Remember the promises of George Bush I and Bill Clinton and Al Gore about NAFTA lifting the economies on both sides of the Rio Grande?

Just drive through any industrial area, and you will find them pock-marked with empty factories which have fled to low-wage, high-repression Mexico (or more recently, to China.)

At least 879,000 US jobs have been lost due to NAFTA, according to calculations by the Economic Policy Institute. (That data is several years old, so the toll is even worse now.)

The threat of moving to Mexico is being used to intimidate workers in about 68% of union organizing drives where that possibility is credible, according to Prof. Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University. This same threat is routinely utilized at the bargaining table to hold down wages or extort concessions, so it comes as no surprise that US wages have been stagnating. Unlike the stringent protections of corporations' "rights" on intellectual property (eg., for drug patents), labor and environmental violations of NAFTA have never produced any penalties, according to economist Jeff Faux in his book, The Global Class War.

LATINO-AMERICANS BEAR BRUNT OF NAFTA JOB LOSSES IN US
Ironically, much of the brunt of NAFTA-caused job displacement in the US has been borne by workers of Latino descent who work in industries like garments,textiles, electronics, auto parts, etc.

Specifically, no less than 47% of the total number of workers certified as having suffered job loss due to NAFTA were Latino! (Source: Government Accountability Office, "Trade Adjustment Assistance…" report GAO-01-59, Oct. 2000, Appendix 1)

SCHIZOID VIEWS ON NAFTA, IMMIGRATIOM FED BY DEMAGOGUES
Unfortunately, the linkage between NAFTA and illegal immigration has rarely been seen in the establishment media, with exceptions like a piece by Louis Uchitelle in the 2/18/07 NY Times. Thus, it should be no surprise that many people--following in the footsteps of demagogues like Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan--understand that NAFTA has ripped apart US industrial communities like Milwaukee, Racine, and Kenosha, but have no clue that NAFTA's impact in Mexico has been utterly devastating.

Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan rightly decry the flow of US jobs to Mexico, and sometimes even--as when Buchanan spoke at Serb Hall in 1996 during his presidential primary run-- express sympathy for Mexican workers in the maquiladoras who are held underfoot by US multinationals thanks to NAFTA. But Dobbs and Buchanan fail utterly to understand that NAFTA has devastated the non-maquiladora sections of the Mexican economy, from corn farming to retail stores to local manufacturing, and instead blame utterly destitute and desperate Mexican workers rather than looking at NAFTA's catastrophic effects on the Mexican economy. So instead, they cruelly scapegoat immigrants and give credibility to the most extreme, anti-Latino forces in the nation.

As a result, we see many people simultaneously furious about NAFTA and yet blaming Mexican victims of NAFTA for job losses in the US!

Below is an excerpt from a piece my wife Carolyn and I wrote last year on the relationship between NAFTA-related devastation of the Mexican economy and the growing tide of Mexican workers desperate to emigrate to the US.


Tuesday, April 25, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
Immigration Flood Unleashed by NAFTA's Disastrous Impact on Mexican Economy
by Roger Bybee and Carolyn Winter

The recent ferment on immigration policy has been so narrow that it has excluded the real issue: family-sustaining wages for workers both north and south of the border. The role of the North American Free Trade Agreement and misnamed 'free trade' has been scarcely mentioned in the increasingly bitter debate over the fate of America's 11 to 12 million" illegal aliens."

NAFTA was sold to the American public as the magic formula that would improve the American economy at the same time it would raise up the impoverished Mexican economy. The time has come to look at the failures of this type of trade agreement before we engage in more and lower the economic prospects of all workers affected. While there has been some media coverage of NAFTA's ruinous impact on US industrial communities, there has been even less media attention paid to its catastrophic effects in Mexico:
* NAFTA, by permitting heavily-subsidized US corn and other agri-business products to compete with small Mexican farmers, has driven the Mexican farmer off the land due to low-priced imports of US corn and other agricultural products. Some 2 million Mexicans have been forced out of agriculture, and many of those that remain are living in desperate poverty. These people are among those that cross the border to feed their families. (Meanwhile, corn-based tortilla prices climbed by 50%. No wonder many so Mexican peasants have called NAFTA their 'death warrant.')
* NAFTA's service-sector rules allowed big firms like Wal-Mart to enter the Mexican market and, selling low-priced goods made by ultra-cheap labor in China, to displace locally-based shoe, toy, and candy firms. An estimated 28,000 small and medium-sized Mexican businesses have been eliminated.
* Wages along the Mexican border have actually been driven down by about 25% since NAFTA, reported a Carnegie Endowment study. An over-supply of workers, combined with the crushing of union organizing drives as government policy, has resulted in sweatshop pay running sweatshops along the border where wages typically run 60 cents to $1 an hour.

