The once-solid North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) is starting to show its age. The 1994 trade agreement that laid the foundation for the economic/political integration of North America is encountering serious internal ruptures, threatening future "progress."
The problems are numerous: fights over trade, immigration, and military cooperation are all issues that Obama recently discussed in Mexico with his NAFTA partners, Mexico and Canada. The annual meeting that usually delivers plans for additional integration was instead used to remedy these heated issues, none of which were fully solved.
Both Mexico and Canada are angry with the U.S. for the "buy American" provision in Obama's stimulus bill, which they label correctly as "protectionist." The bill is explicit that many of the raw materials used in construction projects must be bought from U.S. corporations only, in violation of NAFTA. Mexico soon retaliated with taxes (tariffs) on dozens of U.S. goods entering Mexico, a spat that was hoped to have been solved with Obama's visit.
Other conflicts involve immigration -- between all three countries -- and the transportation of goods.
Although NAFTA was written with U.S. corporations first in mind, many of them have been out-competed by companies in Canada or Mexico. It was these U.S. corporations that pressured Obama into promising to "re-negotiate" NAFTA.
A danger for U.S. workers, however, is to think that any re-negotiation of NAFTA is intended to help them. Some "fair trade" and anti-free-trade groups -- many with connections to labor unions -- used Obama's promise to re-negotiate NAFTA as proof that he should be supported. Since being elected, EVERY significant policy implemented under Obama has been anti-worker -- bank bailouts, wars, killing EFCA, etc. The issue of "trade" will not be a progressive exception.
This is because being "against free-trade" is not automatically progressive. The many U.S. corporations that hope to re-negotiate NAFTA to shut-out foreign competitors should not be admired for their actions. They are for the opposite of free-trade, protectionism, and instead of looking for low wages and poor working conditions abroad, seek to further implement them in the U.S.
Some of these companies have codified their intentions in the TRADE Act, a U.S. congressional bill yet to be passed. Although the TRADE Act has a number of progressive statements concerning worker and environmental standards, it immediately contradicts itself by advocating specific pro-corporate polices, including: assessing how NAFTA has affected the "competitiveness" of U.S. corporations; "protecting intellectual property rights," protecting the "right to hold clear title to property" (for mega-corporations abroad); and wording that protects the "investments" of trans-national corporations and rich investors. This is the real reason that many Democrats feel compelled to pass the bill.
Many Canadian and Mexican corporations are similarly miffed by NAFTA, threatening the plans of some corporations -- the best market competitors -- to further unify North America. These ideas find expression in the North American Union, a think tank plan to essentially turn the NAFTA countries into one nation, or at least to erase specific economic/political boundaries similar to what has happened in the European Union.
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