Pat Buchanan was right and Bill Clinton was wrong

[Elwood P Dowd]

I was against this deal from the get-go - from the time I first heard rethugs like H.W. Bush and Carla Hills pushing this insanity (1990?).
No need to worry I thought, the Democratic House will never pass the implementing legislation. Next thing you know, our own Bill Clinton stabs us in the back, twists just enough Democratic arms, and one of the worst pieces of legislation in our history passes the House and Senate. Hard to say it, but Pat Buchanan was right and Bill Clinton was wrong.

You might want to do a quick copy/past to lift this article off the web site and read it with your word processor. Otherwise, you get distracted by some really ugly mug shots.

http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=13114

For U.S. companies, it was one sweet deal. At zero cost, they were allowed to rid themselves of their American workers; get out from under contributing to Social Security and Medicare; and slough off the burden of environmental, health-and-safety, wage-and-hour and civil-rights laws -- and were liberated to go abroad and hire Mexicans who would work for one-fifth to one-tenth of what their unwanted American workers cost.

What NAFTA, GATT, Davos and the WTO have always been about is freeing up transnationals to get rid of First World workers, while assuring them they could hold on, at no cost, to their First World customers.

When one considers who finances the Republican Party, funds its candidates, and hires its former congressmen, senators and Cabinet officers at six- and seven-figure retainers to lobby, it is understandable that the GOP went into the tank.

But why did the liberals, who paid the price of mandating all those benefits for American workers and imposing all those regulations on U.S. corporations, go along? That's the mystery. About NAFTA there is no mystery. There never really was.

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[redqueen]

1. "But why did the liberals, who paid the price of mandating ..."

It WASN'T the liberals, dammit!

[Jackpine Radical]

3. Ask Feingold why he voted for it. Oh--wait, he didn't.

[redqueen]

8. Exactly.

The liberals didn't... the corporatist DLC $&#*(@$&s did.

[JHB]

2. What "liberals" is Buchanan referring to?

Probably all the liberals Clinton charmed into going along with the corporatist agenda.

Couldn't be referring to Clinton himself, since as the governor of a "right to work" state, he was never liberal on this.

[underpants]

4. Pat probably means NEOLIBERALISM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

[Elwood P Dowd]

5. I'm trying to remember the dems in the house who pushed this

Foley, Matsui, Richardson, and Rostinkowsky are four I can remember

[papau]

6. RW Human Events has Pat rewriting history again.

NAFTA was a Mexico rescue - the peso was near death - and its death could have pulled down the US.

In 94 the GOP were in charge of Congress.

[Elwood P Dowd]

7. NAFTA passed in 1993

Dems were still the majority.

[papau]

9. You are correct - the 1/1/94 start date was stuck in my memory.

But the HW Bush 41 treaty (an expansion of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement of 1989) was OK'd by Clinton in the atmosphere of a peso crisis.

Plus Clinton added provisions regarding worker and environmental protection later as a result of supplemental agreements signed in 1993.

And as I recall a majority of Dems voted against the Treaty (with the GOP more or less all in favor).

I do not think that without the peso crisis, Clinton would have pushed it.

The main effect is that we import less from the far-east and more from Mexico - at least that is how I recall the studies over the last few years.

[Elwood P Dowd]

10. The side agreements were basically useless

and unenforceable happy talk designed to placate opponents. Worker and environmental protection in Mexico is almost non-existent.

The major peso crisis actually took place in 1994. We loaned Mexico billions to bail them out.

[papau]

11. My memory is gone if there was no peso problem in 93 - I swear I

remember a great deal of angst prior to the Nafta vote (I do not doubt that we loaned a great deal to Mexico in 94 to bail them out - but I really do recall 93 Nafta discussions of the looming peso problem and of how Nafta was a long term solution - but perhaps my memory is gone today :-) )

I never checked out the side agreements because I was so pissed at the provision that said a government regulation could be tossed by a rich corporate polluter by claiming that the regulation was a restraint of trade.

Was that wording ever invoked and what was the effect if it was invoked?

[Wilms]

12. K&R n/t

[mnmoderatedem]

13. At yet, in spite of it all

CAFTA got pushed through...

[iconoclastNYC]

14. That's the DLC for you.

The reason the fortune 500 spends seven million on year funding the DLC is to ensure there are just enough "Profits First" corporate-owned Democrats in the Congress to work with Republicans to push the corporate agenda.

Aren't most of the new senators DLC types? Do you think that's by chance?