Document A: President Clinton Press Conference (excerpts)
Ours is now an era in which commerce is global and in which money, management,
technology are highly mobile. For the last 20 years, in all the wealthy countries of the
world, because of changes in the global environment, because of the growth of
technology, because of increasing competition, the middle class that was created and
enlarged by the wise policies of expanding trade at the end of World War II has been
under severe stress. Most Americans are working harder for less. They are vulnerable
to the fear tactics and the averseness to change that is behind much of the opposition to
NAFTA.
But I want to say to my fellow Americans, when you live in a time of change the only
way to recover your security and to broaden your horizons is to adapt to the change, to
embrace it, to move forward. Nothing we do, nothing we do in this great capital can
change the fact that factories or information can flash across the world, that people can
move money around in the blink of an eye. Nothing can change the fact that technology
can be adopted, once created, by people all across the world and then rapidly adapted
in new and different ways by people who have a little different take on the way the
technology works. For two decades, the winds of global competition have made these
things clear to any American with eyes to see. The only way we can recover the
fortunes of the middle class in this country so that people who work harder and smarter
can at least prosper more, the only way we can pass on the American dream of the last
40 years to our children and their children for the next 40 is to adapt to the changes
which are occurring.
In a fundamental sense, this debate about NAFTA is a debate about whether we will
embrace these changes and create the jobs of tomorrow, or try to resist these changes,
hoping we can preserve the economic structures of yesterday. I tell you, my fellow
Americans, that if we learned anything from the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the fall of
the governments in Eastern Europe, even a totally controlled society cannot resist the
winds of change that economics and technology and information flow have imposed in
this world of ours. That is not an option. Our only realistic option is to embrace these
changes and create the jobs of tomorrow.
I believe that NAFTA will create 200,000 American jobs in the first 2 years of its effect. I
believe if you look at the trends—and President Bush and I were talking about it this
morning—starting about the time he was elected President, over one-third of our
economic growth and in some years over one-half of our net new jobs came directly
from exports. And on average, those exports-related jobs paid much higher than jobs
that had no connection to exports. I believe that NAFTA will create a million jobs in the
first 5 years of its impact. And I believe that that is many more jobs than will be lost, as
inevitably some will be, as always happens when you open up the mix to a new range of
competition.
NAFTA will generate these jobs by fostering an export boom to Mexico, by tearing down
tariff walls which have been lowered quite a bit by the present administration of
President Salinas but are still higher than Americas'. Already Mexican consumers buy
more per capita from the United States than other consumers in other nations. Most
Americans don't know this, but the average Mexican citizen, even though wages are
much lower in Mexico, the average Mexican citizen is now spending $450 per year per
person to buy American goods. That is more than the average Japanese, the average
German, or the average Canadian buys; more than the average German, Swiss, and
Italian citizens put together.
So when people say that this trade agreement is just about how to move jobs to Mexico
so nobody can make a living, how do they explain the fact that Mexicans keep buying
more products made in America every year? Go out and tell the American people that.
Mexican citizens with lower incomes spend more money—real dollars, not percentage
of their income—more money on American products than Germans, Japanese,
Canadians. That is a fact. And there will be more if they have more money to spend.
That is what expanding trade is all about. . . .
The second agreement ensures that Mexico enforces its laws in areas that include
worker health and safety, child labor, and the minimum wage. And I might say, this is
the first time in the history of world trade agreements when any nation has ever been
willing to tie its minimum wage to the growth in its own economy. What does that mean?
It means that there will be an even more rapid closing of the gap between our two wage
rates. And as the benefits of economic growth are spread in Mexico to working people,
what will happen? They'll have more disposable income to buy more American
products, and there will be less illegal immigration because more Mexicans will be able
to support their children by staying home. This is a very important thing.
The third agreement answers one of the primary attacks on NAFTA that I heard for a
year, which is, "Well, you can say all this, but something might happen that you can't
foresee." Well, that's a good thing, otherwise we never would have had yesterday. I
mean, I plead guilty to that. Something might happen that Carla Hills didn't foresee, or
George Bush didn't foresee, or Mickey Kantor or Bill Clinton didn't foresee. That's true.