So rather than improving living standards, Mexican wages have actually fallen since NAFTA. The initial growth in the number of jobs has leveled off, with China's even more repressive labor system luring US firms to locate there instead....
The rest of the article is available at http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0425-30.htm

MEDIA COVERAGE OF NAFTA GENERALLY AWFUL

US media coverage of NAFTA in particular and corporate globalization in general has followed the government-corporate line so slavishly that Soviet journalists in Stalin era would have been put to shame. I've written a few pieces for which I have provided links below:

• "CAFTA a Bomb for Working Americans" ... www.populist.com/05.10.bybee.htm
• "NAFTA's Hung Jury" http://www.fair.org/extra/0405/nafta-jury.html
• "Sweatshops Are the Worker's Friend" http://www.fair.org/extra/9611/sweatshops.html
• "Times Unmasks Protesters" http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/julyaug01toc.htm
• "Benedict Arnold Democrats" www.populist.com/04.9.bybee.html -
• "From Green Bay to Bombay: Offshoring Costs Jobs, Tax Base" www.populist.com/03.13.offshoring.html

Some of my other stuff on NAFTA and globalization for Z magazine and Progressive Populist is also available on line.

"Operation Eagle Eye" was a Republican effort to suppress minority voting in Phoenix, Arizona in the early 1960's, and was headed up by none other than future Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist.

"Eagle Eye" involved the crude tactic of young Republicans, led by Rehnquist, trying to intimidate mostly older African-Americans and Latinos as they waited in polling lines. Minority voters were warned by Rehnquist and his henchmen that they were committing a federal crime if they were voting while not familiar with the Constitution, according to a variety of accounts, by former Nixon counsel John Dean and personal testimony by former Eagle Eye participants like Louis Rhodes.

At a minimum, the Operation Eagle Eye was intended to cause delays in voting and thus discourage minority voters who were overwhelmingly Democratic in their sympathies. As Dean notes, Rehnquist later went on to lie about his involvement during confirmation hearings when he was being appointed as chief justice.

FLORIDA 2000: COMPUTERIZED THEFT OF VOTING RIGHTS

In recent years, Republican voter suppression tactics have grown more sophisticated. As Greg Palast documented on BBC and in his book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, the 2000 presidential election was swung to George W. Bush by the improper purging of more than 55,000 African-Americans in Florida from the voter lists. These African-Americans were falsely identified as convicted felons and thus ineligible to vote. That scheme involved then-Secretary of State Katherine Harris (also state Bush campaign chairperson), Gov. Jeb Bush, and a firm called DataPoint which carried out the computerized deletion of what would have been an indisputable victory for Al Gore.

OHIO 2004: "CAGING" AFRICAN-AMERICAN VOTERS

Now a new scandal is emerging about the 2004 elections and illegal efforts by Republicans to "cage" and then purge African-American voters in Ohio and four other key states. (Mark Crispin Miller's book Fooled Again is a very persuasive argument that the 2004 election was stolen by unethical tactics, particularly in Ohio; Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has also written compelling case for this charge in Rolling Stone magazine)"Caging" involves sending a registered letter to someone's home; if that person is unwilling to sign for the letter, the Republicans assert that this person does not live at that address and should be eliminated from the list of registered voters.

As Jason Leopold and Matt Renner report in today's Truthout website: (http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/072607A.shtml">http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/072607A.shtml "Previously undisclosed documents detail how Republican operatives, with the knowledge of several White House officials, engaged in an illegal, racially-motivated effort to suppress tens of thousands of votes during the 2004 presidential campaign in a state where George W. Bush was trailing his Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry. "The documents also contain details describing how Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign officials, and at least one individual who worked for White House political adviser Karl Rove, planned to stop minorities residing in Cuyahoga County from voting on election day."

The Republican caging program to suppress minority voting will be one of the topics on Bill Moyers' "NOW" program on PBS Friday night July 27.

Republican presidential contender Rudy Giuliani has somehow gained the reputation of being "the liberal" in the GOP field, based on his positions on abortion and gay rights.

This reflects two political phenomena: 1) how far the Republican Party has lurched to the Right (see Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's excellent book Off-Center for a keen analysis of this) and 2) how the commercial media have narrowed the definition of "liberal." At one point, "liberal" meant more than gender issues alone, as critical as they are. "Liberal" also meant support for worker rights and economic equality, and actively fighting against racism, among other concerns. But times have changed and many so-called liberals have lost any identification with the cause of workers or the poor.

But the supposedly Giuliani has employed barely-veiled racism at times, as when he addressed a crowd of white New York police officers, many of them drunk and carrying racist banners, to oppose a civilian review board to investigate NYPD abuses against mostly African-American citizens. Wayne Barrett, one of the few journalists to critically examine Giuliani's record, uncovered a "vulnerability study" that Giuliani's own campaign conducted on their candidate's weak spots. The study stated: "Giuliani's shrieking performance at the copy rally may be his greatest political liability this year. Giuliani has yet to admonish those who attacked the mayor with racist code words on signs and banners. Why not?"

