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Gary L. Teeter
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To strengthen and rebuild the economy By Pro supporting |
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Gary's Views |
It seems as though about the time things
go well enough, long enough ,the wheel needs reinvented ,or does it? In
regards to the economy and the effects of ever changing government
policy, I ask was
NAFTA too much of an overhaul ? Is 15 years long enough to judge NAFTA's
success? To me it seems as though more and more jobs have been exported
from the U.S. since 1994.Why? I feel that constantly loosing jobs in an ever
growing population is the best economic equation to increase
unemployment, inflation, crime, negative growth and unstable markets in
any country. With nearly six hundred thousand jobs lost in march of
2009 it seems as though the nine hundred pages of The North American
Trade Agreement need reopened and re-examined by many of us. Most of us
understand that recessions are cyclical. I question the reasons as well
as the frequentness and severity at which these recessions return.
As the news media brings forth reports about larger banks that faulted
the system and how they did so. I find it overwhelming that many of our
key elected officials did not take notice or react to this banking
problem even when their constituents were blowing whistles of warning.
As these giant locomotives that pull an economy start moving forward
with new momentum let us not forget what got us here and to enact
measures that deal directly with these catastrophic oversights. As your Ohio Senator I will collectively scrutinize and support legislation that works for Ohioan's and Americas work force. I will support new adequate legislation that safe guards against financial schemes that weaken the economy as well as the individual investors. |
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| Trivia |
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." Benjamin Franklin, 1759 |
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Note
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These website articles are for bringing
attention to issues facing our nation and world today. The links to the
sites that host their featured information are listed so that you
may visit them to view and derive your own conclusions and opinions. |
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Fannie, Freddie Worker Bonuses Total $210MBonuses for Fannie, Freddie workers total $210 million; regulator defends payouts
The Associated Press
Mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae
and Freddie Mac plan to pay more
than $210 million in bonuses through
next year to give workers the
incentive to stay in their jobs at
the government-controlled companies.
(ABC News Photo Illustration)Mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac plan to pay more than $210 million in bonuses through next year to give workers the incentive to stay in their jobs at the government-controlled companies. The retention awards for more than 7,600 employees were disclosed in a letter from the companies' regulator released Friday by Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee. The companies paid out nearly $51 million last year, are scheduled to make $146 million in payments this year and $13 million in 2010. "It's hard to see any common sense in management decisions that award hundreds of millions in bonuses when their organizations lost more than $100 billion in a year," Grassley said in a statement. "It's an insult that the bonuses were made with an infusion of cash from taxpayers." Fannie and Freddie declined to comment on Friday. Fannie had disclosed that it plans to pay four top executives at least $1 million each in retention payments that run through February. Freddie has yet to report on which executives are in line for the awards. The two companies, hobbled by skyrocketing loan defaults, were seized by regulators last fall and operate under close federal oversight with new chief executives installed by the government. Since the takeover, Fannie Mae has received $15 billion in federal aid, while Freddie Mac has received nearly $45 billion. The companies' federal regulator, James Lockhart of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, defended the bonuses in a March 27 letter to Grassley, noting that the collapse of the company's stock prices "destroyed years of savings for many" workers. The companies' stocks now trade below $1, down from more than $60 in fall 2007. Lockhart denied a request Grassley made last month to release names of employees receiving at least $100,000 in bonuses, citing "personal privacy and safety reasons." More than 70 percent of new loans in recent months have been backed by Fannie and Freddie. They own or guarantee almost 31 million mortgages worth about $5.5 trillion, more than half of all US home loans.
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visit: http://www.citizen.org/trade/nafta/
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The North American Free Trade Agreement
took effect on January 1, 1994. NAFTA opponents - including labor, environmental, consumer and religious groups - argued that NAFTA would launch a race-to-the-bottom in wages, destroy hundreds of thousands of good U.S. jobs, undermine democratic control of domestic policy-making and threaten health, environmental and food safety standards. NAFTA promoters - including many of the world’s largest corporations - promised it would create hundreds of thousands of new high-wage U.S. jobs, raise living standards in the U.S., Mexico and Canada, improve environmental conditions and transform Mexico from a poor developing country into a booming new market for U.S. exports. Why such divergent views? NAFTA was a radical experiment - never before had a merger of three nations with such radically different levels of development been attempted. Plus, until NAFTA, “trade” agreements only dealt with cutting tariffs and lifting quotas to set the terms of trade in goods between countries. But NAFTA contained 900 pages of one-size-fits-all rules to which each nation was required to conform all of its domestic laws - regardless of whether voters and their democratically-elected representatives had previously rejected the very same policies in Congress, state legislatures or city councils. NAFTA requires limits on the safety and inspection of meat sold in our grocery stores; new patent rules that raised medicine prices; constraints on your local government’s ability to zone against sprawl or toxic industries; and elimination of preferences for spending your tax dollars on U.S.-made products or locally-grown food. In fact, calling NAFTA a “trade” agreement is misleading, NAFTA is really an investment agreement. Its core provisions grant foreign investors a remarkable set of new rights and privileges that promote relocation abroad of factories and jobs and the privatization and deregulation of essential services, such as water, energy and health care. Remarkably, many of NAFTA’s most passionate boosters in Congress and among economists never read the agreement. They made their pie-in-the-sky promises of NAFTA benefits based on trade theory and ideological prejudice for anything with the term “free trade” attached to it. Now, over a decade later, the time for conjecture and promises is over: the data are in and they clearly show the damage NAFTA has wrought for millions of people in the U.S., Mexico and Canada. Thankfully, the failed NAFTA model - a watered down version of which is also contained in the World Trade Organization (WTO) - is merely one among many options. Throughout the world, people suffering with the consequences of this disastrous experiment are organizing to demand the better world we know is possible - but we face a race against time. The same interests who got us into NAFTA are pushing to expand it to include 31 more countries in Central and South America through the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). In 2005, Congress voted to extend NAFTA to five Central American countries through the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), and the Bush administration is now looking to add Peru and Colombia to the list as well.
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