Now, the third agreement protects our industries against unforeseen surges in exports
from either one of our trading partners. And the flip side is also true. Economic change,
as I said before, has often been cruel to the middle class, but we have to make change
their friend. NAFTA will help to do that.
This imposes also a new obligation on our Government, and I'm glad to see so many
Members of Congress from both parties here today. We do have some obligations here.
We have to make sure that our workers are the best prepared, the best trained in the
world.
Without regard to NAFTA, we know now that the average 18-year-old American will
change jobs eight times in a lifetime. The Secretary of Labor has told us, without regard
to NAFTA, that over the last 10 years, for the first time, when people lose their jobs
most of them do not go back to their old job; they go back to a different job. So that we
no longer need an unemployment system, we need a reemployment system. And we
have to create that. And that's our job. We have to tell American workers who will be
dislocated because of this agreement, or because of things that will happen regardless
of this agreement, that we are going to have a reemployment program for training in
America. And we intend to do that.
Together, the efforts of two administrations now have created a trade agreement that
moves beyond the traditional notions of free trade, seeking to ensure trade that pulls
everybody up instead of dragging some down while others go up. We have put the
environment at the center of this in future agreements. We have sought to avoid a
debilitating contest for business where countries seek to lure them only by slashing
wages or despoiling the environment.
This agreement will create jobs, thanks to trade with our neighbors. That's reason
enough to support it. But I must close with a couple of other points. NAFTA is essential
to our longterm ability to compete with Asia and Europe. Across the globe our
competitors are consolidating, creating huge trading blocs. This pact will create a free
trade zone stretching from the Arctic to the tropics, the largest in the world, a $6.5 billion
market with 370 million people. It will help our businesses to be both more efficient and
to better compete with our rivals in other parts of the world.
This is also essential to our leadership in this hemisphere and the world. Having won
the cold war, we face the more subtle challenge of consolidating the victory of
democracy and opportunity and freedom. For decades, we have preached and
preached and preached greater democracy, greater respect for human rights, and more
open markets to Latin America. NAFTA finally offers them the opportunity to reap the
benefits of this. Secretary Shalala represented me recently at the installation of the
President of Paraguay. And she talked to Presidents from Colombia, from Chile, from
Venezuela, from Uruguay, from Argentina, from Brazil. They all wanted to know, "Tell
me, is NAFTA going to pass so we can become part of this great new market—more,
hundreds of millions more of American consumers for our products."
It's no secret that there is division within both the Democratic and Republican Parties on
this issue. That often happens in a time of great change. I just want to say something
about this because it's very important. Are you guys resting? I'm going to sit down when
you talk, so I'm glad you got to do it. [Laughter] I am very grateful to the Presidents for
coming here, because there is division in the Democratic Party and there is division in
the Republican Party. That's because this fight is not a traditional fight between
Democrats and Republicans and liberals and conservatives. It is right at the center of
the effort that we're making in America to define what the future is going to be about.
And so there are differences. But if you strip away the differences, it is clear that most of
the people that oppose this pact are rooted in the fears and insecurities that are
legitimately gripping the great American middle class. It is no use to deny that these
fears and insecurities exist. It is no use denying that many of our people have lost in the
battle for change. But it is a great mistake to think that NAFTA will make it worse. Every
single solitary thing you hear people talk about, that they're worried about, can happen
whether this trade agreement passes or not, and most of them will be made worse if it
fails. And I can tell you it will be better if it passes.
So I say this to you: Are we going to compete and win, or are we going to withdraw? Are
we going to face the future with confidence that we can create tomorrow's jobs, or are
we going to try against all the evidence of the last 20 years to hold on to yesterday's?
Are we going to take the plain evidence of the good faith of Mexico in opening their own
markets and buying more of our products and creating more of our jobs, or are we going
to give in to the fears of the worst-case scenario? Are we going to pretend that we don't
have the first trade agreement in history dealing seriously with labor standards,
environmental standards, and cleverly and clearly taking account of unforeseen
consequences, or are we going to say this is the best you can do and then some?
