Saturday, February 23, 2013

Jobs jobs jobs!!! Brian Mulroney and the NAFTA legacy

It was obvious from the beginning that Mulroney's campaign to push "free trade" down Canada's throat was going to be good for a few of his pals in the ownership classes, or the "one percent" as we refer to them now, and not so great for the rest of us.

But the sales job had an almost-believable appeal to the racism inherent in our society. Our brown-skinned brothers south of the Rio Grande would only get the shit jobs that we didn't want to do anyway.

We'd be doing all those new hi-tech jobs that were beyond the ability of our stupid brown-skinned brothers in Mexico.

Most of my union brothers in the United Steelworkers of America knew the truth right away; this was a fancy way of moving our jobs to Mexico.

But the Mulroney bullshit won the day.

Mulroney was in Toronto the other day to celebrate 25 years of NAFTA.

Mulroney was feted by U of T's Rotman School of Management, where they have no problem celebrating a shit-bag who weaseled his way out of serious bribery charges that followed the revelation that he had taken cash-stuffed envelopes from Karl-Heinz Schreiber, Krupp-Thiessen Ambassador at Large for schmier-geld back in the day.

So Rotman pays Lyin' Brian a speakers fee to come tell all about how great NAFTA has been. It has transformed the land!..

Indeed it has. A few days later The Globe and Mail finds room for this story. Seems twenty-five years after that glorious victory for "free trade"  half of all Toronto area employees are suffering from "precarious employment."

As in no benefits and no job security and if you don't like it, move to Mexico.

That's the real legacy of Mulroney's NAFTA achievement.

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