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NAFTA took nearly a million jobs away, and the trade agreements that followed it were responsible for the loss of a staggering four million more jobs, most of them in manufacturing. The Great Recession slashed another two million jobs and twenty-five thousand businesses.[11] The average laid-off factory worker suffered a 19.2 percent fall in their standard of living, with Chinese imports reducing roughly a third of all Americans’ incomes, delivering a disproportionate blow to rural areas and small towns.[12] The international conglomerate Honeywell Aerospace would end up owning Grimes Manufacturing. “I don’t even know where it’s based,” said Rich Ebert, the county’s director of economic development.[13] (Honeywell’s corporate headquarters are in Charlotte, North Carolina.) There is no Old Man Honeywell who has at least some of Urbana’s interests at heart. Cheaper furniture and blue jeans notwithstanding, displaced American workers are still waiting on Clinton’s win-win to land. In the transition to a “twenty-first-century economy,” hollowed-out communities and even whole regions were largely treated as collateral damage.
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