In an imperfect world, we have something which will enable us to go forward together
and to create a future that is worthy of our children and grandchildren, worthy of the
legacy of America, and consistent with what we did at the end of World War II. We have
to do that again. We have to create a new world economy. And if we don't do it, we
cannot then point the finger at Europe and Japan or anybody else and say, "Why don't
you pass the GATT agreement; why don't you help to create a world economy?" If we
walk away from this, we have no right to say to other countries in the world, "You're not
fulfilling your world leadership; you're not being fair with us." This is our opportunity to
provide an impetus to freedom and democracy in Latin America and create new jobs for
America as well. It's a good deal, and we ought to take it.
Thank you.
Source: President Clinton’s comments on signing the supplemental agreements to
NAFTA, September 14, 1993.
Document B: Ralph Nader (excerpts)
Citizens beware. An unprecedented corporate power grab is underway in global
negotiations over international trade.
Operating under the deceptive banner of “free” trade, multinational corporations are
working hard to expand their control over the international economy and undo vital
health, safety, and environmental protections won by citizens’ movements across the
globe in recent decades.
The megacorporations are not expecting these victories to be gained in town halls, state
offices, the U.S. Capitol, or even at the United Nations. They are looking to circumvent
the democratic process altogether, in a bold and brazen drive to achieve an autocratic
far-reaching agenda through two trade agreements, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade
deal (formally known as NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement) and an
expansion of the the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades (GATT), called the
Uruguay Round.
The Fortune 200’s GATT and NAFTA agenda would make the air you breathe dirtier
and the water you drink more polluted. It would cost jobs, depress wage levels, and
make workplaces less safe. It would destroy family farms and undermine consumer
protections such as those ensuring that the food you eat is not compromised by
unsanitary conditions or higher levels of pesticides and preservatives.
And that’s only for the industrial countries. The large global companies have an even
more ambitious set of goals for the Third World. They hope to use GATT and NAFTA
to capitalize on the poverty of the Third World countries and exploit their generally low
environment, safety, and wage standards. At the same time, these corporations plan to
displace locally owned businesses and solidify their control over developing countries’
economies and natural resources.
It is only recently that corporations developed the notion of using trade agreements to
establish autocratic governance over many modestly democratic countries. The world
community founded GATT after World War II as an institution to peacefully regulate
world trade. At present, more than 100 nations responsible for more than four-fifths of
world trade belong to it. In its first 40 years of existence, GATT concerned itself primarily
with tariffs and related matters; periodically, the GATT signatories would meet and
negotiate lower tariffs on imported goods. In 1986, however, when the current Uruguay
Round of GATT negotiations began, things changed. Multinational corporations thrust
an expanded set of concerns on GATT that went far beyond traditional trade matters.
They demanded that they be free to invest anywhere in the world with no restrictions;
that environmental and safety standards be “harmonized” (made the same
everywhere)—with the practical result that they would be pulled down toward a lowest
common international denominator level; and that monopoly rights governing ownership
of intellectual property (patents, copyrights, and trademarks) enforced throughout the
world be entrenched. They also asked that food, agriculture, and services (banking,
insurance, shipping, etc.) be brought under GATT disciplines. Finally, they crafted a
new structure called the Multilateral Trade Organization to enhance GATT’s power over
each participating country. In short, these companies sought to expand GATT’s reach
and elevate its importance as a means of undermining the ability of local, state, or
national governments to impose any sort of controls on business.
In 1990, George Bush announced his proposal for a U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade
pact. NAFTA is basically a mini-GATT, except that NAFTA offers even greater privileges
to business and allows for fewer restrictions on corporate operations in the three
countries.
American Express, Cargill, Imperial Chemical and their allies have managed to turn
trade talks into a debate over whether nations may retain their sovereign right to protect
their citizens from harm. Global commerce without commensurate democratic global
law may be the dream of corporate chief executive officers, but it would be a disaster for
the rest of the world with its ratcheting downwards of workers, consumer, and
environmental standards.
The Uruguay Round expansion of GATT and NAFTA would establish a world economic
government dominated by giant corporations, but they do not propose a democratic rule
of law to hold this economic government accountable. It is bad enough to have the U.S.
Fortune 200 along with European and Japanese corporations effectively ruling the
Seven Seas of the marketplace, which affects workers, the environment, and
consumers. But it is a level of magnitude worse for this rule to be formally expanded
over entire political economies without any democratic accountability to the people. . . .
