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February 28, 2008

It Took Clinton to Get It Ratified

The Birth of NAFTA

By FRED GARDNER

The best defense, some say, is a good offense. Hilllary's "Shame on you, Barack
Obama" performance deflected attention from the fact that the Clinton
Administration did indeed get NAFTA through a resistant Congress. NAFTA was
conceived under Reagan and then pushed by Poppy Bush, who got an extension of
fast-track negotiating authority from Congress. (Meaning Congress couldn't revise
the text, just vote yes or no.) Agreement with Canada and Mexico was reached in
August '92.
As a candidate for president Bill Clinton supported NAFTA with the proviso that side
agreements (that would not involve renegotiating the NAFA text) might be needed to
protect the environment and the rights of workers. After taking office, Clinton
negotiated the side agreements, ignoring the majority of Democrats in Congress
whose preference was to scuttle the pact altogether.
In July '93, according to a National Association of Manufacturers' chronology,
"Lawmakers returning home to their districts in August were barraged by anti-NAFTA
sentiment. Many supporters of NAFTA returned to Washington publicly undecided on
the pact. Convinced that NAFTA's passage was contingent upon a strong push by the
White House, dozens of House Republicans--led by Minority Leader Newt Gingrich--
said they would withhold their support until the President demonstrated his
commitment to the issue.
"That commitment came September 14, 1993, when President Clinton accompanied
by former Presidents Ford, Carter and Bush, issued a strong statement of support for
NAFTA." At this point the Archvillain of the American Century, David Rockefeller,
weighed in with a Wall St. Journal op-ed explaining why passage was so important to
him, personally:
"I can't help seeing the current debate over NAFTA in the context of
my own half century of work with the people of Canada and Latin
America, an interest I shared with my late brother, Nelson. It seems
ironic that many of the things we had hoped to witness in Latin
America--and worked hard to accomplish--are threatened by a
rejection of NAFTA by the U.S."
The Archvillain's brother Nelson had toured Latin America at Nixon's behest in the
late '60s and was greeted by riots in every city. At the time the Rockefellers owned a
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ranch in Venezuela five times the size of New York City and controlled Creole
Petroleum.
The entire hemisphere, the Archvillain wrote in the WSJ, now has "a whole new vision
of economic organization ... This revolutionary process started with the profound
economic transformation undertaken by Chile [under Pinochet]. It accelerated rapidly
with Mexico's decision to join the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade; to
unilaterally reduce tariffs; and finally to work toward a radically new trading system
with the signing of NAFTA. This not only brought Mexico into the game ... it also held
out the promise of extending the new trading system to the entire hemisphere."
[Rockefeller used the word "revolutionary" four times and "radical" twice to describe
the move towards One Big Market. No wonder the Birchers mistake him for a
Communist!]
The Archvillain singled out some faithful lieutenants for special praise: George Bush,
Carlos Salinas de Gortari ("a young, Harvard-educated economist"), the Peronist
Menem in Argentina, Perez in Venezuela ... Rockefeller must have wanted to credit
Pinochet for turning around "the game" in Chile, but he refrained from doing so by
name: "Under what were special circumstances, Chile had already moved in the
direction of a market economy under the military government that replaced
President Allende's disastrous Marxist experiment in the early 1970s ... " Rockefeller
gloated that there was no longer opposition to privatization in Latin America:
"Traditional 'labor' parties carried out the economic revolution because they felt that
the changes being encouraged would result in economic growth and job creation ...
"I never expected to see such a transformation in my lifetime. It would be a terrible
pity to see such a historic opportunity pass by us now because of a failure on our part
to 'grasp the moment ... ' I truly don't think that 'criminal' would be too strong a word
to describe an action on our part, such as rejecting NAFTA, that would so seriously
jeopardize all the good that has been done --and remains to be done-- to improve the
lives and fortunes of so many people."
Rockefeller's lifelong gopher, Henry Kissinger, weighed in at the same time with a
piece in the LA Times calling NAFTA "the single most important decision that
Congress would make during Mr. Clinton's first term ... . the most creative step
toward a new world order taken by any group of countries since the end of the Cold
War ... not a conventional trade agreement but the architecture of a new
international system."
Meanwhile, on the legal front, Public Citizen, the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth
had sued the Bush Administration for not completing an environmental impact
statement on NAFTA. On June 30, 1993, U.S. District Court Judge Charles Richey ruled
that the White House did indeed have to complete an EIS before sending NAFTA to
Congress. The Clinton Administration asked a U.S. appeals court to reverse the
decision. Solicitor General Drew S. Days III argued that the Environmental Protection
Act applies to federal ITAL agencies, END ITAL not to the president, who would be in
charge of implementing NAFTA. (George W. Bush's advisors didn't invent the imperial
presidency.) A three-judge panel overruled Richey and Clinton sent an implementing
bill to Congress in November '93.
According to the NAM history, "Anti-NAFTA forces claimed they had enough votes to
defeat the bill in the House, but as the House vote scheduled for November 17
approached, intense lobbying efforts by the White House and by the NAM and its
members proved successful ... In the end, the House approved NAFTA by a 234-200
vote."
The difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, some say, is that the
Democrats do it to us with lubrication. Poppy Bush probably could not have forced
NAFTA through Congress. It took the Clinton side agreements to slide it through.
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Fred Gardner edits O'Shaughnessy's. He can be reached at fred@plebesite.com