In the upcoming two years, 30,000 blue-collar American jobs will be lost, and 16 factories will be closed. Those layoffs are from Ford Motor Co. alone.
The decline of the American automotive industry is representative of a broader problem: America no longer produces its own goods.
According to the most recent census statistics available, America has lost nearly 3 million manufacturing jobs since President Bush took office.
As long as manufacturing jobs are being cut, the American economy will be unstable and our workers will be in danger of falling into poverty.
Free trade is the factor that keeps us from re-establishing a strong manufacturing core in our economy.
In many ways, free-trade agreements have profited us the way they said they would by putting money in the pockets of major corporations and producing low-cost goods for consumers.
With free trade, substandard American goods are passed up in favor of cheaper, better products from overseas.
In the process, jobs are lost and lives are devastated.
In order for America to regain a stable economy that provides good jobs and the opportunity for upward mobility to the masses, our country must start producing good products.
Unfortunately, good products do not simply materialize. Industries must be protected with high tariffs for imported goods. The history of economic success demonstrates that all the economic powers in the world today were built with policies of economic isolationism.
Yet, as good of a reason as our own economic security is, that alone does not explain all the benefits of closed-trading systems.
Free trade also wreaks havoc on the Third World, where basic human needs cannot be met.
Unemployment levels are up to 10 times greater than in the United States and life-saving drugs are prohibitively expensive.
By ending the free-trade system, we could move toward the self-sufficiency that globalization has robbed of the Third World.
We must realize that our own well-being - socially, economically, politically - is intrinsically tied up with the well-being of others.
Free-trade economic policies may work to our advantage for some time, but eventually the exploitative character of the system will apply to us.
For the good of the hardworking American factory employee and the emaciated child in Africa, free-trade policies must be universally abandoned.
For once, at least, we can help others by helping ourselves.
Alex Ginsburg is bourgeois religious studies major who is in the privileged position to harp on the shortcomings of America. You can reach him at Alexander.Ginsburg@asu.edu.