Instead, Giuliani proceeded to maintain the racial polarization and regularly label African-American Mayor David Dinkins a "Jesse Jackson Democrat," a strategy that propelled him to victory as mayor. Once in office, Giuliani not only proposed cutting already-minimal welfare benefits, but, in the words of the NY Times 7/22/07, "suggested that many of the poor might profitably leave town." As Giuliani himself put it, "A natural consequence of a reduction in benefits might very well be that that would happen. That would be a good thing."

But Giuliani is not alone in pursuing a new urban vision where the presence of the poor --especially African-Americans and Latinos--is minimized and their influence marginalized. It boils down to ethnic and class cleansing. After Hurricane Katrina, several local leaders in New Orleans openly expressed the view that the devastation provided an opportunity to purge the city of many of its poor. NY Times columnist David Brooks, along with local New Orleans-area planners, openly spoke of the "silver lining" of Katrina--the chance to reshape the city without the troublesome African-American rabble. (I discuss this view of "Disposable People" in more depth in the forthcoming issue of Extra!, published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.)

"Heckuva job, Bushie."

Recent revelations about the Bush administration's role in New Orleans's rebuilding have included: **FEMA trailers are making residents sick from contaminated air
**Federally-funded housing reconstruction is moving at a snail's pace, with just a tiny number of new units completed.
**Thanks to bureaucratic barriers erected by the Bush administration, Louisiana and New Orleans are getting a fraction of what they need for reconstruction.

But the most appalling aspect came to light in a July 24 NY Times article on the absence of hospitals and doctors in New Orleans, which are absolutely essential to the city getting back on its feet. After all, who would live in a city where they literally could not get healthcare? Unfortunately, Bush and Co. see this as an opportunity to drive home a vital lesson: healthcare is best delivered through paying off private insurers as useless middlemen, instead of directly providing health services.

Much the same philosophy underlines Bush's opposition to the S-CHIP program to provide health coverage to uninsured children. The expansion of S-CHIP has the support of such hardline right-wingers as Sens. Orrin Hatch, Pat Roberts, and Charles Grassley, but Bush is taking the extreme position that the S-CHIP program is part of a plot to establish single-payer healthcare in the US, according to a NY Times article July 8.

In New Orleans, at immediate issue is the rebuilding of Charity Hospital, constructed in 1939 as one of Gov. Huely Long's most important achievements. The state is willing to commit the needed funds, but Bush wants the money mainly funneled to private insurers, despite the obvious inefficiency. As the NY Times reported July 24,

"But the hospital’s future is now the subject of a debate about the best use of federal health care dollars, even after the state agreed to pay $300 million to get the project off the ground. The federal government would prefer that the state build a small hospital and use its federal dollars to buy private insurance for the poor. Dr. Frederick P. Cerise, the secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Health and Hospitals, said that plan would help less than half of the uninsured."

So when it comes down to subsidizing private insurers or saving the poor of New Orleans and poor children across the nation, Bush's priorities are atrociously crystal-clear.

The big drug companies must be using some of their own steroids to keep their arrogance pumped up.

Large pharmaceutical firms have been particularly adept at both manipulating Congress into a tax amnesty and then continuing to exploit tax-haven loopholes in the US tax code, all the while cutting US jobs.

"Two years ago, when companies received a big tax break to bring home their offshore profits, the president and Congress justified it as a one-time tax amnesty that would create American jobs," reported Alex Berenson (NYT 7/24/07) "Drug makers were the biggest beneficiaries of the amnesty program, repatriating about $100 billion in foreign profits and paying only minimal taxes. "But the companies did not create many jobs in return. Instead, since 2005 the American drug industry has laid off tens of thousands of workers in this country."

**********
Meanwhile, at the state level, a full 62% of state firms with revenues of $100 million or more paid zero state income taxes in 2003 (the latest year for which full data was available)according to a dynamite report by Jack Norman, research director of the Institute for Wisconsin's Future. Whether these firms have a shiny reputation as good corporate citizens (eg., Racine-based SC Johnson-related companies) or gained wide notoriety for rapaciousness (eg., Wal-Mart), they share a shameful record of not paying state income taxes and shifting the burden to ordinary homeowners. As Norman wrote in Isthmus (4/5/07)http://www.thedailypage.com/isthmus/article.php?article=6214) , "Among the companies that in 2003 paid no income tax are some big names: McDonald's, Merck, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Kimberly-Clark, Johnson Controls (the largest Wisconsin-based firm), Kohl's and Snap-on Tools.

"The S.C. Johnson family of companies is especially noteworthy. Emerging from the Johnson Wax company, based in Racine, are a handful of large firms, including Johnson Financial Group, Johnson Bank, Johnson Outdoors, JohnsonDiversey, along with the original S.C. Johnson & Son. From 2000 through 2004, not a single one of these firms paid a cent in Wisconsin corporate income tax."