Elaine explains how "free trade" has killed her town

Elaine Meinel Supkis:

[. . .]

This week, Israel is bombing Gaza to smithereens. But Israeli flower importers are building more and more greenhouses to raise the exact same flowers our own town used to raise in identical greenhouses. But our greenhouses stand empty while Israel’s business grows, just for example. Israel and Columbia where the US spends a fortune ‘fighting drug growers’ has utterly destroyed the Berlin, NY rose growing business.

The deals the US made over and over again were all designed to help other nations not just build businesses which is fine with me, but to build EXPORT businesses focused mainly on exporting to the US. This is killing our nation. The photo at the top of this story, for example, is the door of one of the newest and biggest greenhouses built here in Berlin just one decade ago. It is not merely empty, it is being destroyed by snow, wind, rain and vandalism.

We may as well have planes dropping bombs on us. Our community, which used to have thriving stores of every sort, is now nearly an economic ghost town and all of this has happened not 100 years ago but in the last decade.

[. . .]