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Title: The Selling of "Free Trade": NAFTA, Washington, and the Subversion of American Democracy by John R. MacArthur ISBN: 0-520-23178-3 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 03 September, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.9 (10 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: sell out of nations
Comment: MacArthur begins his book from the venerable Swingline Staple Company of Queens, NY, with profiles of employees, union activists, owners over the last 30 years. Not so long a period, but starting at a time when a lattice of low technology manufacturing still ringed the great metropolis and bustled in the lower regions of Manhattan. They provided a modest but sustaining salary and a route to the ladders of American society for generations of immigrants. By the end of that period those societal understandings had given way to a much different order. Swingline moved its operations to the dollar an hour wages and shanty towns of Nogales, Mexico, channeling back product to an American market they were no longer willing to support with their payroll.
The author exposes the shell (or shill) game that took over the debate of North American Free Trade. Politicians as diverse as Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton cynically assured the electorate that open trade heralded an era of unequaled prosperity and opportunity, propelled by such vacant aphorisms as the 'information economy' or the 'new realities' of global business. The agenda was marketed as 'inevitable'. The neoliberal lobby managed to bamboozle a skeptical public and buy the political establishment. By 1994 this well financed machine had bribed or bullied its way to passage of NAFTA in all three countries. A full-scale reorganization of continental industry ensued, with an attendant labour disenfranchisement, deindustrialization and currency sabotage.
The corrupt Salinas regime exemplified the motives of the Free Traders. Mexico's acceptance of their wealthy northern neighbors' largesse of 'investment' was extorted in part by their inability to pay the usurious loans of the IMF and foreign banks. NAFTA has since led to a collapsing peso and living standards that have dropped by a third. That has legions besieging the U.S. border. Free Trade, though, means anything but free movement of labour for impoverished Mexicans. Its profit equation hinges on a desperate, captive work force.
In some ways MacArthur's focus on the most ostentatious of Free Trade icons is the book's weakness. Mexico has, after all, no more than 4% of the American GDP. The workers of the maquiladoras are poorly educated and low skilled. It was only the most vulnerable, politically expendable Canadian and American workers who would be sacrificed to NAFTA. Discarding this lynchpin, however, has profound implications to the soundness of any nation's overall socio- economic structure.
The more insidious aspects of the Free Trade movement comes from agreements mentioned only in passing in this book. The Tokyo and Uruguay rounds of GATT, the WTO, a myriad of bilateral agreements, operating below public awareness, are devastating the high tech, high paying upper rung of industry-- steel, agriculture, chemicals, automotive, ship building, textiles, electronics, robotics. These processes sustain a sophisticated scientific infrastructure, critical to any economy that hopes to maintain its industrial integrity. They come easily under attack from countries who provide focused government direction, structural protection, subsidy, targeting the laissez-faire underbelly North American commerce.
The result is clear. Free Trade brings fragmenting inequity, stagnation of incomes, a steady devolution of government services under the drumbeat of 'privatization' and 'deregulation', fragile bubble economies, erosion of industrial capacity. Multitudes are tossed into the dustbin of the new economy, joining the ranks of the working poor or no longer deemed countable even as unemployment statistics. The media blithely proclaims all a success, the human detritus neatly excluded from recognition. This is the real legacy of politicians of all stripes who have sold out their countries to this juggernaut. The dissolution of the sovereign nation state promises a cult of government inertia, leaving the field to the most debased and predatory of commercial interests.
Rating: 5
Summary: The death of Franklin Roosevelt's Democratic party
Comment: The author of this book clearly shows that NAFTA is not about "free trade," but is in fact an investment agreement designed to protect American multi-national corporations that relocate to Mexico for "cheap labor". Mexico has a GNP about 4% of the U.S. GNP; the only people in Mexico who are able to buy American goods are either in the durg trade or the Mexican government elite. The author tells a story of discarded American workers (Swingline Staplers, Long Island City) who loose their plant and jobs to their Mexican brothers and sisters in the great "cheap labor" camps of the Maquiladora Program.
But this is also the terrible story of how Bill Clinton and Co. finished off the party of FDR, and made it the party of "cheap labor" sold to corporate interests for campaign contributions. As I read the book I kept thinking that maybe it's time for the American labor movement to run a candidate for President (Bonier?) and demand a North American Free Labor Agreement that will protect American workers, Mexican workers-and all workers everywhere. And I think such a movement would likely attract many on the American right, who are very anti-authoritarian, and deeply distrustful of what Mussolini called "corporatism"-which is what Mussolini said fascism was all about.
Great, thought provoking book. Brovo.
Rating: 4
Summary: A Good History of NAFTA
Comment: Chapter One tells of the history of the Swingline stapler business from 1920s to 1997. This still profitable business was shut down when production was moved to Mexico. Computers resulted in a great increase in the use of cut papers, and this needed more staples to fasten them together.
Chapter Two quotes the David Ricardo statement of "comparative advantage" (p.71). Isn't this just a simple argument created to support a point of view, and not reality? It doesn't address shipping costs, or other facts. Hardware and other goods CAN be manufactured in America and Poland, or France and Portugal. This example masks the political decisions hidden in his argument. Page 75 quotes Ricardo again, and notes it was false when he wrote it; another created argument. Pages 78-79 repeat the praises for President Salinas, then. He unilaterally lowered Mexican tariffs to allow US exports to gain market share; the book says this wrecked the Mexican economy, and Salinas fled the country to avoid arrest for murder and money laundering! The net effect was to loot and impoverish the country.
Page 95 speaks of the Republicans and Democrats as if they were real things, and not just names for a collection of special interests that create oratory to advance their aims. Page 97 discusses the rational of lowered tariffs: to fight "communism" by importing foreign goods! The fact that those who profited by financing and merchandising these imports also influenced government policy is just another coincidence. Pages 99-125 tell of the intrigue behind the passing of NAFTA (like other special interest legislation). These pages are one of the most important part of the book!
Chapter Three investigates the details of the NAFTA agreement. It starts with the candidature of William Clinton, a "master of two-dimensional obfuscation" ("like Woodrow Wilson") on p.143. Clinton's attraction was that, however flawed, he could win and the politicians preferred him over a loser, however pure. Clinton supported NAFTA because that was where the big money was (p.150). Also, it would not give Bush an issue when Clinton was ahead in the polls.
Chapter Four deals with the politics of passing NAFTA with Democratic Party votes. President Clinton sought the help of the Republican Party and the Fortune 500 (p.199). Why? "Politics is self-interest. Simply put, it's complete self-interest. The fact of the matter is, they'll get in bed with anyone" (p.201). Pages 17-8 tell how a "grass roots" campaign is manufactured. Pages 218-9 tell how a "grass tops" campaign is run: find important people in a congressional district and get them to repeat your
requests in person. with a lower tariff on Mexican imports, the lost revenue means higher taxes for Americans whether or not they still have a job (p.232).
"The fact of the matter is they won NAFTA because of money, because of gifts, because of special interests, goodies, and everything else. They did not necessarily win the debate" (p.275). Since then the number of manufacturing jobs have declined; NAFTA helped to export jobs, not goods (p.282). Pages 285-6 lists the bad things that happened after NAFTA's ratification. Page 291 says the abolition of the Mexican communal land system (like the English Encclosure Acts) drove millions off the land, and some across the border; an increasing pool of cheap labor.
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