Trade agreements have caused the loss of millions of jobs in US

Back in 1992 while I was an officer in the USWA (United Steelworkers of America) at Wheatland Tube Co. the Congress and President Clinton were about to set in motion one of the worst trade agreements ever. It was NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). From the get-go the steelworkers, autoworkers and numerous other unions were against it, stating that it would cost the U.S. jobs and manufacturing facilities. We were bombarded from all sides on how great it would be for the U.S., Mexico and Canada. It was signed, sealed and delivered in 1993 and since that time we have lost 2.5 million jobs and numerous businesses have staked out a claim in Mexico.

These figures don’t lie, and you would think that President Obama, along with the House and Senate, would do something to halt the job losses and the loss of our manufacturing base, not to mention our sovereignty. NAFTA should be repealed, but that probably will never happen because of inaction on the part of the president and Congress, but at least try.

NAFTA, CAFTA, GATT, etc., all have given us a huge trade deficit after promising just the opposite. If all of these so-called free and fair trade agreements aren’t bad enough, along comes the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) which includes 12 nations. I won’t list them all but one of them has to be mentioned. It’s Vietnam. You read it right. How in the world can our president and Congress even consider doing business with the bunch of communist thugs? What would we get from Vietnam? They use slave labor like China, and shouldn’t we remember the 58,000 men and women who gave their lives to try to stop these lowlifes. If and when this horrible trade agreement comes up for a vote in the House and Senate, I hope by that time they are swamped by hundreds of thousands of letters telling them to vote “no” on the TPP.

Bud McKelvey, Hermitage, Pa.