As the world prepares to enter the twenty-first century, GATT and NAFTA would lead
the planet in exactly the wrong direction.
One of the clearest lessons that emerges from the study of industrialized societies is
that the centralization of power of commerce is environmentally and democratically
unsound. No one denies the usefulness of international trade and commerce. But
societies need to focus their attention on fostering community-oriented production. Such
smaller-scale operations are more flexible and adaptable to local needs and
environmentally sustainable production methods, and more susceptible to democratic
controls. They are less likely to threaten to migrate, and they may perceive their
interests as more overlapping with general community interests.
Similarly, allocating power to lower level governmental bodies tends to increase citizen
power. Concentrating power in international organizations, as the trade pacts do, tends
to remove critical decisions from citizen influence—it’s a lot easier to get ahold of your
city council representative than international trade bureaucrats.
All over this country—and indeed all over the world—there is a bubbling up of citizen
activity dealing with consumer rights, the environment, and public health. People want
safe and healthy food, products, and services. They want solar energy instead of fossil
fuels; they want recycling; they want to contain soil erosion and to clean up toxic waste
dumps; they want safer, environmentally benign materials instead of others that happen
to be sold in greater numbers worldwide. And if local or state governments can make
decisions to help achieve these goals, then people can really make a difference. But if
local and state standards can be jeopardized by a foreign country’s mere accusation
that the standards are a non-tariff trade barrier, if countries must pay a bribe in trade
sanctions to maintain laws ruled to be trade barriers by foreign tribunals, if a company’s
claim that the burden the standard would impose is so great that they would have to
pick up their stakes and move elsewhere, then the evolution of health and safety
standards worldwide will be stalled. For it is rare that regulatory breakthroughs occur at
the national, let alone international, level. Usually, a smaller jurisdiction—a town, city, or
state—experiments with a standard, other cities and states copy it and, eventually,
national governments and international governments, lagging behind, follow their lead.
This percolating-up process will be squelched by GATT and NAFTA, with top-down
mercantile dictates replacing bottom-up democratic impulses.
Source: Ralph Nader, “Free Trade and the Decline of Democracy,” 1993.
Document C: Pat Buchanan (excerpts)
It’s Not About Free Trade — It’s About Our Way of Life…
“It may not be too great a flight of rhetoric to say that, at this crossroads of post-Cold
War history, Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot represent the cause of evil.”
Thus did the New Republic close an editorial begun on its cover calling NAFTA “the
most critical vote in years…[which]…could define America’s post-Cold War identity. The
nation’s economic health, it’s geopolitical reach, even its moral character are at stake.”
As the effect of NAFTA would simply be to eliminate, over 15 years, an average 10
percent tariff on a Mexican economy only 3 percent the size of our own, how explain
TNR’s hyperbole and hysteria? How explain the anti-NAFTA rage of the populist Right?
Answer: Just as the Battle of Gettysburg was about more than who held a town in
Pennsylvania, NAFTA is about more than trade. NAFTA is the chosen filed upon which
the defiant forces of a new patriotism have elected to fight America’s foreign policy elite
for control of the national destiny. The vote on NAFTA will measure the power of a
sentiment that has been running swift and deep since 1992.
Already this spirit of “America First has forced both parties to address illegal
immigration, to back off the New World Order, to cut foreign aid, to get out of Somalia,
to stay out of Bosnia and Haiti and to deep-six the notion of a New World Army, with
U.S. troops permanently consigned to His Excellency Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Upon a
balking Establishment this sentiment is imposing a new national interest-based foreign
policy–compelling both Congress and the president to abandon any notions of investing
blood and treasure on quixotic crusades for global democracy. Ideas maligned in the
campaign of 1992 as “neo-isolationism,” “nativism” and “protectionism,” would seem–
from the shocked recoil of the Establishment–to be carrying the country in 1993.
“Can this reversion to isolationism be arrested?” cries Arthur Schlesinger. “Or must we
abandon the Wilsonian dream, forget the hope of an international peace system and
return to the old sauve qui peut world?”
