Like I said, thank Clinton for NAFTA and sekking us out to the Chinese.
Read this and get back to me:

Not even the boldest booster can deny the bare facts: U.S. exports did
increase, by 36 percent to Mexico and 33 percent to Canada, between
1993 and 1996. But imports increased more--up 83 percent from Mexico,
41 percent from Canada--increasing the U.S. trade deficit by $39
billion.

Those import/export numbers presumably led the Clinton administration
to backpedal from earlier claims: Issued quietly a week past the July 1
deadline, the official report claimed NAFTA had generated only a
"modest positive effect" on the U.S. economy. The corporate-owned media
followed that lead, producing a handful of stories that mirrored the
administration's upbeat tone.

Most accounts noted perfunctorily that Clinton's evaluation was "likely
to provide ammunition for both sides in the NAFTA debate" (L.A. Times,
7/12/97), but the anti-NAFTA ammunition went largely undescribed:
Mainstream coverage overwhelmingly echoed Clinton's accent on the
positive and, in particular, the emphasis on total exports as the
measure of NAFTA's success, rather than balance of trade--even though
balance is considered far more important than volume in determining the
impact of trade on jobs.

Critics call the shift in emphasis an example of bait and switch.
"During the debate, they said the overall trade balance would improve.
Now that that hasn't happened, they've changed their tune," says Sarah
Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). Along with the
Economic Policy Institute, Global Trade Watch and other groups, IPS
issued its own report card, "NAFTA at Three Years: The Failed
Experiment."

Establishment media also left unchallenged the administration's
attribution of the disappointing trade balance results to internal
Mexican economic problems that had nothing to do with the pact. The New
York Times (7/11/97), for example, referred matter-of-factly to "the
deep financial crisis that engulfed Mexico in 1995 and turned a small
American trade surplus with the country into a deficit." A Washington
Post article (7/11/97) speculated on NAFTA's effect "if the impact of
Mexico's financial crisis is factored out."

But to "factor out" Mexico's peso crisis in assessing NAFTA is
disingenuous in the extreme, Anderson says, because the two are deeply
entwined. "The Failed Experiment" argues that the peso's fall was a
necessary part of Mexico's "aggressive export-led growth strategy"--a
strategy that was premised on NAFTA. The artificially high peso had
kept down inflation in Mexico, which was key to NAFTA's passage in the
U.S. and to the 1994 election of pro-NAFTA Mexican president Ernesto
Zedillo.

In fact, mainstream media largely acknowledged this at the time; much
of their pro-NAFTA reporting depicted the pact as crucial for Mexico's
economic future. The L.A. Times declared in 1993 (3/25/93) that NAFTA
would "keep Mexico stable." And the Washington Post explained why: It
reported (7/1/93) that the Mexican economy "is supported by a heavy
flow of investment from abroad," and "a lot of that investment is based
on the assumption that the United States will keep its word in putting
the trade agreement into effect."

But that's all forgotten now: The Mexican crisis, which devastated that
country's economy, doubling the number of unemployed, dropping real
wages 27 percent in just two years and pushing millions of people into
poverty, is today just a sad story whose only connection to NAFTA is
that it "initially overshadowed any gains from" the pact (U.S. News &
World Report, 7/7/97).

Some outlets are categorical: "Analysts say the notion that NAFTA
caused the 1995 peso crisis is simply wrong-headed," asserted the L.A.
Times (7/9/97). "The crisis--and the slump that followed--were spawned
by mismanagement on the part of Mexican policymakers, who had kept the
peso artificially high to distract from domestic political problems,
analysts say."

Jobs! Jobs! Jobs?

In 1993 (5/11/93), the Washington Post declared without qualification
that NAFTA would "create twice as many jobs in this country as it will
threaten," while other outlets (e.g., L.A. Times, 5/29/93) limited
themselves to the claim that it would generate "many more U.S. jobs
than it will eliminate."

In 1997, however, the same outlets that were so confident in predicting
the future threw up their hands at the idea of reporting the present.
"For all the claims and counterclaims about NAFTA's impact on
employment, analysts have no good way to measure it," says the L.A.
Times (7/9/97). The New York Times is similarly stumped: "Officials
said there were largely unsolvable problems in generating an accurate
estimate of job losses," they declare (7/11/97).

