Is There Life After Nafta?
The great historian Charles A. Beard used to talk about the vital gulf between “appearance” and “reality” that pervades our politics and our political system. Rarely has that gulf been as striking and as revealing as in the bitter and intense struggle over Nafta. On the surface, Nafta dealt with a few puny tariffs covering a small fraction of American trade. So why the fuss and feathers? Why did the Clinton administration pull out all the stops, throwing caution to the winds by openly and shamelessly buying Congressional votes? And why the coming together of the entire Establishment: Democrats, Republicans, Big Business, Big Finance, Big Media, ex-Presidents and Secretaries of State, including the ubiquitous Henry Kissinger, and the last but surely not least, Big Economists and Nobel Laureates? What was going on here? Perhaps the most shocking performance was that of America’s self-styled free-market economists, periodicals, and think-tanks. Surely it would have been legitimate for the
