The GIANT SUCKING SOUND South of the Border. -or- Ross Perot was right.

Ross Perot was right.

Scene: 1992 Presidential Debate: Former Arkansas Governor William Jefferson Clinton – D, President George H. W. Bush – R, and Ross Perot – I.

White Male Audience Member: Yes, I’d like to direct my question to Mr. Perot. What will you do, as President, to open foreign markets to fair competiton from American business, and to stop unfair competition here at home from foreign countries, so that we can bring jobs back to the United States?

Ross Perot: That’s right at the top of my agenda.

We’ve shipped millions of jobs overseas, and uh… we have a strained situation because we have a process in Washington, where after you’ve served for a while, you cash in, become a foreign lobbyist, make $30,000 a month, then take a leave, work on presidential campaigns, make sure you got good contacts, and then go back out.

And if you just want to get down to brass tacks, the first thing you ought to do is get all these folks who got these one-way trade agreements that we’ve negotiated over the years, and say ‘fellas, we’ll take the same deal we gave you.’ And they’ll gridlock right at that point, because, for example, we’ve got international competitors who simply could not unload their cars off the ships if they had to comply, you see, if it was a two-way street? Just couldn’t do it.

We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.

To those of you in the audience who are business people… pretty simple. If you’re paying 12, 13 dollars, 14 dollars an hour for factory workers, and you can move your factory south of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire a young twenty – that’s assuming you’ve been in business for a long time, you’ve got a mature workforce – pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no healthcare – that’s the most expensive single element in making a car – have no environmental controls, no pollution controls, and no retirement, and you don’t care about anything but making money – there will be a giant sucking sound going south.

So, we… if, if… the people send me to Washington, the first thing I’ll do is study that 2000 page agreement, and make sure it’s a two-way street.

I ask one last point here.

I’ve called… I decided I was dumb, and didn’t understand it, so I called a who’s who of the folks who’ve been around it, and I said, ‘why won’t everybody go south?’

They said, ‘it’ll be disruptive.’

I said, ‘for how long?’

I finally got ’em up for 12-15 years, and I said, ‘well, how does it stop being disruptive?’ And that is, when their jobs go up from $1/hour to $6/hour and ours go down to $6/hour and then, it’s level again, but in the mean time, you’ve wrecked the country with these kind of deals.

We gotta’ cut it out.