NAFTA

[microbet]

Founder: Now, I realize that these laws we’re passing are going to help keep us rich landowners in control of the country for the rest of our lives, but someone may use this document to let women vote in 150 years!

[i2i]

What? Not all founding fathers were for slavery and it wasn’t mostly due to moral objections. Who do you think the 3/5th compromise was between lol

[MysteryConman]

I’ll state again that the thesis you believe I’ve put forward is your interpretation of what I wrote. There were at least 10 people who read my post and did not interpret it in the same way that you did. There was so much to unpack in your longer response to mine, that I felt it would take a ton of effort to respond to it all.

I’ll point out one area where I feel you are “off” in understanding what I was saying.

@Basic

It is certainly true that those who drafted NAFTA could have drafted a document that would have relegated the rights of those not at the table to dust. But they didn’t.

The drafters of NAFTA were pursuing their own interests. They couldn’t relegate the rights of workers to dust because those workers have reach a point of historical class struggle where the stroke of pen can not revert them from wage slaves back into chattel slavery. It wasn’t the goodness of the capitalists’ hearts that prevented them from doing so, it was the power of the working class. However, just because the working class at this time has the power to stop themselves from being turned into chattel, does not mean we have the power to prevent every effort that the capitalists make to roll back our gains.

[Basic]

@MysteryConman

I’ll state again that the thesis you believe I’ve put forward is your interpretation of what I wrote. There were at least 10 people who read my post and did not interpret it in the same way that you did.

Or they didn’t, and just agreed with you for other reasons.

[MysteryConman]

The most likely other reason is that they interpreted my post the way that I intended it to be read.

You’ve interpreted it another way. I’ve told you that’s not what I was intending. Yet you continue to stick to you’re (mis)interpretation. Your (mis)interpretation is convenient for someone who is attempting to make the arguments/rebuttals that you’ve put forward.

[Bigoldnit]

But the reason that women and black people enjoy their current legal status is because later generations rewrote the original document. So the original text did a pretty good job of, “locking things down”, no? These marginalized groups actually had insufficient power within the original framework.

I guess you could argue that allowing amendments was “the leak” but, given the distribution of political power at the time, it was not a dumb decision to allow some process for changing the document when you know you’ll be in charge of that process (or, at the very least, will retain enough power to veto any really bad proposals).

[MysteryConman]

I know that the founding fathers is tangential to NAFTA, but the corollaries between people with power and wealth advancing their own interests while formulating the documents that create the social constructs and institutions that they use to control others is fascinating.

I transcribed this from a Michael Parenti video, so where I start and end the “–” may not be precise. The points he’s making are on point, imo.

When the so called founding fathers met in Philadelphia they were determined that persons of birth and fortune and affluence should control the affairs of the nation, and check what they called the “leveling impulses” of the property-less multitude that composed what Madison called “the majority faction[class]”. James Madison who played probably the most crucial role in putting the constitution together, talked about how it was important in his famous Federalist Paper #10 to keep the “spirit and form of popular government with only a minimum of the substance.” This was the task that he said the framers were facing. How do you create a government that would win popular support but would not tamper with the existing class structure? A government that was strong enough to service the growing needs of an entrepreneurial class, while withstanding the egalitarian demands of the popular class. The way that you do that is by excluding the popular class from most of the crucial points of power.

The framers all agreed with Madison when he wrote in Federalist #10 that “the most common and durable source of faction(class) has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.” Now if you say that today you are called a Marxist. Well, Madison was talking about reality and we can’t help it if certain forms of reality are Marxist. [Madison]: “The first object of government is the protection of different and unequal faculties for acquiring property. Elbridge Gerry, another of the framers in Philly, noted that “democracy was the worst of all political evils”. Both he and Madison warned of the danger of the “leveling spirit”. Roger Sherman of Connecticut, another delegate: “the people should have as little to do as may be, about the government”. Alexander Hamilton: “all communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and the well born, and the other are the mass of the people…the people are turbulent and changing. They seldom judge or determine right”.

So, these delegates were rather explicit that the further you could keep people from government, the better. Now they spent many weeks debating their interests. Most of the historical accounts of the founding fathers are about the differences between merchants, slave owners and manufacturers, the northerners and the southerners, but this was a debate between haves versus haves. In which each group sought to safeguard its own interests. It involved mostly questions of representation and structure. On these issues there were no dirt farmers or poor artisans attending the convention to offer an opposing view. They couldn’t take four months off to go to Philadelphia. For the most part the framers built a constitution that would have the power to support commerce and protect the interests of property in a variety of ways.

I’d say these men deserve less than .1% of the credit(and that is being generous) for the rights that women and POC and working people have today. The ideals we hold dear today are the antithesis of what the founding fathers were trying to advance.