Buchanan on Trade and Commerce

Text excerpted from Pat Buchanan's speech at the AARP Conference, Bedford, NH
January 26, 1996

Let me talk now about the threats, that I see to our country
very briefly because I know you folks want to get in some
questions.  I think and it's an area where I've got
disagreements with my friends and colleagues.  And with
with Steve Forbes, Phil Gramm, with Bob Dole.  And I speak as
a Republican and a conservative Republican who believes in a
free market system, and who believes in capitalism.  But I
have to agree on one point, with Mike Cuthbert.  Two many
of the members of our party, are representing corporate
America, and are not representing middle America.  They're
not representing the working people of this country.  They're
supporting trade deals like NAFTA and GATT, which are
wonderful f for corporations, who want to close down their
factories and plants in America, and move them to Singapore
and Mexico, but they're bad deals for the working people, and
the middle class folks of this country.[applause]

That's why I'm set against these deals.  It is wrong to force
American workers, into dog-eat-dog competition, with Chinese
workers who have to work for twenty-five cents an hour.
Mexican workers who have to work for a dollar an hour.  We're
seeing a decline, in the real living standard of middle
American families, and a decline in the real wages of our
working people.

The burden of taxation is only one of the problems.  Another
of the problems is those good paying factory jobs, that used
to be there for young people, when I was getting out of High
School.  They're going over seas, we're shipping em over
seas, and we're surrendering the national sovereignty, of the
United States in the process.  Under this world trade
organization, which Forbes supported and Dole supported and
Gramm supported, the United States surrenders the
sovereignty, for which our founding fathers fought and died,
to U.N. and a world trade, where we get one vote, out of a
hundred and twenty, on a matter vital to our national
interest.  What are they doin surrendering the sovereignty of
our country, to global institutions like the U.N. Look how
far we've gone.