NAFTA: Two Decades Later

Of course Buck McKeon voted for NAFTA and every other disastrous "free" trade agreement

On November 17, 1993-- quite late at night-- the House voted on NAFTA, the George H.W. Bush "free trade" bill that he couldn't pass but that Clinton assured Wall Street he would get done. And it got done, Rahm Emanuel twisting arms for the White House. Although most progressives warned of the consequences in advance, we now have 20/20 hindsight to rely on in confirming their worst fears:

NAFTA opponents-- including labor, environmental, consumer and religious groups-- argued that NAFTA would launch a race-to-the-bottom in wages, destroy hundreds of thousands of good U.S. jobs, undermine democratic control of domestic policy-making and threaten health, environmental and food safety standards.

NAFTA promoters-- including many of the world’s largest corporations-- promised it would create hundreds of thousands of new high-wage U.S. jobs, raise living standards in the U.S., Mexico and Canada, improve environmental conditions and transform Mexico from a poor developing country into a booming new market for U.S. exports.

Why such divergent views? NAFTA was a radical experiment-- never before had a merger of three nations with such radically different levels of development been attempted. Plus, until NAFTA, “trade” agreements only dealt with cutting tariffs and lifting quotas to set the terms of trade in goods between countries. But NAFTA contained 900 pages of one-size-fits-all rules to which each nation was required to conform all of its domestic laws-- regardless of whether voters and their democratically-elected representatives had previously rejected the very same policies in Congress, state legislatures or city councils.

NAFTA requires limits on the safety and inspection of meat sold in our grocery stores; new patent rules that raised medicine prices; constraints on your local government’s ability to zone against sprawl or toxic industries; and elimination of preferences for spending your tax dollars on U.S.-made products or locally-grown food. In fact, calling NAFTA a “trade” agreement is misleading, NAFTA is really an investment agreement. Its core provisions grant foreign investors a remarkable set of new rights and privileges that promote relocation abroad of factories and jobs and the privatization and deregulation of essential services, such as water, energy and health care.

Remarkably, many of NAFTA’s most passionate boosters in Congress and among economists never read the agreement. They made their pie-in-the-sky promises of NAFTA benefits based on trade theory and ideological prejudice for anything with the term “free trade” attached to it.

Now, over a decade later, the time for conjecture and promises is over: the data are in and they clearly show the damage NAFTA has wrought for millions of people in the U.S., Mexico and Canada. Thankfully, the failed NAFTA model-- a watered down version of which is also contained in the World Trade Organization (WTO)-- is merely one among many options.

Throughout the world, people suffering with the consequences of this disastrous experiment are organizing to demand the better world we know is possible-- but we face a race against time. The same interests who got us into NAFTA are pushing to expand it to include 31 more countries in Central and South America through the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). In 2005, Congress voted to extend NAFTA to five Central American countries through the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA); Peru was added in 2007; and there are signed NAFTA expansions with Panama and Colombia as well, although these have not been taken up by Congress.

During his first campaign for president, Obama lied about re-opening NAFTA talks (above) to ameliorate the damage the treaty has done to working people and to the environment. Despite having said, "NAFTA was a mistake" and using the issue to beat up on Hillary Clinton during the primary debates, not only did he not do what he promised once winning office, he has accelerated Wall Street's "Free" Trade agenda with gigantic new trade agreements just as bad-- if not worse-- than NAFTA.

Most of the Members of the House who voted for NAFTA back then are gone-- but not all. And some are still backing the catastrophic "free" trade agenda which is part of the bipartisan conservative agenda that pervades our ruling elites. First and foremost, the current Speaker of the House, John Boehner voted for NAFTA. So did the two top Democrat, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer. Here's a list of 10 somewhat vulnerable Members who voted for NAFTA and will be facing the voters next year:

•Joe Barton (R-TX)
• Ken Calvert (R-CA)
• Dave Camp (R-MI)
• Howard Coble (R-NC)
• Jim Cooper (Blue Dog-TN)
• Peter King (R-NY)
• Buck McKeon (R-CA)
• Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA)
• Fred Upton (R-MI)
• Frank Wolf (R-VA)

So who's still in the House today who was smart enough to vote NO on NAFTA 20 years ago? Well Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH), two of the leaders of the anti-NAFTA coalition, have gone on to the U.S. Senate. But Corrine Brown (D-FL) is still in the House. So are Jim Clyburn (D-SC), John Conyers (D-MI), Pete DeFazio (D-OR), John Lewis (D-GA), Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Frank Pallone (D-NJ), Charlie Rangel (D-NY), Jose Serrano (D-NY), Louise Slaughter (D-NY), Maxine Waters (D-CA) and several others… mostly voices still worth listening to today.