NAFTA critics aren't buying that line. Economists routinely use trade
balances to reckon job creation and loss; the "Failed Experiment"
indicates that the quadrupling of the U.S. deficit with Mexico and
Canada works out to some 420,000 jobs lost to increased imports and to
companies shifting production to Mexico to take advantage of lower
wages.

Some articles did cite Labor Depart-ment statistics that, by July of
this year, more than 133,000 U.S. workers had applied for the
"transitional adjustment assistance" program set up to address job loss
connected to NAFTA. But most accounts left out facts that suggest why
that number isn't a very good indicator: It excludes all those who seek
help through other, more accessible programs, and it only includes
people employed directly in manufacturing--if a factory shuts down, the
secretaries and administrators who lose their jobs don't qualify (much
less other affected workers in the surrounding community).

NAFTA proponents often play down the numbers of people thrown out of
work by "free trade" policies, arguing that it's more important that
the jobs created are in export sectors that pay higher-than-average
wages. That analysis, supported by the White House, repeatedly found
its way into news reports; but readers had to find the occasional
"opinion" column to get any countervailing information, however
basic--like the fact that the jobs being lost to import competition
also pay higher-than-average wages (Jeff Faux, Washington Post op-ed,
5/20/97), or that even the much-ballyhooed NAFTA-generated exports can
wind up costing U.S. jobs, since "more and more, multinationals are
shipping components to Mexico, so they can be assembled by low-wage
workers, then sent right back as finished products to the United
States." (David Bonier, New York Times op-ed, 7/13/97) This kind of
"revolving door" export has more than doubled under NAFTA.

Unsubtle Threats

If disputes about the number of lost jobs were pushed to mainstream
media margins, discussion of NAFTA's impact on wages and workers'
rights was forced off the page entirely. Media overwhelmingly ignored,
for example, the compelling report commissioned by the U.S. Labor
Department on U.S. employers' use of the threat of "moving to Mexico"
to hold down wages and benefits. (According to Cornell University
researcher Kate Bronfen-brenner, who conducted the study, the Clinton
administration sat on the results for several months before they were
finally released--National News Reporter, 5/97.)

Employers have long used plant-closing threats to keep workers from
forming unions and to force concessions, but Bronfenbrenner found
(Multinational Monitor, 3/97) that between 1993 and 1995, employers
used this illegal maneuver in a whopping 50 percent of all union
certification elections; 15 percent actually did shut down within two
years of a union victory--triple the rate found in the late 1980s,
before NAFTA went into effect. "In fact, in several campaigns, the
employer used media coverage of the NAFTA debate to threaten the
workers that it was fully within the company's power to move the plant
to Mexico if workers were to organize," Bronfen-brenner wrote.

The threats aren't subtle: During a United Auto Workers 1995 organizing
campaign, Michigan's ITT Automotive parked tractor-trailers full of
equipment in front of the plant, bearing hot-pink signs reading "Mexico
Transfer Job." Another company posted maps of North America throughout
the factory, with an arrow pointing from the current plant site to
Mexico. Workers get the message; where employers used such threats,
unions' success rate dropped significantly.

Of course, whether something is a problem or a boon depends on where
you stand. U.S. News & World Report (7/7/97), for one, did acknowledge
that "a growing number of U.S. companies [have turned] to Mexico for
manpower and manufacturing capacity" as a direct result of NAFTA. But
they see that as a good thing, since it "may have helped ease the
bottlenecks that cause inflation during an economic expansion,"
providing what one source describes as a "relief valve" from
inflationary pressure. Readers familiar with media corporate-speak know
that "inflation" means higher wages; so U.S. News is telling us that
NAFTA gives employers "relief" from having to pay workers more.
Cham-pagne, anyone?

Losers Weepers

In place of thoughtful analysis of the kind and quality of jobs
destroyed and created by NAFTA, the corporate-owned media offered a
gloss: Trade pacts, in the ubiquitous simpleminded phrase, produce
"losers" as well as "winners." While implicitly or explicitly arguing
that winners matter more, media have made occasional passing mention of
what might be done about those annoying losers.

"Congress should provide generous retraining and relocation assistance
to those who will suffer" under NAFTA, the New York Times (8/17/93)
suggested vaguely back in 1993. The Washington Post (3/15/93) agreed:
Govern-ment must "acknowledge an obligation to the people who get hurt
in the process," and that means "job training and adjustment
legislation."

