America is Caught in a 'Free Trade' Trap

This article originally appeared on Fosters.com.

When our government ends its fiscal year Sept. 30, 2010, I would like the following information.

First of all, I would like the trade imbalance with every one of our trading partners in dollars. We can start with China, Japan, India, South Korea, Canada, Mexico, Germany, France, Vietnam, etc., Now I know this request is just a matter of record and can, within a month, be made public. What isn't made public is the number and quality of the jobs our imports from all our trading partners takes away from our American economy and how many jobs our exports to the same countries provides for our American economy.

Giving us figures, in dollars, of our trade imbalance just tells us where our money has gone. For example, (and these are ballpark figures) if China exported $380 billion to America and they only imported $90 billion from us, they had a $290 billion trade imbalance with America.

Now what I want to know is how many jobs did our exports to China give us and how many jobs did our imports from China take away from us?

We should get these job imbalance figures from every country we do business with. Naturally, many of the small, poor and developing countries will not take away a significant amount of jobs from our economy; however, all job imbalance figures must be monitored — the same as the dollars are monitored.

What these job imbalance figures will show is what I already know — all of our trading partners are shipping us goods that provide jobs for their citizens and are only importing from us commodities plus other goods and technology they need to grow their economies.

So, under the false premise of free world trade, our trading partners are taking away jobs that should belong to the American economy.

I don't get out much anymore; however, if you do see an old man with gray hair and a blue face, that's me. I have been repeating myself 'until I am blue in the face.

I have said this for nearly seven years now — what then millionaire (now billionaire) Wilbur E. Ross said on the front page of the USA Today newspaper: "The World Trade Organization (WTO) is a wealth transfer organization not in the best interests of America, and the only problem with free world trade is that only America practices it."

It's little wonder to me how President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. Of course, what he didn't know then and still doesn't know now is there is an ongoing economic war, with every country (except America) fighting for jobs for their citizens.

So after every country asked Obama the same question — "Are you going to let America resort to protectionism?" — Obama, being naive or uninformed, (whichever adjective you want to use) answered, "No, I don't believe in protectionism, I believe in free trade."

These foreign countries, being protectionists themselves, embraced Obama and were instrumental in awarding him a Nobel Peace Prize when he had been in office for only six months.

I guess they also were pleased that Obama had restrained Israel from bombing strategic nuclear facilities in Iran and publicly told Israel to stop any building in the West Bank, which Israel can't do without taking away a lot of their country's security.

Sooner or later, Israel, for their own existence, will have to take out (bomb) the nuclear facilities in Iran. It's going to be a lot harder for Israel to take out these nuclear facilities in Iran six months to a year from now than it would have been a year ago, before Obama won his Nobel Peace Prize.

Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me. Call me a protectionist, but if we don't put America's citizens back to work in our own economy, we have no chance of an economic recovery.

The strength and stability of the American dollar and American financial system, while avoiding runaway inflation in three or four years, depends on putting Americans back to work. Our goal for total unemployment in America should be six percent by 2012.

Mr. Rigazio is a 78-year-old retired businessman. He was on the ballot for president in the 2004 NH Primary