Free Trade

* I am appalled that you would permit such misleading trash as your Drawingboard feature by Ted Rall (Commentary, July 27), blaming the current loss of jobs in the United States on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In case anybody hasn’t yet noticed, NAFTA isn’t law, it hasn’t passed, and therefore it can’t be the cause of anyone’s job loss. While it is true that global competition is changing the way business is conducted, there are plenty of real reasons why we’ve had a recession that are home-grown, such as defense cuts and higher taxes. So, let’s stop pretending we’re such a withered and weak country that we’ve lost the economic competition before it’s started and remember that the U.S. became No. 1 via the free trade that the opponents of NAFTA berate.

TOM TSOTSIS

Anaheim