The New Republic’s fear and loathing is thus dead on. The neo-liberals are right to be
alarmed. For the vote on NAFTA will reveal how firm a grip the internationalistinterventionist elite retains on U.S. public opinion. That its hold is slipping is undeniable.
Why does the Populist Right abhor NAFTA? Because NAFTA epitomizes all that repels
us in the modern state. Though advertised as “free trade,” it is anti-freedom, 1,200
pages of rules, regulations, laws, fines, commissions–plus side agreements–setting up
no fewer than 49 new bureaucracies.
Henry Kissinger is right: NAFTA is not really a trade treaty at all, but the architecture of
the New World Order. Like Maastricht, it is part of a skeletal structure for world
government. At its root is an abiding faith in the superior wisdom of a global managerial
class–our would–be Lords of the Universe.
Contemptuous of states’ rights, regional differences and national distinctions, NAFTA
would supersede state laws and diminish U.S. sovereignty. It takes power from elected
leaders and turns it over to transnational bureaucrats whose allegiance is to no country
at all. Though our Constitution specifically empowers Congress to regulate foreign
commerce, Congress is not even permitted to amend NAFTA.
Under NAFTA, foreigners–Canadians and Mexicans, first–can inspect U.S. factories
and impose fines on the United States. Such a treaty insults the memory of the men of
1776.
Why are we doing this? For love of money.
Our corporate elite is desperate for the investment guarantees Carlos Salinas has
agreed to provide, so they can move factories and jobs south, with security, and to hell
with the devastation caused to the communities left behind. “Merchants have no
country,” wrote Jefferson, “the very ground they stand on does not constitute so strong
an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.” Such “merchants” are the
driving force behind NAFTA: they fill up the GOP collection baskets, pay the party bills,
call the party tune.
In Thomas Sowell’s phrase, the battle over NAFTA is about “visions in conflict.” What,
after all, is America? Is she just a “part of the global economy” or a beloved country the
unique character of which must be preserved? What is American? A consumer or a
fellow citizen? Is a worker a unit of labor, or one of the family?
The battle over NAFTA is also a struggle about what it means to be a conservative in
1993. Who defines the term in the post-Reagan era?
To “conservatives of the heart,” Even if NAFTA brings an uptick in GNP it is no good for
America. No matter the cash benefits, we don’t want to merge our economy with
Mexico, and we don’t want to merge our country with Mexico. We don’t want to force
American workers to compete with dollar-an-hour Mexican labor. That’s not what
America is all about.
Of late, some of our brethren of the Right have come to exhibit a near-monomaniacal
obsession with economics, an almost religious faith in its ability to solve the crises of the
spirit and the dilemmas of the heart. But there are higher things in life then the bottom
line on a balance sheet, or being able to buy Hong Kong suits at the cheapest possible
price. Community and country are two of those things.
“To lower the price of labor, our business leaders are willing to sell out not just the
working class but the country itself,” writes Chronicle’s tome Fleming, “Where others
see crisis, big business sees only opportunity. Is California swamped with illegal aliens?
God, illegals work cheap. Are divorces and feminism tearing the American family apart?
Wonderful, they’ll eat out more and women work cheap. Will NAFTA encourage
companies to relocate factories to Mexico? Terrific, there’s no environmental regulation,
and — as Hyman Roth would say — ‘these people down here really understand
business…. ‘”
While NAFTA will sail throughout the Senate, it is in the House, among the newer
members, that its fate will be determined. Had the vote been held the day they came
back from the August recess, NAFTA would be dead. Since then, President Clinton,
using blandishments and the tug of party loyalty, has been able to pick off, one by one,
reluctant Democrats. Assisting are the Taco Belles of Carlos Salinas: all those ex-White
House aides, Cabinet officers and trade reps bought up wholesale by Mexico City.
Behind them stand the money-lenders of the Fortune 500. Behind them the foundationfed scholars off-loading onto our op-ed pages their endless odes to “free trade.”
Will Newt Gingrich be able to deliver the House Republicans for Clinton? If he cannot,
NAFTA is dead. And if NAFTA falls, the free trade myth will have lost its hold on
America. Then, all things are possible.
