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  • From: Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Politics, it's still the economy, in the rust belt stupid.
  • Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 08:52:48 -0700


Funny thing about the folks from the rust belt, like myself ( from Michigan, family still in the auto industry), is that the single thing they attribute most with the loss of jobs, is the NAFTA agreement Clinton signed. Like you say, they seem to think the guy in the white house is the one to take the credit or heat, and Clinton started this snowball rolling.

Actually, Bush I started the NAFTA snowball rolling.

As a Clinton supporter, I was strongly against NAFTA. I don't recall all the politics of it but I think the Pubs were in control of the DC Whorehouse at the time.

I looked for it in Clinton's book and found this on page 432:
"In the week leading up to the first [presidential] debate, I finally endorsed the controversial North American Free Trade Agreement, which the Bush administration had negotiated with Canada and Mexico, with the caveat that I wanted to negotiate side agreements ensuring basic labor and environmental standards that would be binding on Mexico. My labor supporters were worried about the loss of low-wage manufacturing jobs . . . .
Page 540: "On the nineteenth, my forty-seventh birthday, I announced that Bill Daley of Chicago would become the chair of our task force on the North American Free Trade Agreement. Six days earlier, with Canada and Mexico, we had completed the side deals to NAFTA on labor and environmental rights, which I had promised in the campaign, as well as one protecting our markets from import "surges." Now that they were in place, I was ready to go all out to pass NAFTA in the Congress. . . . NAFTA would be a very different fight from the budget. A lot of Republicans would support it, and we had to find enough Democrats to go along over the objections of the AFL-CIO."

At http://www.ndu.edu/library/n2/n025603H.pdf there is background on NAFTA. George H.W. Bush hurried the NAFTA agreement to conclusion before the Republican convention, using it to show Clinton as weak on trade issues. It would appear that Clinton had to embrace NAFTA to defeat Bush, but he managed to get the labor and environmental side agreements in order to have the backing he needed.

By the way, while I was digging this out I found that Bush II wants to expand NAFTA to include Latin American countries. I also found that of those members of the DC Whorehouse who voted for NAFTA, a minority remain. So if any president wants to change it, the votes probably exist. But it would be bloody; big business was and is the driving force behind trade agreements.







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