Critics like the Economic Policy Institute's Jeff Faux (Washington Post
op-ed, 5/20/97) point to obvious fallacies in the retraining
"solution." The ratio of U.S. to Mexican wages, Faux notes, is roughly
9 to 1. "Even if this administration and Congress were willing to
finance first-class retraining for American workers, which they are
not, it is impossible to make U.S. workers anywhere near nine times as
productive as Mexican workers in competing industries."

But you won't find such criticism taken up in mainstream news accounts.
Once they'd declared "retraining and education" the linchpin in
ameliorating any harmful "free trade" fallout, the establishment press
corps promptly lost interest in it. Recent NAFTA assessments offered no
information on the scope, success or even the existence of any such
effort.

In fact, establishment media won't even take up the issue of trade
pacts' disparate impact on different groups of people when they're
handed the opportunity. When more than 150 labor, environmental and
human rights activists protesting the proposed expansion of NAFTA to
Chile rallied in San Francisco on June 26, they were simply ignored by
the city's major dailies, the Chronicle and the Examiner (San Francisco
Bay Guardian, 7/2/97).

A group of mostly Latino members of Congress met similar media
indifference when they publicly protested the disproportionate burden
NAFTA puts on Latino, African-American and female workers, who often
work in especially vulnerable regions and industries. The Washington
Post (7/16/97), which ran a brief item on page C13, sidestepped the
protest's substance to frame it as most importantly a "blow to
President Clinton's trade agenda."

Another topic that somehow dropped off the media's radar between 1994
and 1997 was NAFTA's impact on the environment. It's a glaring absence
in the current discussion, says IPS's Anderson, "because that's been
perhaps NAFTA's most outrageous failure."

The disturbing information cited by Anderson and others would make for
gripping reporting: In NAFTA's wake, fewer than 1 percent of trucks
entering the U.S. each year are inspected--even though 50 percent of
those inspected are rejected for major safety violations. Or that much
Mexican produce is entering the U.S. with illegal pesticide residue due
to weakened food safety inspections.

Such complaints got a mention in some of the mainstream accounts of the
White House NAFTA report, but few outlets considered them worthy of any
actual investigation. One exception, a June 30, 1997 L.A. Times story
on pollution control efforts on the U.S.-Mexican border, provided a
pretty bleak picture of NAFTA's public health repercussions.

While including information on some NAFTA-produced improvements, like a
new water treatment plant in the Tijuana River Valley, the story found
much more evidence of broken promises and official indifference. For
example, "only 16 of 98 promised public utility projects have been
approved for financing through NAFTA; just one has been completed."
Forty percent of the Mexican population in the border area have no
sewers or drinkable water, likewise some 400,000 people on the U.S.
side. The notoriously toxic New River "still runs black on days when
Mexicali's inadequate sewer system is overwhelmed," and ground water in
expanding border cities is being depleted at alarming rates.

"As the trucks roll north carrying Zenith TVs, General Motors auto
parts, Sony computer monitors . . . and a host of other name-brand
products," wrote reporters Frank Clifford and Mary Beth Sheridan, "they
pass through communities with elevated rates of tuberculosis, typhoid,
hepatitis, salmonellosis and other diseases associated with bad water
and bad air."

NAFTA encouraged an explosion in industry in the already polluted
maquiladora zone, but "did not mandate a crackdown on polluters or a
cleanup of existing pollution." And while the pact outlined some
programs for infrastructure improvements, "lending policies and high
interest rates by NAFTA's financial arm, the North American Development
Bank, have made it difficult for many small border towns, especially in
Mexico, to qualify for assistance."

This kind of in-depth exploration of NAFTA's actual impact on real
communities is just what was missing from most of mainstream coverage,
which generally presents the issue as claims and counterclaims, facts
be damned. That it appeared in the L.A. Times is noteworthy; in 1993,
the paper argued in an outraged editorial (7/1/93) that calls for the
trade pact to include an environmental impact statement were "based on
dubious assumptions about NAFTA's negative effects on the environment,
especially along the U.S.-Mexico border," and gave "too much credence
to scare scenarios of extreme environmentalists."

