Your Opinion: Oppose new trade agreements

Dear Editor:

Congress is now considering three new trade deals, the Colombia Agreement, the Korea-US Agreement, and the Panama Agreement. These deals are bad for American workers and bad for our economy. I urge you to contact your congressional representatives and tell them to stop offshoring jobs, and start rebuilding America. No more unfair trade deals.

Before Congress considers any more trade deals, we need to tackle big problems like unfair trade with China, respect for workers' rights, currency manipulation and America's massive infrastructure deficit. Congress needs to work on creating jobs, not sending more out of the country. Past trade deals like NAFTA have been a miserable failure for working people - and these new deals follow in NAFTA's footsteps. Working people need to make our voices heard - and we need to fight hard.

Congress has been working for years to give American companies incentive to send manufacturing jobs offshore. As a result, hundreds of thousands of our citizens are unemployed or under-employed and our middle class is shrinking along with tax revenue. America was once the manufacturing giant of the world. It will never be again if we continue down this road. Congress should close tax loopholes that encourage exporting American jobs and give incentives for businesses to open new factories at home that employ our citizens. If we want to return to the prosperity of the last century we need a strong middle class and a strong manufacturing sector.

Again I urge you to contact your representatives in Congress and urged them to oppose all new trade agreements that encourage exporting American manufacturing jobs. Keep our jobs at home and work to create more.