NAFTA: Ross Perot and Al Gore Debate 1993
How many lies did Al Gore tell? What happen to the trade surplus and environment Al? Watch Al Gore push cheap abusive labor!
NAFTA: Ross Perot and Al Gore Debate 1993, Part 2 of 8
WATCH Al Gore’s BIGGEST LIE THAT NAFTA WILL REDUCE ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION!
The North American Free Trade Agreement took effect on January 1, 1994.
NAFTA opponents – including labor, environmental, consumer and religious groups – argued that NAFTA would launch a race-to-the-bottom in wages, destroy hundreds of thousands of good U.S. jobs, undermine democratic control of domestic policy-making and threaten health, environmental and food safety standards.
NAFTA promoters – including many of the world’s largest corporations – promised it would create hundreds of thousands of new high-wage U.S. jobs, raise living standards in the U.S., Mexico and Canada, improve environmental conditions and transform Mexico from a poor developing country into a booming new market for U.S. exports.
Why such divergent views? NAFTA was a radical experiment – never before had a merger of three nations with such radically different levels of development been attempted. Plus, until NAFTA, “trade” agreements only dealt with cutting tariffs and lifting quotas to set the terms of trade in goods between countries. But NAFTA contained 900 pages of one-size-fits-all rules to which each nation was required to conform all of its domestic laws – regardless of whether voters and their democratically-elected representatives had previously rejected the very same policies in Congress, state legislatures or city councils.
NAFTA requires limits on the safety and inspection of meat sold in our grocery stores; new patent rules that raised medicine prices; constraints on your local government’s ability to zone against sprawl or toxic industries; and elimination of preferences for spending your tax dollars on U.S.-made products or locally-grown food. In fact, calling NAFTA a “trade” agreement is misleading, NAFTA is really an investment agreement. Its core provisions grant foreign investors a remarkable set of new rights and privileges that promote relocation abroad of factories and jobs and the privatization and deregulation of essential services, such as water, energy and health care.
Remarkably, many of NAFTA’s most passionate boosters in Congress and among economists never read the agreement. They made their pie-in-the-sky promises of NAFTA benefits based on trade theory and ideological prejudice for anything with the term “free trade” attached to it.
Now, over a decade later, the time for conjecture and promises is over: the data are in and they clearly show the damage NAFTA has wrought for millions of people in the U.S., Mexico and Canada. Thankfully, the failed NAFTA model – a watered down version of which is also contained in the World Trade Organization (WTO) – is merely one among many options.
Throughout the world, people suffering with the consequences of this disastrous experiment are organizing to demand the better world we know is possible – but we face a race against time. The same interests who got us into NAFTA are pushing to expand it to include 31 more countries in Central and South America through the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). In 2005, Congress voted to extend NAFTA to five Central American countries through the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), and the Bush administration is now looking to add Peru and Colombia to the list as well.
Immigration Flood Unleashed by NAFTA’s Disastrous Impact on Mexican Economy
by Roger Bybee and Carolyn Winter
The recent ferment on immigration policy has been so narrow that it has excluded the real issue: family-sustaining wages for workers both north and south of the border. The role of the North American Free Trade Agreement and misnamed ‘free trade’ has been scarcely mentioned in the increasingly bitter debate over the fate of America’s 11 to 12 million illegal aliens.
NAFTA was sold to the American public as the magic formula that would improve the American economy at the same time it would raise up the impoverished Mexican economy. The time has come to look at the failures of this type of trade agreement before we engage in more and lower the economic prospects of all workers affected.
While there has been some media coverage of NAFTA’s ruinous impact on US industrial communities, there has been even less media attention paid to its catastrophic effects in Mexico:
NAFTA, by permitting heavily-subsidized US corn and other agri-business products to compete with small Mexican farmers, has driven the Mexican farmer off the land due to low-priced imports of US corn and other agricultural products. Some 2 million Mexicans have been forced out of agriculture, and many of those that remain are living in desperate poverty. These people are among those that cross the border to feed their families. (Meanwhile, corn-based tortilla prices climbed by 50%. No wonder many so Mexican peasants have called NAFTA their ‘death warrant.’
NAFTA’s service-sector rules allowed big firms like Wal-Mart to enter the Mexican market and, selling low-priced goods made by ultra-cheap labor in China, to displace locally-based shoe, toy, and candy firms. An estimated 28,000 small and medium-sized Mexican businesses have been eliminated.
Wages along the Mexican border have actually been driven down by about 25% since NAFTA, reported a Carnegie Endowment study. An over-supply of workers, combined with the crushing of union organizing drives as government policy, has resulted in sweatshop pay running sweatshops along the border where wages typically run 60 cents to $1 an hour.
So rather than improving living standards, Mexican wages have actually fallen since NAFTA. The initial growth in the number of jobs has leveled off, with China’s even more repressive labor system luring US firms to locate there instead.
