The Selling of "Free Trade": NAFTA, Washington, & the Subversion of American Democracy

NAFTA became a blue-print for exporting jobs all over the world. It allows corrupt governments everywhere to exploit the poor for the benefit of the world trade organization (WTO) and the wealthy of these countries.This book is an example of excellent reporting. MacArthur takes a small subject--the fate of the Swingline staple factory in New York and shows you how a company cut its labor costs by moving to a bordertown in Mexico. This factory once was the first job off the boat for thousands of immigrants. Now, it is the modern equivalence of the workhouse in places like Mexico. There a corrupt government threw its peasants off their land offering them a brutal choice: be exploited by corporations in Mexico or take a chance at a new life in America.What shocked me was how in such a world as we are creating, friends come in strange packages while your enemies come at you with warm hands and friendly smiles. Bill Clinton, to the delight of conservatives, pushed NAFTA through Congress. The opposition: a lonely, odd, short guy from, of all places, Texas, by the name of Ross Perot. "Can you hear that sucking sound," was his cry throughout his tour of America against NAFTA. We did not listen. Instead, we bought Bill Clinton and Gore, who was the front man for this PR campaign, based on their supposed liberal values. We got took.Read this book and find out how. I took off a few points because the flow dragged a little but otherwise, a great book --- MacArthur made the Conservative hit list.Please rate this review. Thanks.

While the author's stance and my own on NAFTA are the same, I disagree with the method taken to drive home his point. The majority of the book focuses almost exclusively on the plight of the struggling staples plant. NAFTA is a much bigger issue then one company and if your hoping to get a better understanding of why that is the case this book will leave you dissapointed.

There are two protectionist camps in the United States. In one is Patrick Buchanan and his doctrine of America First. His populist pitch is simple: Foreigners are taking our jobs. In the other are people such as Harper's publisher John R. MacArthur. As a salon-dwelling member of protectionism's lefty camp, he cares deeply about complex issues such as rainforest preservation and child labour. He has a harder job than Buchanan: When he knocks free trade, he can't limit himself to the dubious proposition that it harms American workers. He has to tackle the even more dubious proposition that it threatens labourers in the developing world as well.MacArthur's new book, The Selling of 'Free Trade', advances the argument that the American campaign in favour of the North American Free Trade Agreement was a cynical sham. The businessmen who lined up behind Bill Clinton simply wanted a piece of paper to protect their Mexican sweatshops from expropriation. NAFTA was about investment, not trade. And so the five-letter acronym is a lie all by itself.If you share MacArthur's distrust of globalization, then the bulk of the book -- the detailed back-story of how Clinton and his staff won political support for NAFTA -- will be of great interest. But if you do not, The Selling of 'Free Trade' will be a bore. The nuts and bolts of Washington logrolling are not inherently captivating. A reader who comes at The Selling of 'Free Trade' with a benign view of NAFTA will find the story of what lobbyist met which congressman where and who issued what press release when to be dull and dry.MacArthur, knowing this, spends roughly a third of his book trying to convince his readers that NAFTA was not only corrupt in conception, but also harmful in effect. He relies mostly on anecdote; and why not? Storytelling is a protectionist's best friend. The benefits of free trade are widely diffused among consumers and manufacturers, while the costs, though smaller, are borne by an identifiable group of failed business owners and laid off employees.And so, in the very first chapter, MacArthur makes a lunge for our heartstrings by sketching the post-NAFTA shutdown of the Swingline Inc. stapler manufacturing plants in Queens, N.Y. We are told the tale of Gorica Kostrevski, a hard-working Macedonian immigrant who, after 26 years with Swingline, loses her union job as a machine operator when the company moves its operation to Mexico. From there on in, MacArthur tirelessly summons up the image of poor Gorica to lacquer a human-interest veneer onto his political chronology. Later on, MacArthur takes us to the Mexican city of Nogales, home to thousands of American-owned assembly plants (maquiladoras), including Swingline's. Using the city's impoverished townships as his backdrop, he hammers home the point that low wages and a lack of independent labour unions produce a work environment that is "exploitative."It is not a convincing line of argument. Cheap labour is the one inexhaustible resource that all poor nations can sell the world. Mexico's exports have skyrocketed since NAFTA's implementation. And, as MacArthur himself grudgingly admits, the working conditions and wages available at maquiladoras are better than those available in Mexico's homegrown industries. If maquiladoras paid a U.S.-scale union wage, or were required to provide American-style fringe benefits, every one of them would close. Forty-hour work weeks and ergonomic counsellors are luxuries the developing world cannot afford. And if MacArthur actually lived in a Nogales shantytown -- rather than merely driving through one to collect anti-maquiladora sob stories -- I rather doubt he would mind being "exploited" by an American employer. The "exploitative" tag only makes sense when MacArthur applies as his benchmark the rights of America's unionized workforce -- a workforce that, thanks to education and capital investment, is many times more productive per capita than Mexico's.On this latter point, the distinction between Pat Buchanan and John MacArthur -- between the leftist and rightist strains of protectionism -- starts to blur. Both venerate Joe Union and see any threat to his livelihood as a sort of conspiracy. It is just that Buchanan sees it as a conspiracy against nation and MacArthur sees it as a conspiracy against class. But, at least Buchanan spares us the argument that he is protecting the interests of the world's huddled masses. MacArthur, with his sanctimonious play on the idea of "exploitation," does not.The Selling of 'Free Trade' carries the mark of a dying breed. Few on the left can look at South Korea, Ireland and Indonesia and maintain with a straight face that globalization constitutes an exploitative plot hatched by Nike and McDonald's. While Harper's is still full of anti-globalization screeds (a recent issue contained an affectionate profile of the anti-corporate rabble that descended on Seattle in November), other leftist vehicles -- such as The New Republic and The New York Times -- are conceding the obvious. It is only a matter of time, I suspect, before John MacArthur does the same.And one more thing: When I finished The Selling of 'Free Trade', just for fun, I phoned Gorica Kostrevski at her home in Whitestone, N.Y. (there is only one Kostrevski listed for all New York state). I asked her what happened after she got laid off from Swingline. "I get new job quick in Manhattan. I do maintenance now," she told me in her thick Macedonian accent. "More money?" I asked. "Yes, more money," she said, "I am good worker!"