Biden defended his support for NAFTA by claiming that the free trade deal “probably created” more U.S. jobs than those that were lost and said the deal “wasn’t the problem.”
Biden said:
My problem is … I voted for NAFTA. NAFTA in my state created more jobs than it lost jobs coming out of my state. And you can argue that, on balance, it probably created more American jobs than it lost. [Emphasis added]…There was dislocation. Some jobs got lost. Some jobs got created. But, again, NAFTA wasn’t the problem. The problem became when you go beyond what these guys are going, [the Bush administration] and it’s attitude — it’s attitude about … and it’s an intellectually indefensible attitude. [Emphasis added]
In Biden’s home state of Delaware, though, NAFTA helped to eliminate nearly 17,000 American jobs due to soaring trade deficits and China’s entering the World Trade Organization (WTO). NAFTA, alone, eliminated about 1,200 American jobs in Delaware due to the U.S.-Mexico trade deficit.
Biden said, in the same interview, that the U.S. must be engaged in “open trade” while calling himself a “fair trader.”
“This isn’t about saying you can’t … we should not be investing in other parts of the world, this is not saying we should not have open trade,” Biden said. “It just says we should have free and fair trade. I mean, literally, fair trade. And that means you get held to the same standard.”
As Breitbart News has chronicled, decades-long free trade deals, NAFTA, and China’s entering the WTO eliminated nearly five million manufacturing jobs across the country since 1994. Free trade advocates, like Biden, claimed at the time that NAFTA would create a million U.S. manufacturing jobs in the first five years.
Instead, nearly a million American jobs have been certified by the federal government as being lost directly due to NAFTA, according to data gathered by Public Citizen. These are only the U.S. jobs that the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program recognizes as being lost to free trade and does not indicate the actual number of jobs lost.
For example, free trade with Mexico, alone, has eliminated at least 700,000 American jobs, and states in the Rust Belt have been hit the hardest. Those states and the number of American workers impacted include:
- 14,500 American workers displaced in Wisconsin
- 43,600 American workers displaced in Michigan
- 2,600 American workers displaced in West Virginia
- 26,300 American workers displaced in Pennsylvania
- 34,900 American workers displaced in Ohio
- 34,300 American workers displaced in New York
- 6,500 American workers displaced in Iowa
- 24,400 American workers displaced in Indiana
- 34,700 American workers displaced in Illinois
Most famously, the state of West Virginia has been enormously crippled by free trade and multilateral trade deals like NAFTA. One former steel town in West Virginia lost 94 percent of its steel jobs because of NAFTA, with nearly 10,000 workers in the town being displaced from the steel industry.
“They talk about creating all these jobs,” an American worker told The Independent of NAFTA. “But they’re just retail jobs that pay minimum wage, or just above.”
This week, Biden defended his support, once again, of NAFTA, job-killing free trade negotiations, and his opposition to tariffs on cheap foreign imports.
“I’m proud of my record,” Biden told local media in Iowa.
Despite declaring himself a defender of American union workers, Biden’s first fundraiser for his 2020 presidential primary campaign was hosted by a slew of wealthy donors, including attorney Steve Cozen, whose law firm specializes in helping corporations bust up labor unions, as Breitbart News’s Matt Boyle reported.
WALL STREET,
GLOBALIST, BILLIONAIRES and the OPEN BORDERS ADVOCATES FINISH OFF
MIDDLE-AMERICA.
Ryan asked how much
longer will the working-class not matter “because it’s becoming impossible for
them to keep their nose above water.”
“Where’s the social compact that we used to have between corporations
and their workers? Where’s the social contract between the government and our
workers?” asked Ryan. “I mean, it’s like the worker —
there’s always an excuse that the worker is going to get hammered, that they’re
going to lose their pensions, they’re going to lose their jobs, they’re going
to have to move. Meanwhile, corporations, in this instance, General Motors got
$157 million in tax cut just last year. I mean how much longer are we going to
do this to where the worker doesn’t matter? And I hope this is a real wake-up
call for us to say, workers, white, brown, black, gay, straight, working-class
people have got to come together because it’s becoming impossible for them to
keep their nose above water anymore.” REP.
TIM RYAN
GENERAL MOTORS DUMPS
THOUSANDS OF WORKERS AND CLOSES PLANTS
- Stockholders celebrate!
"It
identifies socialism with proposals for mild social reform such as
“Medicare for all,” raised and increasingly abandoned by a section of the
Democratic Party. It cites Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher to
promote the virtues of “economic freedom,” i.e., the unrestrained
operation of the capitalist market, and to denounce all social reforms,
business regulations, tax increases or anything else that impinges on
the oligarchy’s self-enrichment."
“The
yearly income of a typical US household dropped by a massive 12 percent,
or $6,400, in the six years between 2007 and 2013. This is just one of the
findings of the 2013 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances released
Thursday, which documentsa sharp decline in working class living standards and
a further concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and the
super-rich.”
