A Tale of Woe over NAFTA
and Health Care in 1993
Obama received an endorsement from Lee Hamilton of 911 Commission fame and former Representative and Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Though now it is in vogue to deny anyone ever considered NAFTA a good thing, Lee Hamilton did and even criticized the Clinton administration of dragging it's feet. In the presidential campaign Obama accuses Hillary of supporting NAFTA even though there are witnesses in the Clinton administration that attest to her dislike for many of the provisions in the agreement and even as he misrepresents his own positions on NAFTA, at times in favor and at other times opposing it, but often simply opportunistically ambivalent depending on the public consensus at that particular time.
"...Lee Hamilton (D., Ind.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, complained that the White House was not doing enough to fight for the North American Free Trade Agreement, the trade pact that would link the economies of Canada, the U.S., and Mexico: "NAFTA will be a lost cause if the campaign for it does not begin soon and in earnest." In the months since, the White House has done nothing. Though President Clinton, like Presidents Reagan and Bush before him, presents the accord as a vital first step in building a hemispheric free-trade zone, his words have yet to be matched by action." (Vin Weber, National Review - September 20, 1993)
"The treaty's opponents - a coalition of environmentalists (Sierra Club, Greenpeace, etc.), organized labor (Teamsters, AFL-CIO), so-called "public-interest groups" (Ralph Nader's Public Citizen, Ross Perot's United We Stand America), and protectionist conservatives (Representative Duncan Hunter, Pat Buchanan)-have been campaigning hard. Electrical Workers President William Bywater summed up their message to Congress recently on CNN: "Anybody that votes for this agreement, we're going to go out and defeat. Period." Perot has just released a new book, Save Your Job, Save Our Country: Why NAFTA Must Be Stopped Now, and is threatening to use his organization to defeat House Members who vote for the pact." (National Review)
"The White House has done little to provide political cover for members wavering under this pressure; it seems to be paralyzed by the intense opposition to the accord on the part of key Democratic constituencies like labor and the greens (organized labor was the second largest contributor of "soft money" to the Democratic National Committee during last year's campaign). Instead of defending the original pact, the Administration strategy has been to negotiate supplemental agreements with Mexico and Canada to satisfy these groups' concerns, and then try to sell them on a new, improved "NAFTA Plus" (thus conceding the opponents' arguments). The key to this strategy was getting Representative Dick Gephardt (D., Mo.), the point man in Congress for labor and environmentalists, to drop his opposition to the pact." (National Review)
NAFTA was always a compromise. Trade representatives were involved in the negotiations. While improbable that labor and environmental groups would ever come around to fully support NAFTA, if at all, the White House walked a thin line to improve the economy while taking advantage of the benefits of lower costs and higher profits, always resulting in greater benefits to some and a disadvantage to others. President Clinton while pushing for better health care made concessions for passage of NAFTA which were unpopular with some constituencies. This is what National Review said about the president's struggle to conclude an agreement which would be satisfactory to practically everyone:
"Mr. Clinton's success or failure in the fight for NAFTA will answer three important questions. 1. Are the Democrats capable of leading? For years, Republicans have charged that the Democratic Party is the party of special interests, beholden to a diverse array of liberal constituencies whose grip renders it incapable of governing. Thus far, Mr. Clinton has tried to appease these groups by delaying NAFTA and negotiating the labor and environmental side agreements. These agreements have now been concluded, presumably to the President's satisfaction. It is time for Mr. Clinton to tell these groups to get on board or get out of the way. If he does so, he can go far toward re-establishing public confidence in the Democratic Party's ability to lead. However, if he allows them to prevent him from winning passage of the NAFTA accord, he will confirm Republican charges that his party is a captive of its special interests." (National Review)
And if NAFTA could not be passed, this is how National Review put it in 1993:
"What will happen to the rest of the Clinton agenda? The President seems to share Mrs. Clinton's view that NAFTA is in competition with health care for political capital. The truth is exactly the opposite: President Clinton probably cannot pass his health-care legislation without first winning passage of NAFTA." (National Review)
NAFTA and Health Care in the Clinton (93) White House
and Hillary's Plan for New Jobs - STOP OUTSOURCING
"...NAFTA is viewed by some powerful forces in the White House as competing with health care for top billing on the fall agenda. So while influential advisors such as David Gergen are arguing for a vigorous NAFTA campaign, others - chief among them George Stephanopoulos and Hillary Clinton - see it as using up scarce political capital." (Vin Weber, National Review - September 20, 1993)
