-Caveat Lector-
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: The Selling of Free Trade: NAFTA, Washington, and the Subversion of
American Democracy
Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2000 00:37:15 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Emilie F. Nichols" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Organization: ?
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
NAFTA is just one of the reasons I am voting for Nader. These
trade agreements need to be renegotiated. The chapter 11 cases
under the NAFTA tribunals are protections for investers against
"expropriation" of their profits -- in other words, there can be
no lost profits. We were told by Al Gore (in his debate with Ross
Perot) that NAFTA would mean more jobs (we've had nothing but
downsizing, outsourcing, rightsizing), that the NADBank was
established to clean up the environmental messes along the border
of US and Mexico (not one penny has been spent; NAFTA meeting in
Irving, Texas earlier this year tried to GUT environmental language).
Methanex v. United States of America is on the NAFTA roster.
Methanex wants $970 million for lost profits. Says laws in
California, Alaska and other states that prevent the sale of their
product MTBE (which is harmful in drinking water) forced them to
lose profits! You and I can go in the hole financially, but not
corporations! --Emilie
The Selling of "Free Trade":
NAFTA, Washington, and the Subversion of American Democracy
By John R. MacArthur
Published by Hill and Wang;
($25.00 US/$39.95 CAN; 0-8090-8531-3)
"If there is spin, there is counter-spin: The Selling of 'Free
Trade' is a devastating unraveling of yet another Bill Clinton con
job. MacArthur tells the NAFTA story in the voices of those who
did the spinning and those who suffered from it. It doesn't get
much better."
--Seymour M. Hersh
This brilliant expose shows us how Washington works to make something
happen, even when confronted with widespread popular opposition.
It chronicles the brutal and expensive campaign in 1993 that led
to the passage of the poorly understood, highly controversial law
creating the North American Free Trade Agreement, but the story is
urgently up-to-date.
Above all else, NAFTA guaranteed U.S. corporations access to cheap
labor in Mexico and protection against expropriation there, but it
was presented as a progressive law that would help workers everywhere.
John R. MacArthur, investigating the political and public-relations
tactics of the Democratic-Republican, the big-business coalition
that favored NAFTA, shows in dramatic detail just how the major
playersGore, Bradley, Clinton, Gephardt, Bush, and the other members
of what he calls the bipartisan oligarchydefeated the ad hoc groups
of working people, skeptics, and mavericks on Capitol Hill who
question the value of the manifestly unpopular bill. We learn how
these oligarchs do their business with the Fortune 500 companies
dominating American trade policy and how they have disregarded the
workers' and environmentalists' concerns they now purport to care
about. How NAFTA was put acrossor put over on usis the central
story of this book.
The Selling of "Free Trade" begins with a 1999 closing of the famous
Swingline stapler plant in Long Island City, New York, and ends
with the factory's relocation just south of the border in Nogales,
Mexico, where MacArthur watches President Ernesto Zedillo preside
over the ribbon cutting. In between, he talks to lobbyists, White
House aides, congressional staff, and politicians who framed the
debate over free trade and the American economy; he investigates
the advertising, public relations, and politicking in maneuvers
that, with White House help, put NAFTA across as a pure free-trade
issue.
And he talks to American factory workers who were losing their
jobs: about their work and their working conditions, about what
the unions have or haven't done for them, and about what it's like
when they come off their last assembly line and watch their jobs
move to Mexico. He attends meetings at an Arizona resort where a
U.S. company helps U.S. businesses learned to save millions of
dollars by using NAFTA regulations to relocate their factories
south of the border. And he interviews Mexican workers about the
deplorable wage variables and shocking lack of health, medical,
and educational benefits they must endure.
The ongoing decline of American democracy chronicled and predicted
by writers as diverse as Joe McGinniss and C. Wright Mills came
vividly true, MacArthur shows, when the American people were sold
on what they thought was free-trade but was actually a subversion
of their political system. His book is essential reading for anyone
who cares about the future of the American republic.
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