But Mexicans must still contend with the results of the American-owned ‘maquiladora’ sweatshops: subsistence-level wages, pollution, congestion, horrible living conditions (cardboard shacks and open sewers), and a lack of resources (for streetlights and police) to deal with a wave of violence against vulnerable young women working in the factories. The survival (or less) level wages coupled with harsh working conditions have not been the great answer to Mexican poverty, while they have temporarily been the answer to Corporate America’s demand for low wages.
With US firms unwilling to pay even minimal taxes, NAFTA has hardly produced the promised uplift in the lives of Mexicans. Ciudad Juarez Mayor Gustavo Elizondo, whose city is crammed with US-owned low-wage plants, expressed it plainly: “We have no way to provide water, sewage, and sanitation workers. Every year, we get poorer and poorer even though we create more and more wealth.”
Falling industrial wages, peasants forced off the land, small businesses liquidated, growing poverty: these are direct consequences of NAFTA. This harsh suffering explains why so many desperate Mexicans — lured to the border area in the false hope that they could find dignity in the US-owned maquiladoras — are willing to risk their lives to cross the border to provide for their families. There were 2.5 million Mexican illegals in 1995; 8 million have crossed the border since then. In 2005, some 400 desperate Mexicans died trying to enter the US.
NAFTA failed to curb illegal immigration precisely because it was never designed as a genuine development program crafted to promote rising living standards, health care, environmental cleanup, and worker rights in Mexico. The wholesale surge of Mexicans across the border dramatically illustrates that NAFTA was no attempt at a broad uplift of living conditions and democracy in Mexico, but a formula for government-sanctioned corporate plunder benefiting elites on both sides of the border.
NAFTA essentially annexed Mexico as a low-wage industrial suburb of the US and opened Mexican markets to heavily-subsidized US agribusiness products, blowing away local producers. Capital could flow freely across the border to low-wage factories and Wal-mart-type retailers, but the same standard of free access would be denied to Mexican workers.
Meanwhile, with the planned Central American Free Trade Agreement with five Central American nations coming up, we can anticipate even greater pressure on our borders as agricultural workers are pushed off the land without positive, alternative employment opportunities. People from Guatemala and Honduras will soon learn that they can’t compete for industrial jobs with the most oppressed people in say, China, by agreeing to lowering their wages even more. Further, impoverished Central American countries don’t have the resources to deal with the pollution and crime that results from moving people from rural areas to the city, often without their families.
Thus far, we have been presented with a narrow range of options to cope with the tide of illegal immigrants living fearfully in the shadows of American life. Should they simply be walled off and criminalized, as Sensenbrenner and House Republicans suggest? The Sensenbrenner option seeks to exploit the sentiment that illegal immigrants entering the US — rather than US corporations exiting the US for Mexico and China — are the primary cause of falling wages for most Americans.
The Bush version is only slightly different, envisioning the “illegal immigrants” as part of a vast disposable pool of cheap labor with no meaningful rights on the job or even the right to vote, to be returned to Mexico upon the whim of their employers.
Yet there is another well-known path of economic and social integration that has been ignored in the debates over immigration in the US: the one followed by the European Union and their “social charter” calling for decent wages, health care, and extensive retraining in all nations. Before then-impoverished nations like Spain, Greece and Portugal were admitted, they received massive EU investments in roads, health care, clean water, and education. The implementation of democracy, including worker rights, was an equally vital pre-condition for entry into the EU.
The underlying concept: the entire reason for trade is to provide improved lives across borders, not to exploit the cheapest labor and weakest environmental rules. We need to question the widely-held assumption that what benefits American corporations benefits Mexican workers and American workers. An authentic plan for growth and development isn’t about further enriching Wall Street, major corporations, and a handful of Mexican billionaires; it is about the creation of family-supporting jobs. It is also about a healthy environment, healthy workers, good education, and ordinary people being able to achieve their dreams.
The massive tide of illegal immigration from Mexico is merely one symptom of an economic arrangement where human needs — not maximum profits– are not the ultimate goal but a subject of neglect. Neither a massive, shameful barrier at the border nor a disposable guest-worker program will address the problems ignited by NAFTA.
Programs providing stable, decent employment, modern transportation, clean water, and environmental cleanup are needed to take the place of the immense NAFTA failure and allow Mexicans to live decent, hopeful lives in their native land. But such an effort is imaginable only if the aim is truly mutual uplift for all citizens in both nations, instead of the NAFTA-fueled race to the bottom.
Did NAFTA Backers Bamboozle America?
THE SELLING OF ‘FREE TRADE’
NAFTA, Washington, and the Subversion of American Democracy
By John R. MacArthur
Hill & Wang
The North American Free Trade Agreement was a package of misleading promises sold to an unsuspecting Congress by a cynical band of White House operatives and mendacious business lobbyists. It immediately failed to live up to the assurances–of more jobs and greater prosperity–made by President Bush, who negotiated it, and by President Clinton, who lobbied for its approval. So, at least, insists John R. MacArthur, author of The Selling of “Free Trade”: NAFTA, Washington, and the Subversion of American Democracy. In addition, he says, NAFTA cost jobs in the U.S., held down wages in the U.S. and Mexico, and led to increased pollution along the border.
MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s magazine, makes a strong revisionist case about the history of the negotiations and the Washington lobbying effort. The pact was not a real free-trade deal, he asserts, so much as an agreement to make Mexico safe for foreign investment–by making sure the Mexican government’s history of seizing foreign assets would not be repeated.
U.S. multinationals were eager to move south; the Mexican government sought the job-creating investment. But as MacArthur notes, that couldn’t be stated openly because it clearly suggested the movement of jobs from the U.S. to Mexico. The pact was instead marketed as a deal to increase U.S. exports. Indeed, U.S. exports to Mexico did eventually grow, but U.S. imports, many from border-area assembly plants called maquiladoras, increased even more. The U.S. merchandise trade surplus with pre-NAFTA Mexico of $1.3 billion became a $22.8 billion deficit by 1999.
NAFTA’s secondary purpose was to provide a form of indirect foreign aid to Mexico. This is the “Trade Not Aid” mantra so often repeated as a justification for deals with poor countries. But after NAFTA went into effect in January, 1994, lots of bad things happened that were supposed to have been prevented by the deal: Employment did not move from the rudimentary maquiladoras into more sophisticated plants in central Mexico as hoped, for example. Instead, employment in border assembly plants doubled. And along with concentrated border industrial growth came pollution, which NAFTA was supposed to reduce.
In addition, the peso and the Mexican economy collapsed. A peasant uprising in the South ensued. The Mexican President who negotiated NAFTA, Carlos Salinas, fled the country amid corruption charges. Mexico required a $47 billion bailout loan from the U.S. But just because these events followed NAFTA doesn’t mean the trade pact caused them, as MacArthur seems to imply. Many economists attribute the peso’s collapse and Mexico’s resulting economic troubles to other factors, such as endemic corruption and mismanagement by the long-ruling one-party government, along with its penchant for massive deficit spending in election years.
Despite some shortcomings, MacArthur’s is the first book to relate the inside story of the Washington battle over NAFTA in a highly readable style. The author painstakingly reconstructs one of the most intense Washington lobbying efforts of all time, and he offers sharp profiles of its major players: former U.S. Trade Representatives Carla A. Hills and Mickey Kantor, White House political director Rahm Emanuel, and former House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt, among many others. Somehow he got lobbyists–who seldom depart from self-serving spin–to reveal embarrassing details: Clinton’s promise to accompany a congressman on a duck-hunting trip, the massive ego stroking necessary to recruit former Chrysler Corp. Chairman Lee A. Iacocca as a NAFTA salesman, and the genesis of the toothless and largely unenforcable side agreements on labor and the environment. The author also says that Ross Perot’s fight against NAFTA backfired when Vice-President Al Gore bested him in a televised debate and made anti-NAFTA sentiment seem as crackpot as Perot.
Fascinating, too, is MacArthur’s historical account of New York’s Swingline staple factory, which he uses to highlight some of the harm in the U.S. from the trade deal. The 50-year-old unionized plant in Long Island City had helped generations of immigrants to pay for houses, cars, and vacations, but by the end of the book, their hopes are dashed: The factory is moved to Mexico to take advantage of low wages and benefits there. MacArthur’s sympathies clearly lie with the Americans, while he views the Mexican workers at the new plant as victims of corporate exploitation.
There are other flaws in The Selling of ‘Free Trade.’ The author doesn’t acknowledge that Mexico’s economy is in recovery, expected to grow by 5% this year. Nor is much attention paid to Canada, the third partner in NAFTA. And there is the matter of the title: NAFTA did not ‘’subvert” American democracy. The lobbying battle was just a larger version of what goes on every day in Washington–what is going on right now, for example, in the comparable fight over granting permanent Normal Trade Relations status to China. The AFL-CIO, which opposes the status change, also fears a loss of U.S. jobs if production is shifted to China.
The current scuffle may in fact be the reason Washington officials have been devouring this book in pre-publication galley form. And well they should.
Maybe your boy Obama can start an investigation.
Bart
Not dealing with facts as usual!
John
How does that go? NAFTA CAFTA HAVTA SHAFTA something?
NAFTA CAFTA HAVTA FIND A JOB!
John,
Stop living in the past…Ross Perot is not coming back.
Still waiting for proof of Bob Barr’s vote against NAFTA (even though he was two years away from joining Congress).
Bart
Was Perot right or wrong?
Perot was/is “crazy”. He was absolutely wrong on just about everything except scamming medicaid to build his business empire.
Did Perot vote against NAFTA at the same time as Bob Barr?
John
Do you have a list of the dullards in Congress who gave “Dubya” fast track authority to bargain away our national sovereignty under the guise of free trade?
Mary…
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