Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Just Wanted Your Thoughts On This

1 comment:

Jon said...

There's an awful lot going on in that video. I guess the main point has to do with the highway system, but I'll address some other things.

NAFTA may have been developed by "elites", but it was ratified by the Congress.

She complains that Ford is getting government subsidies while moving jobs to Mexico. Then she complains about the disruption of Mexican farmers by NAFTA, which contributed to our illegal immigrant problem. Might the former not been seen as a rectification of the latter, and an effort to curb illegal immigration by providing employment alternatives in Mexico?

There might be a legitimate concern about portions of our infrastructure being controlled by foreign interests, but I would imagine that any such lease agreements would contain provisions preventing the leasee from arbitrarily restricting access to toll-paying customers or government agents. Such an agreement does not yet exist, but I have a hard time thinking that anyone would approve of such a thing without provisions of this sort.

This system might draw traffic away from the ports in S. California - that is probably what it is designed to do. This could be a bad thing for the workers in those ports if the diversion was large enough, but it is unclear to me the volume that the new Mexican ports will be able to handle, and whether we are looking at a radical shift, or a shift which results in less congestion and more efficient offloading/ transporting. We also need to know whether the benefits of shipping to Mexico (in the form of poorly paid longshoremen) is offset by the tolls that were mentioned and whether it costs more to ship from Asia to Mexico than from Asia to L.A..