FWD: jc/sa on barry

[MDOLAN <mdolan@citizen.org>]

  FORWARDED MESSAGE from NAIMAN @ CITIZEN * Robert Naiman (NAIMAN @ 
  CITIZEN.ORG <ROBERT NAIMAN>) at 7/07/97 6:30 PM
  Tom Barry's critique (PR, Vol. 1, No. 4) of the criteria used by some 
  progressives to evaluate NAFTA has generated much reaction. In his posting, 
  Barry reviewed Sidney Weintraub's "NAFTA at Three: A Progress Report," 
  which was published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies 
  earlier this year. 
  
  Response to Tom Barry's piece on NAFTA in Vol 1., No. 4, of "The 
  Progressive Response"
  
  by John Cavanagh & Sarah Anderson (jcavanagh@igc.apc.org)
  
  We are writing to respond to Tom Barry's recent piece that raised a number 
  of criticism's of many anti-NAFTA groups in the context of a review of 
  NAFTA booster Sidney Weintraub's new book: NAFTA at Three.
  
  Tom Barry is a leading scholar/activist on Latin America; his Zapata's 
  Revenge is one of the best recent books on Mexico. He is also a superb 
  editor and we value our work with him as a colleague in the "Foreign Policy 
  in Focus" series that IPS and the IRC jointly produce. He has also been a 
  wonderful ally in constantly challenging the progressive community to press 
  for approaches that benefit both Mexicans and people in this country. It is 
  in this context that we respectfully and strongly differ with the views he 
  just put forward on NAFTA. We encourage others as well to join the debate.
  
  Barry raises a number of points. The two of us, based on our work with the 
  Global Economy Project of the Institute for Policy Studies, respond here to 
  just 4 of them:
  
  1) Weintraub and Barry both accuse the anti-NAFTA coalition of basing too 
  much of our critique of NAFTA on claims of lost U.S. jobs and the huge 
  negative U.S. balance of trade with Mexico. This is simply not true. These 
  issues are simply two of quite a few that many of us are stressing in our 
  opposition to NAFTA. More prominent in our recent critiques have been three 
  other issues. The first is how NAFTA reinforces the growing power of 
  corporations to use the threat of moving plants overseas to bargain down 
  wages and working conditions here. The second is the utter failure of the 
  extravagant claims of the NAFTA boosters about cleaning up the 
  environmental nightmare on the U.S.-Mexican border. The third is the 
  economic collapse of Mexico, which we argue grew out of the liberalization 
  of Mexican financial markets that were a U.S. precondition to Mexico 
  joining NAFTA.
  
  Our critiques also include arguments about damage done to farmers on both 
  sides of the border, and the failure of the NAFTA side agreements on labor 
  and environment to protect worker rights or the environment in any of the 
  three countries. The vast majority of progressive organizations have argued 
  that NAFTA has been good for the top 200 firms that straddle all three 
  countries and bad for the majority of workers and communities in all three 
  countries. None of us argue that NAFTA created these inequalities; simply 
  that the agreement has accelerated them and a host of other problems.
  
  2) Weintraub and Barry fault both sides of the NAFTA debate with 
  overstating the impact of NAFTA on jobs. Yes, there was some of this on 
  both sides, and some on each side did too mechanistically assume that a 
  billion dollars worth of trade translated into 20,000 jobs. At IPS, we 
  published an excellent study by Dave Ranney at the University of Illinois 
  at Chicago that showed how a number of large U.S. firms both increased 
  exports to Mexico and cut U.S. jobs. Still, there is no question that the 
  explosion of a U.S. trade deficit with Mexico has cost the United States 
  good jobs, even as two-way trade between the two countries has grown. 
  Weintraub and the Clinton administration like to claim that no one knows 
  how increased U.S. imports from Mexico affect U.S. jobs. What we do know is 
  that most of the imports are products that are also made in the United 
  States by workers in good jobs, such as autos. IPS, Public Citizen, and the 
  AFL-CIO have spent a good deal of time tracking some of the 120,000 workers 
  who have been certified by the U.S. Labor Department as having lost their 
  jobs due to NAFTA. Many can't find new jobs; those who do, on average, earn 
  quite a bit less in the new jobs. So, again, NAFTA has accelerated the 
  trend in the United States of workers losing job security and earning less 
  with fewer benefits in the much vaunted new jobs that the U.S. government 
  brags about creating. This state of affairs might be a bit more tolerable 
  if good jobs were being created in Mexico, but the Coalition for Justice in 
  the Maquiladoras and others have documented the abysmal pay and conditions 
  on the Mexican side of the border
  
  Barry agrees with us that a good deal of the reason why Mexico imported 
  fewer U.S. goods than projected was because of the collapse of the peso in 
  the Mexican economic crisis of 1994. He strangely fails to mention the 
  relationship of the crisis to NAFTA.
  
  3) Barry and Weintraub fault progressives for caring more about U.S. 
  workers than the U.S. consumers who benefit from the allegedly cheaper 
  goods that come from Mexico as tariffs drop. Both fall victim to one of the 
  great fallacies of economic theory in the age of corporate concentration. 
  Public Citizen and others have charted the prices of several products now 
  flooding into the United States that were made with lower production costs 
  in Mexico. Are prices lower? No, except in those rare cases like apparel 
  where there are thousands of competing firms. In autos, most food products, 
  cigarettes, many electronic products, and many other sectors, a few firms 
  control the U.S. market. They set prices and it is they who benefit from 
  cheaper production and labor costs, not the U.S. consumer.
  
  4) Barry implies that much of the anti-NAFTA work in the progressive 
  community is nationalistic and that it argues only for protections of U.S. 
  workers and communities. While this assertion applies to a few groups, it 
  is widely off the mark. The broad anti-NAFTA coalitions, the Alliance for 
  Responsible Trade and the Citizens Trade Campaign, have both worked closely 
  with Mexican and Canadian groups to fashion alternatives to NAFTA and the 
  neo-liberal policies that underpin them. Public Citizen carried out its 
  major critique of NAFTA and the environment with a Mexican organization. 
  Citizen groups in all three countries worked long and hard on an 
  internationalist framework entitled: "A Just and Sustainable Trade and 
  Development Initiative for North America." This framework included many of 
  the principles with which Barry ends his piece.
  
  Tom Barry knows the richness and complexity of the anti-NAFTA opposition 
  too well to fall into Weintraub's accusation that we are primarily 
  nationalistic Mexico-bashers. Most recently, IPS, the International Labor 
  Rights Fund, and the Development GAP joined the AFL-CIO and many other 
  labor federations and NGOs at a hemispheric meeting in Belo Horizonte, 
  Brazil where we jointly committed ourselves to hemispheric rules that 
  benefit workers, communities, and the environment. Many of the groups we've 
  mentioned in this short note are producing a joint critique of the Clinton 
  administration's NAFTA record on July 1 in which we elaborate on many of 
  these points.
  ***** NOTES from MDOLAN (MDOLAN @ CITIZEN) at 7/07/97 6:40 PM
  
  
  ****************************************************************************
   /s/ Mike Dolan, Field Director, Global Trade Watch, Public Citizen
  
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