That Republicans and conservatives should be marching in lockstep, behind Clinton
and Mickey Kantor, to defeat the populist coalition fighting NAFTA, is astonishing. For
true conservatives, NAFTA should be hemlock. It mandates $7 billion in foreign aid and
loan guarantees to clean up a border mess created by multinational corporations who
took American jobs south to Mexico. To make this bitter pill go down easier with his
party’s Left, Clinton is promising a big new job-training program. Republicans get
nothing.
Yet when Kantor boasts that NAFTA will prevent any rollback of environment
regulations “ever,” when EPA director Carol Browner claims NAFTA has “teeth,” when
Sen. Max Baucus hails NAFTA’s “iron fist,” when Rep. Robert Matsui says NAFTA
involves a surrender of American “independence,” Republicans rush to reassure one
another: It cannot be true!
“Americans like to think of themselves as a …practical people,” marvels Edward
Luttwak in the ‘The Endangered American Dream.’ “Yet, there is one ideology that grips
the American mind–the ideology of free trade. Elite Americans are no longer seriously
churchgoing, but their unquestioning faith in the ideology of free trade is intact.”
“[T]rue believers in free trade are ready to sacrifice for the sake of the splendid promise
of their ideal–jobs, businesses, entire industries abandoned to foreign competition.”
What might be saved with but a pinch of protectionism is “irrevocably abandoned,
sacrificed on the altar of theoretical beliefs.”
From Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt to Coolidge, the GOP was the party of industry. It
supported free markets at home, protected by a high tariff wall–with low taxes and little
regulation. The Night Watchmen State. This was the foundation of American prosperity,
the formula that converted the small agrarian economy of 1800 into the greatest
industrial power the world had ever seen by 1900, with mankind’s highest standard of
living. But after World War II, Republicans lapsed in the old faith and bought into all the
Utopian heresies of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt whom the Old Right had
fought to the last ditch.
We shipped hundreds of billions, foreign aid and bank loans, to Europe, Asia, Africa,
Latin America, then threw open U.S. markets to let their products swamp our industries
and kill America’s jobs. We fought two wars to contain a communist menace that
threatened their security more then ours. We built a monstrous welfare state, just like
Europe’s, then shouldered the burden of Western defense. When our allies begged off
making comparable contributions, we were delighted to carry the hod. After all, we were
the Superpower, the Leader of the West. Didn’t they always tell us so?
So, while we built the world’s finest spy satellites, ballistic missiles and carrier-based
aircraft, they built the world’s best new cars, television sets and consumer electronics.
Thanking us for our eloquent essays on the joys of free trade, Japan practiced ruthless
protectionism, converting herself from a nation that made paper lanterns and cheap toys
into an industrial power that challenges our supremacy in manufacturing and
technology. Now Japan runs merchandise trade surpluses as high as $150 billion, while
free-trade America runs trade deficits almost as large–and sees her manufacturing base
hollowed out in the Rust Belt and Southern California.
“The golden eras of Holland, Britain and the United States,” writes Kevin Phillips in
“Boiling Point,” “were marked by bourgeois patriotism and provincialism, whereas their
decline . . . seems to have been characterized by recurrent attitudes: a diminishing
concern for fading national industries, rising transnational values, support for minimal
restraint on immigration, willingness to sell critical technologies overseas and the
eagerness of domestic capital to invest in rival foreign economies.”
Exactly–and the latter sentiment is the spirit of NAFTA.
Once the GOP was an America First party of the full dinner pail that sought not a “levelplaying field” but victory in the struggle for world markets and national power. Once
Americans knew that international competition decides not only the fate of business
enterprises but of societies. That is a long way from today’s “progressive conservatives”
endlessly spouting their geysers of globaloney about an emerging New World Order,
“waging democracy,” “the world economy,” “the necessity of NAFTA” and “the
importance of GATT.”
“The defeat of NAFTA would be the first step in precisely the wrong direction–an
American looking inward rather than reason,” wails the New Republic.
False, Naiveté’s defeat would be a declaration of independence by a new generation of
Americans, a shot heard ’round the world that the Old Republic is back, that we
Americans are, once again, going to start looking out for America First.
If we don’t who will?
Source: Pat Buchanan, “America First, NAFTA Never,” November 7, 1993.