it was flawed but ultimately it helped me and everyone else i worked with in my industry, which in turn helped other industries. but software wasn’t even on the radar when the agreement was negotiated.
btw, i was wrong, looks like Reagan first proposed it in the 80 campaign, and championed agreements prior to nafta. HW just picked up the mantle.
i don’t know what you are talking about. i’m trying to google and reply at the same time. are you talking about Guatemala? so not nafta. are you saying free trade proponents willingly caused that?
i’m fine with this level of hostility. this is discourse. i’m actually kind of relieved that we are moving towards verbiage that free trade isn’t in itself bad, but requires regulatory enforcement to not leave communities on both sides of the border behind.
Clinton implemented NAFTA. He could have killed it, just like Trump killed TPP. He didn’t kill it because he supported it: it was a major issue in the 1992 campaign. NAFTA was the whole reason Perot ran.
Colombia. Similar things happened in Mexico, but isn’t as good a story as legit on the books terrorist list death squads and Eric Holder tie in.
I’m saying things like that are an inevitable obvious outcome when you are forcing indigenous rights to be run over and their land privatized.
When you just keep saying “free trade” you make it sound like there was no trade and then unrestricted trade. It increased trade with Mexico 11% and it largely did that simply by relocating production and not increasing it and it put large amounts of Mexican wealth into the hands of US and Canadian corporations whose revenue then partially got counted as GDP for Mexico making it look less like imperialism on the financials.
Eta: the books also look better for Mexico than the real effects when millions of the most adversely affected leave as refugees.
Vote for socialists* but support capitalist endeavors that expand corporate rights and powers across north america, lower wages and eliminate jobs, and help in extracting resources from communities with no say in the process. Unsurprisingly the capitalists knew how many scraps they needed to give out to have americans not be too bothered by it.
Free trade wasn’t what was promoted with NAFTA, it was freedom to exploit and make more profits.
that’s misleading. during nafta implementation, trade quadrupled between the three countries, but it also increased total north american exports.
mexico trade tariff policy prior to the 90s was dictated by its debt to foreign governments. they were literally taxing the shit of its own people to make payments on the debt they couldn’t afford. on top of that the price of energy (oil) in mexico was higher than just across the border in the US, which kept mexico from further development. to get out of that self-defeating cycle, Mexico negotiated with many countries to drop tariffs in exchange for debt-forgiveness, which culminated with nafta. mexico did see some growth, although as many economists pointed out since the rest of their policies were counter-productive.
Perot and Trump both not liking something is strong Bayesian evidence of it being good.
i vote for socialists because i trust them to regulate “tariff-free trade” more than i trust those with capital to regulate themselves. when your ideology is with the communities, you afford them a say in the process.
i am not for government preventing development of industries, as i don’t think that fits into the interests of those communities either.
nafta on net increased jobs, not shrunk them. automation “killed” way more manufacturing jobs, but even so, that capital and workers found new things to work on. some with government help.
You only need to do a Bayesian analysis if you don’t want to actually bother to figure out if Perot and Trump are right about trade. And of course that has nothing to do with my point, which was that it’s absurd to treat Clinton as some sort of bystander on NAFTA.
I understood your point, I was just riffing on how easy it is to use heuristics to know whether something is dark and evil by whether dark and evil people are vehemently against it or for it.
Feel free to sub in Ron Paul for Perot/Trump if you like.
Jobs. Everyone has jobs. The person who owned a farm in Southern Mexico and now mows my neighbor’s lawn or delivers a newspaper still has a job. NAFTA increased inequality both here and in Mexico and between here and Mexico. It’s very difficult to find some of these stats, but the typical standard of living for a not rich person has increased here and in Mexico since WWII and NAFTA and other things like it didn’t stop that, but they didn’t accelerate it either.
How about stanning for Reagan/Bush?
And speaking of Reagan…NAFTA goes along nicely with the rest of his policies in Latin America.
I mean, Reagan/Bush is a prettt easy W over Trump/Perot/Paul. I’m not saying it’s an either/or, but when that trio REALLY hates something it is almost certainly a neutral to good if not great thing.
Perot had two main positions: No NAFTA and no invasion of Iraq (you young people might not remember that we did that twice). He was right about both regardless of what he thought about welfare or medicare or social security.
ETA: Meanwhile Reagan sponsored war in Central America lead to hundreds of thousands of people being murdered. Mass slaughters of helpless subsistence farmers. Not and easy W over anyone.
Clinton didn’t champion it? He just signed it into law, gave a shout out to his VP for his contributions to bringing to fruition, and said the following.
I’m happy that people were able to access education and career training. I don’t see how NAFTA was a necessary condition for those kinds of programs to be implemented.
How was NAFTA a necessary condition for the digital boom? You seem to be giving it a lot of credit. And the whole “worked for the benefit of consumers” is the kind of turn of phrase that is used when the policies screw the working class. Don’t worry guys it’s good for consumers, and the economists say that it’s good for the “economy”(wink wink). Just look at those corporate profits!
Exploited it? They intentionally wrote it exactly how they wanted to write it. The second it was ratified, they immediately started “exploiting” it by doing all the things that they wanted to do, which is why they wrote it the way they did–to allow them to do those things. Cui bono–who benefits? Them. They wrote it. Their interests were advanced. Who’s interests were sublimated? Working people on all sides of the border.
Timothy McVeigh also didn’t support invading Iraq. I don’t really see how one’s position on Iraq has any bearing on whether NAFTA was awful.
To your ETA, I meant regarding economic issues. Again, conflating awful foreign policy positions with trade is strange.