Stopping off in Canada, President Obama took time out of his busy schedule to meet with the Prime Minister and hold a joint press conference. Most of it consisted of the usual Miss Congeniality Contest pablum typical of these meetings, but when it came time for the Q&A, a member of the press dared to ask about NAFTA and America’s so called “free trade” agreements with our trading “partners” such as Canada. Despite what he told us on the campaign trail, Obama quickly demonstrated that we were in for more of the same old, same old that we got from Clinton and GW Bush.

President Obama warned on Thursday against a “strong impulse” toward protectionism while the world suffers a global economic recession and said his election-year promise to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement on behalf of unions and environmentalists will have to wait.

This was one of the items Obama brought forth during the 2008 campaign which almost made me change my mind and vote for him instead of Bob Barr. Today I’m quite happy not to have made that mistake, as we’re obviously in for four more years of the same destructive “free trade” policies which have been sapping our nation dry for well over a decade. The “free trade” apologists – unfortunately including friends of mine – were quick to point out that Obama’s statements were “encouraging” while still sticking a knife in his back for flip flopping or having expiration dates on his promises. I’ll take the other route and just declare it a blatant flip-flop, and a destructive one at that.

You remember the “free trade” apologists, don’t you? They’re the ones who have been singing the same old choir tune since 1992. (In many cases for no other reason than the fact that they think it will hurt labor unions which are seen as Democratic entities.) NAFTA and related policies were going to deliver a whole new world of opportunities for us. They would open foreign markets for American goods, create new jobs here at home and bring lower prices on products for us because of competition. None of them ever seem to want to talk about any hard numbers for some reason, but this is the promise they’ve been preaching for roughly sixteen years now. How did that work out?

Well, in reverse order, the one thing that it did deliver was lower prices. You can now buy all manner of things cheaper than ever! These include poisoned pet food and baby formula, children’s toys coated in lead based paint and a host of other dangerous defects. You can also buy a whole roll of tube socks for around a buck. Of course, you have to buy another roll in two months because they’re so shoddily made, but boy howdy… they sure are cheap!

And how about all of those jobs? Another success! Don’t mind the fact that tens or hundreds of thousands of our best, high paying tech sector jobs have fled to India and South America or that our factories continue to close down only to be reopened in Mexico. Unemployment stayed about the same, so it must be working, right? Sure… so long as you don’t count the massive numbers of underemployed. Also, lots of our great new jobs were in financial services and health care – domestic industries virtually unaffected by “free trade.” But lots of laid off workers got to take two new jobs at Starbucks (at least until they started shutting down too) so all must be right in the world.

And how about our balance of trade? You know… the one that should have improved when this “free trade” opened up all those foreign markets for us? We didn’t cover Canada in my last piece on Buy American, so let’s take a look at our friendly neighbor to the North now. According to the US Census Bureau’s Foreign Trade Statistics, our trade deficit with Canada in 1992 (adjusted for inflation) was $8 billion. In 2008 it was …. drum roll please… $74.1 billion! Hurray for the “free trade” nation! Yes, a fair bit of that is accounted for by our oil imports, but hardly all of it. And we were importing oil from them in 1992 anyway. The trend is the same as in so many other countries covered in our previous article.

I thought the President said that the solution to our current economic crisis had to start with “jobs, jobs, and jobs.” Then how about doing something that might actually protect and return some of them to our own shores, President Obama? But no… the scam continues, preached to us constantly by people who call you an isolationist or even a (cover the children’s ears!) protectionist if you point out the employment figures and trade deficit numbers over the last sixteen years. But hey… who you gonna believe? Them or your own lying eyes?