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Hope in the Time of NAFTA

By David Sirota

Reading articles about Hillary Clinton attacking NAFTA can lead you to believe The Onion has taken over America’s news bureaus.

Clinton spent the last 10 years repeatedly praising the trade deal in speeches, most recently calling the job-killing accord “good for New York and America.” Yet, journalists barely mention that record as they transcribe her assertions that, “I have been a critic of NAFTA from the very beginning.”

This week, such media negligence went from pathetic to absurd, as a CNN headline blared, “Clinton hammers Obama on NAFTA.” Political scribes breathlessly recounted how the New York senator criticized her opponent — a longtime NAFTA critic — over a thinly sourced television report claiming his adviser, economist Austan Goolsbee, told Canadian officials to not take the campaign’s anti-NAFTA platform seriously. Clinton said the uncorroborated allegations, seeded by Canada’s right-wing government, showed “the difference between talk and action.” Most journalists regurgitated her charges without noting the difference between Clinton’s new fair-trade talk and her decade-long pro-NAFTA actions (nor did they note that the same report said Clinton advisers also did what Goolsbee was accused of).

Of course, Bill Clinton signed NAFTA after pledging to oppose expanded cross-border trade until Mexican wages rose. So Hillary Clinton’s dishonesty, which sealed her Ohio primary win, is nothing new in politics.

What is new is the fact-free coverage. Whereas diligent reporting marked the original NAFTA debate, today’s media reduce trade discussions to vapid cartoons — ones so inane that a leading NAFTA booster is rewarded with glowing headlines for pretending she never supported the accord.

An agenda is obviously at work. Reporters, pundits and lobbyists are insulated from the job and wage cuts that rigged policies like NAFTA encourage. To them, the profit-making status quo is swell, and so the news they manufacture avoids upsetting those who did the rigging. Consequently, the trade debate is portrayed as a battle between Saint Commerce and evil “protectionists” — a fallacious depiction burying significant questions.

For instance, America became an economic force in the early 20th century thanks, in part, to tariffs sheltering our industries. Considering that, why are all tariffs now billed as inherently bad for the economy and “free” trade billed as inherently good?

Speaking of that word “free” — why does it describe protectionism for corporate profits? “Free” trade deals wrapped in the rhetoric of Sally Struthers ads include no human rights protections. But they include patent protections that inflate pharmaceutical prices. Why does “free” trade refer only to pacts being free of protections for people?

Similarly, why have Washington’s “free” traders passed laws blocking Americans from importing lower-priced, FDA-approved prescription drugs from other countries? What is “free” about letting corporations import lead-slathered toys, but barring citizens from importing life-saving medicine?

Trade fundamentalists like Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria say “struggling farmers” abroad want more NAFTA-style agreements. Why then are Mexican and Peruvian farmers now staging mass protests against our “free” trade deals? Could they know our trade policy promotes market-skewing subsidies helping corporate agribusiness put “struggling farmers” out of business?

Finally, what is “free” about trade rules letting international tribunals invalidate domestic laws? As the watchdog group Public Citizen discovered, Democrats’ climate and health care proposals could face such challenges at the World Trade Organization. What happened to the concept of sovereignty?

Before being embroiled in controversy this week, Goolsbee was the only remaining presidential adviser openly pondering some of these questions. He publicly confesses that before the campaign, he never closely analyzed trade agreements, but now that he has, he says he sees the corruption and is appalled. The admission, while muted, is encouraging at a moment when substance is so brazenly ignored.

This epoch of globalization has become an era of media-driven insouciance — one allowing a journalist like Thomas Friedman to retain his “expert” label while bragging that he “didn’t even know what was in” a trade deal he championed. This is a time when the biggest economic deliberations are dominated by commentators berating Democrats for mentioning trade and then falling silent when Republicans praise pacts that eliminate jobs.

In the face of such insanity, it is promising that even one presidential adviser — however clumsy - acknowledges our trade policy’s underlying depravity. If there could be love in the time of cholera, there may yet be hope in the time of NAFTA.

David Sirota is a senior editor at In These Times and a bestselling author whose newest book, "The Uprising," was released in May 2008. He is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network -- both nonpartisan organizations.

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  • Reader Comments

    This week on C-SPAN Senator Byron Dorgan, (D) S.D., was advocating allowing the Consumer Protection Agency to ban imports from those companies which have repeatedly sent us dangerous products.