"The American phenomenon of record stock values fueling
an ever greater concentration of wealth at the very top of
society, while the economy is starved of productive investment,
the social infrastructure crumbles, and working class
living standards are driven down by entrenched
unemployment, wage-cutting and government austerity policies, is part of
a broader global process."
"A
defining expression of this crisis is the dominance of financial speculation
and parasitism, to the point where a narrow international financial aristocracy
plunders society’s resources in order to further enrich itself."
Flashback–Biden Cozied Up to General Motors CEO Mary Barra: ‘GM is Alive!’
4:42
Following former President Obama’s billion-dollar American taxpayer bailout of multinational automaker General Motors (GM), then-Vice President Joe Biden (D) cozied up to CEO Mary Barra, who has since laid off thousands of American workers and outsourced their jobs to Mexico and China.
Throughout the 2012 presidential election cycle, Biden routinely claimed that “General Motors is alive” following the Obama administration’s $11 billion taxpayer bailout of the company in 2009.
Years after the bailout, Biden and officials with the Obama administration not only touted Barra’s leadership at GM but invited her to the State of the Union Address in 2014 and took photo-ops with the executive.
Today, Barra is overseeing the layoff of thousands of American workers as GM shifts and increases production in Mexico and China. Barra’s mass layoff effort is stopping production at four of its U.S. plants, including Detroit-Hamtramck and Warren Transmission in Michigan, Lordstown Assembly in Ohio, and Baltimore Operations in Maryland.
While GM was bailed out by U.S. taxpayers, the Obama-Biden scheme came with no commitments for the corporation to stop outsourcing Americans’ jobs overseas.
In 2011, Hoover Institution at Stanford University research fellow Paul Gregory noted that despite the Obama-Biden bailout for GM, the company continued outsourcing American jobs abroad. A 2011 report detailed GM had less than 75,000 jobs left in the U.S. while employing more than 122,000 foreign workers overseas. At the time, nearly two-thirds of GM’s workforce was located abroad.
Rather than stopping GM’s outsourcing, the Obama-Biden scheme focused much of their attention on subsidizing and promoting electric, plug-in cars like the Chevy Volt. Last year, Barra announced that production for the Volt, as well as the Chevy Cruze, would end.
General Motors CEO Mary Barra talks about the company’s Corvette Stingray with Vice President Joe Biden during a tour of the North American International Auto in Detroit, Thursday, Jan. 16, 2014. Biden said the U.S. auto industry’s resurgence since the 2009 federal bailout provides a strong basis for a Motor City recovery. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)
General Motors CEO Mary Barra talks with Vice President Joe Biden during a tour of the North American International Auto in Detroit, Thursday, Jan. 16, 2014. Biden said the U.S. auto industry’s resurgence since the 2009 federal bailout provides a strong basis for a Motor City recovery. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)
Last month, Barra closed the Lordstown plant, a decision expected to result in the layoff of more than 8,000 American workers in the area, and allegedly blamed the United Auto Workers (UAW) for the plant’s closure. Closing the Lordstown plant resulted in the immediate layoff of about 1,600 American workers and since 2017, GM has laid off about 4,500 American workers in Ohio. Another 900 American workers in supporting industries have been put of out work as well.
After all four plant closures, GM’s Barra is expected to have laid off 14,700 of its workers in the U.S. and Canada.
As Breitbart News has chronicled, American workers and UAW officials have debunked Barra’s claim that the union is at fault for the Lordstown plant closure. Details emerged this month revealing that the UAW accepted nearly $120 million a year in concessions to keep the Lordstown plant open. When workers and UAW officials heard of Barra’s announcement last year, they say they were stunned.
“We did everything they want,” longtime GM worker Sonja Smith told Bloomberg News. “This is their payback.”
Simultaneously, UAW officials have voiced support for Trump in his effort to reopen the Lordstown plant and keep open GM’s other three plants slated for closure by Barra.
Experts have called on Trump to implement a 25 percent auto tariff to protect American auto worker jobs and the U.S. auto industry from Chinese domination. Likewise, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), vying for the Democrat nomination for president, has told Trump to immediately ban GM from receiving federal contracts for their outsourcing, offshoring, and mass layoff scheme.
While GM lays off thousands of American workers this year, its production in Mexico and China is ramping up. Specifically, GM is looking to manufacture an electric Cadillac in China and continue manufacturing its Envision compact vehicle in China.
The made-in-Mexico Chevrolet Blazer will soon arrive in U.S. markets. Last year, GM became the largest automaker in Mexico as it has cut jobs in America and increased production in Mexico.
Offshoring production to Mexico has proven cheaper for GM executives because American workers earn about $30 an hour while Mexican workers earn about $3 an hour, a 90 percent cut to wages that widens the corporation’s profit margins. Meanwhile, Barra continues to earn a salary of about $22 million.
Biden’s first fundraiser for his 2020 presidential primary campaign was hosted by a slew of wealthy donors, including attorney Steve Cozen whose law firm specializes in helping corporations bust up labor unions, as Breitbart News’ Matt Boyle reported.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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