The people know what’s really harsh:
From the St. Cloud Times – 8 September, 2003
Letter: Unfair trade bills hurt America
Richard Steffes, President, Central Minnesota Trades and Labor Association, St. Cloud
In the past 30 months, 50,000 Minnesotans lost their jobs manufacturing tools, tapes, toys, cookware, paper, plastic containers, refrigerators, school computer stands, book trucks and industrial valves. These are dozens of items we use every day.
At least a third of those jobs were sent to overseas sweatshops. In the past decade, more than 3 million U.S. jobs have made the same journey as a result of unfair trade bills.
This week, the Bush administration officials are in Cancun, Mexico, negotiating new global trade deals that will cost us many more jobs.
Manufacturing jobs will continue to be victims, but white-collar jobs, jobs in all levels of government, and even construction jobs also will be destroyed if these new trade deals go through.
U.S. negotiators also want these new trade deals to strictly limit the kinds of laws our elected officials can pass, taking away our rights as citizens to determine our own future.
For example, the administration is planning to use World Trade Organization “trade” rules to require the privatization of water, regardless of whether citizens want our water owned by private companies.
The protests in Cancun show that people throughout the world are sick and tired of free-trade deals that provide benefits to the wealthy while destroying the jobs, the environment, and now the democratic rights of everyday people. Many thousands of U.S. citizens also will be protesting these free trade policies at western hemisphere trade talks in Miami in November.
Help save Minnesota’s jobs. Tell our senators and representatives that America can’t take any more free-trade deals and we don’t want our job being one that is sent overseas for nothing more than corporate greed.
From: Pine City Pioneer – Getting squeezed by the bad economy
Strapped counties to raise taxes, then cut programs
And from: Irv Anderson in the Walker Pilot Independent
Minnesota budget cuts have human faces
Republicans aren’t listening to the people. When they say “can’t we just be nice and get along” and talk about “reaching out to immigrants, women, the less well off” they show they haven’t thought about the hostile and detrimental effects of their policies. The people in St. Cloud, Pine City and Walker, the people of Minnesota, are hurting from the impacts of Republican economic policies. We must hold them accountable, and we must turn this around.