    We’ve heard how only 1% of foreign goods are inspected, but until now I had no idea that there is no one empowered to stop this stuff from coming in.

    He mentioned one Matel supplier in China caused three product recalls in five weeks — and there is NO WAY to cut them off.

    Our country is suffering from terminal silliness.

    Posted by whattheheck on Mar 7, 2008 at 1:30 PM

    Hope in the Time of NAFTA?

    Hope?  You sound like that vacuous idiot running for president.  A few facts are much more to the point than all the hopes of Osama, Obama, and Bonnie and Clod.

    NAFTA passed in 1993, sponsored by Republicans and endorsed by President Clinton and some Democrats in Congress, and, more particularly, by Clinton’s wife on numerous occasions.  Economists, the people who study markets, jobs, and economic growth, are virtually unanimous that free trade improves everyone’s economic well-being in the aggregate.  Manufacturing employment rose for five years after NAFTA, stabilized for two years, and only started down in Clinton’s last year in office, the same year that NASDAQ lost $3 trillion, half its total value.  Employment reductions frequently follow market drops. 

    Manufacturing employment has declined from 17.2 million to 14.8 million since NAFTA.  The value of manufactures has increased by 66% during this time frame.  That means that individual manufacturing productivity has increased by 80% since NAFTA passed.  Overall civilian employment has grown from 121.5 million at the end of 1993 to just over 146 million at the end of 2007.  So, while dramatic increases in productivity have reduced the need for manufacturing workers, there is no shortage of high-paying jobs available.  These figures certainly do not indicate that NAFTA is a cause of job loss, when individual workers produce nine units of economic output in 2007, when they only produced five units of economic output in 1993.

    In a post-industrial society such as ours, industry must and should play a smaller role, as higher-paying high-tech, medical, and financial jobs expand.  The Demonicrat argument that all these medium-paying manufacturing jobs go to “burger-flippers” is false; even burger-flipping shows a degree of productivity improvement, meaning that there is no great residual demand for fast food workers when manufacturing productivity limits manufacturing jobs. 

    We have been through this cycle many times.  In the early years of our new nation, over 95% of the population was engaged in agriculture.  Now it is less than 3%.  What happened to all the ex-farmers, did they starve off?  Well, no, they went to better paying manufacturing jobs.  One hundred years ago the saddle makers and buggy whip manufacturers were hurting, but they didn’t starve either; auto mechanics pays better than equine accessory craftsmanship. 

    So, given HillBilly’s past support for NAFTA and Goolsbee’s documented denial that Obama was serious about renegotiating NAFTA, this whole conversation about NAFTA is absurd, as well as being dishonest, on the part of both parties.  But these are Demonicrats, after all. 

    The most delicious aspect of this teacup tempest is Hillary’s attack on Obama.  When was the last time a little old white lady attacked a young black thug?  I love it.

    Posted by scorp on Mar 9, 2008 at 12:11 PM

    “...this whole conversation about NAFTA is absurd, as well as being dishonest”

    Yes, as is yours.

    Go out into the real world of people who have been adversely affected by the economic changes of the past 14 years. Perhaps the greatest problem today is the willingness to accept as fact the numbers which are fed to us each day.

    Your data and arguments you presented above are irrelevant and unrealistic.

    The switch from agricultural to industrial took place over generations — globalization and outsourcing in a click of a computer key.

    The productivity data ignores subassemblies produced in cheap labor markets and installed here, or even worse a minimum amount of assembly in the U.S. in order to “justify” a Made in the USA label.

    Try to imagine yourself at between 45 and 65 — kids in college or about to be, a house you can’t sell, picking up the health care costs for a family of 3 or more, only able to find part time work and unable to afford to travel very far for an interview (tickets are too costly).

    Even before the subprime mess when a major manufacturer left town the housing market was over crowded. There are homes for sale here on the market for two years by people who did leave due to transfer or job loss.

    We can agree on this:
    Clinton is twisting her own history and Obama knows he cannot or will not fix this problem.

    But both parties are going to perpetuate it either knowingly or because they accept the same data which you do.

    We are now being advised to continue spending devalued dollars to buy things we didn’t make from people who don’t care about the safety of their customers. We are being forced to commute more to jobs which pay less and using more gas we don’t produce. We are counting the productivity additions and GDP gains in what is being spent in foreign countries.

    This was not so 95 years ago.

    Posted by whattheheck on Mar 12, 2008 at 8:25 AM

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