"Gergen does not seem to have won this argument: the President devoted most of his speech before the National Governors' Association to health care, spending only one paragraph on NAFTA. And he has instructed Democratic National Committee Chairman David Wilhelm to set up a full-blown campaign on health care, complete with a "war room"; the DNC has already rented two floors of downtown office space for the "National Health Care Campaign," which will have some twenty full-time staffers to coordinate grass-roots lobbying activities including town meetings, phone banks, letter-writing campaigns, etc. There will be nothing comparable for NAFTA; a White House official recently told the Wall Street Journal that its effort on the treaty "is not going to be like a campaign. It will be more educational." Without a campaign, NAFTA will reach Congress dead on arrival." (National Review)
"Mr. Clinton lost the battle for his stimulus package earlier this year because he failed to reach out to moderate Senate Republicans, thus enabling Minority Leader Bob Dole to organize a solid filibuster against it. The President was able to get his budget passed in both the House and the Senate without a single GOP vote, but only because Senate rules do not allow a filibuster on budget votes. Without some measure of Republican support, Mr. Clinton cannot win passage of his health-care proposals, and he cannot gain that support unless his Administration pursues some confidence-building measures with congressional Republicans. NAFTA gives him a unique opportunity to rebuild bridges with the GOP by working with Republicans toward a common goal." (National Review)
"Mr. Clinton should not fool himself into believing he can recover politically if he allows NAFTA to go down to defeat. If the foreign-policy and economic implications of losing NAFTA are not daunting enough, the President should recognize that, like it or not, his political future is on the line. He had better fight to win." (National Review)
There is no doubt the pressure from Congress was on President Clinton to get NAFTA passed if he intended on getting anything else on his agenda approved. Was it good for America? Some of it was. Some of it has proved to be disastrous for lack of regulation and because of short sighted neglect by those who opposed it even when expectations were for it to pass. Working together could have brought about better resolution of some of the unanticipated consequences but it is never too late to make changes which will benefit labor and the environment.
Hillary Clinton in her 2008 presidential bid has proposed billions of dollars ($4.48 billion a year) in tax incentives for job-creation in the United States, whereas Obama says he will turn off trade deals adapted under NAFTA - while at the same time his economic adviser tells the Canadians, he is just kidding. With Obama it is all about the rhetoric. With Hillary Clinton it is all about the jobs.
Hillary, Jobs Creation and NAFTA
Hillary would finance the $4.48 billion dollar per year tax-incentive for jobs creation program by removing those tax breaks to American firms who are moving their jobs overseas.
Obama, on the other hand, would oppose the pending trade agreement with South Korea because of Seoul's barriers to keep out U.S. autos and beef. He said to the AFL/CIO in Pittsburg,
"What I refuse to accept is that we have to sign trade deals like the South Korea Agreement that are bad for American workers... "What I oppose _ and what I will always oppose _ are trade deals that put the interests of Wall Street ahead of the interests of American workers. That's why I opposed NAFTA," he said. And what's wrong with that statement? He didn't oppose NAFTA. He wasn't even in Congress when NAFTA was proposed and approved in the 90's, the deal struck during the presidency of Bill Clinton between Mexico and Canada.
Hillary says she didn't believe NAFTA would work but her daily schedules as first lady showed her holding about five meetings in 1993 aimed at helping win congressional approval of NAFTA. The Obama campaign said the meetings show Clinton was misrepresenting her record on NAFTA. But what it doesn't show is the approval of NAFTA was part of the deal one makes with the Devil to get other things on the agenda through a persnickety Congress.
Obama has been outspending Clinton almost 4 to 1, and has 3 of every 4 black votes. She is leading with blue collar white voters and with women. Obama has a huge lead with young voters and Hillary has the older voters. And, that has been pretty much the way it has gone all along in this race. If Obama wins, it will be mostly because of young first-time voters and blacks. It won't be on issues.
How would Hillary fix NAFTA? She has laid out a plan which includes strengthening labor and environmental provisions, making them core to the agreement and reviewing NAFTA regularly to ensure they meet the ongoing needs of labor and the economy. The plan includes changing the investment provisions that currently grant special rights to foreign companies, to ensure they CAN NOT undermine workers and worker protections, and most importantly, by strengthening NAFTA's enforcement mechanisms.
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Today is Wednesday July 23, 2008
Hank Roth (on the Internet since 1982)
While I don't use a standard blog (weblog software) mostly because I've been doing this too long - having been there with Ike when the precursor to the Internet, Arpanet got started and every step of the way since, I can't get into all the many fads over the years (now it is social networking), but I have been an observer and participant in events which shape the world since my time with NSA and with Army Security and as a voice security cryptologist in the White House for the President, and the War Room at the Pentagon for the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff plus two wars. You could say this site is one of the better kept secrets [grin] on the InterNUT. You are invited back as often as you would like to see what I and others, I trust, may be saying.
-- Hank Roth