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nicoffeine | 4 years ago
NAFTA was passed in the very early days of the internet. Here's a great quote about it from former presidential candidate Ross Perot via wikipedia:
"We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory south of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, ... have no health care—that's the most expensive single element in making a car—have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south. ... when [Mexico's] jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it's leveled again. But in the meantime, you've wrecked the country with these kinds of deals."
Perot was from Texas, and mocked by corporate media as a clueless hillbilly for suggesting that NAFTA would be a bad deal for Americans. It was one of the few issues Noam Chomsky and Rush Limbaugh and all the major unions agreed on. Trump, whether sincere or not, uses it as one of his main talking points because it is absolutely true. Selling out our capacity to manufacture our own goods has been a terrible choice for Americans. We can't make the things our civilization needs to function. We have hollowed out entire metro areas and replaced steady paychecks and fairly cohesive social units with "gig" work and broken families.
That's a long way of saying their memory is accurate, but I think it's a critical moment to understand in modern US history. NAFTA was a big fucking deal, and the owners of corporate media spared no one to make sure it would get passed. They understood the power it would give them in terms of wealth accumulation and bargaining power to beat down unions and wages. Everyone thought Clinton wouldn't capitulate since it was unpopular with Democrats, but Clinton was attracted to and further corrupted by Wall St power and depended on them for guidance.
For a lot of Americans, NAFTA was the beginning of the end of their community. They are still pissed off about it, and that's the reason the criticism of the Clintons can turn vile in certain circles. It's not entirely unearned. I don't like the Clintons, though I voted for her as the lesser of two evils in 2016.
tablespoon|4 years ago
>> As far as I can tell, you just made that up. Literally no Google hits
> NAFTA was passed in the very early days of the internet. Here's a great quote about it from former presidential candidate Ross Perot via wikipedia:
I'm well aware. What I meant was the headline he "quoted" was almost certainly made up (I mean "NAFTA and China WTO"? There was a bit of a time gap between those things). Obviously there were advocates who made grand predictions in favor of free trade in general, and advocates who said that was all BS (and for the record the latter have been proven to be far more correct). The issue I have is with the sloppy thinking and sloppy argumentation in the GGP.
A lot of people seem to lazily think of the media as a unitary agent, and think that agent's intentions are revieled in some random cherrypicked op-eds they read sometime that pissed them off. That's almost as big of a pet peeve of mine as libertarianism.
That's not to say it can't be taken by a zeitgeist or its participants don't show bias, but it's kind of an important thing that ought to be thought about more carefully and less conspiratorially.
> Selling out our capacity to manufacture our own goods has been a terrible choice for Americans. We can't make the things our civilization needs to function. We have hollowed out entire metro areas and replaced steady paychecks and fairly cohesive social units with "gig" work and broken families.
No disagreement there.