If news reports ignored NAFTA's failures, or blurred them with
ostensibly neutral language, editorials made it clear that the
corporate-owned media are emphatically allied with "free trade"
boosters. Indeed, mainstream editorialists all appear to be reading
from the same primer.

NAFTA has been "a sweet deal economically" that President Clinton
"should have no hesitation in declaring . . . a success," said the L.A.
Times (6/30/97). The pact has been "good for Mexico," creating a
"bountiful trade family." There is no mention whatsoever of the trade
deficit, and the paper gives only a throwaway sentence to "legitimate
concerns" like "the jobs picture, environmental aspects, political
effects"; such questions, they allow, should be "heard out and
investigated where necessary."

The Washington Post was equally upbeat: "Free trade is good for the
U.S. economy," it declared (4/27/97); it "helps create jobs that tend
to be higher-paying than average," and promotes the exports that have
"helped revive the U.S. manufacturing sector." For workers who "lose
out" under the new policy, the Post's remedy is the same glib panacea
from 1993: "retraining" and "improved education to create the kind of
labor force that will attract long-term investment."

In a New York Times op-ed (7/13/97) that questioned the conventional
wisdom, a former member of a presidential commission on U.S./
Asian-Pacific trade, Kenneth Lewis, called for a "national dialogue" on
trade. We need to ask fundamental questions, like: "What is the purpose
of our trade policy and what do we want our domestic economy to look
like?" and: "What conditions must exist--concerning human rights,
workers' rights or environmental protections--for us to allow other
nations' goods to enter our country?"

Far from providing the space for such a dialogue, when it comes to
trade, mainstream media don't even pretend to present two sides: The
"debate" they offer is between a presumed consensus of economists who
"understand" the issue and a few stray "political Luddites" (L. A.
Times, 7/1/93) who don't. Even as their concerns are borne out,
organizations critical of NAFTA are portrayed as partisan--as in the
New York Times (7/11/97) formulation, "labor unions, environmentalists
and other Democratic constituencies"--or "protectionist." Trade policy
dissenters are presented as merely wanting to "kill" trade pacts,
instead of calling for open discussion of their implications and
offering alternative economic visions.

Most disturbing is that while establishment media's coverage of NAFTA's
effects sidestepped critics' substantive concerns and ignored myriad
issues that cry out for investigation, these outlets were also
clamoring for President Clinton to be given "fast track" authority to
negotiate even further-reaching trade pacts (involving Chile and other
countries) with limited discussion. But it's not surprising that
national media who are so unwilling to honestly examine the effects of
past trade pacts would be interested in squelching debate on future
ones.

Again, wrong guy, Truman in this case:

   
1947
Having already established the International Monetary Fund and the
precursor to the World Bank, the United States and its allies create the
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to bolster free trade.
GATT is intended to be a stopgap measure on the way to forming the
International Trade Organization.

Clinton is responsible for the stain on Monica's dress though.

I should have known better,sorry.

What fact?  One swing vote on the Democrat side and Alex wouldn't have
posted this?

49% of the Democrat vote was for it, 51% was against it... even back then
they waffled on the subject.

Lee

Why do you ask?  Are you looking for a job there?  I suggest you ask the HR
person at WalMart, they will have the answer you seek.

mike hunt

mike hunt

Move to the middle of Kansas and live in a house shared by three families.

Lee

Pay you mom for room and board I guess.   Better yet stay in school get some
training and look for a job that pays more than one where you simply pack
shelves.

If you have a skill you might even try getting one of the new automated
machinery technician jobs at McDonalds.. Because of the new minimum wage has
made automation cost effective, McDonalds is installing robotic equipment
that they have had waiting in the wings, in their stores that will make,
wrap, and dispense the food the customer choses buy pressing buttons, much
as the person behind the counter now does on the cash register, near a
picture of the food on a menu board.

They need people with the skills to maintain the robots.  Starting pay is
around $26 an hour form what I've read.  The new stores require any average
of  three employees per shift, rather than twenty

mike hunt

I would be more interested in the mean or median than the average pay
figure.
Average is an old ruse that says, "Ignore the mask I'm wearing."

Karl

If it says."Drinking Water" it must meet specs.
Now, where could a bottler easily get such water at a good price?

(Hint: Lee just told us.)

Karl (Also, it hard to find cheap water that hasn't been spring water
at one time or another.)