Twenty Years Ago

To celebrate 20 years of publishing Whatcom Watch, we will be publishing excerpts from 20 years ago. David Laws has been generous enough to volunteer to review the Whatcom Watch from 20 years ago to find suitable material to reprint. The below excerpts are from the December 1993 issue of Whatcom Watch.

Is There a Future for Farming in Whatcom County?

NAFTA Afta-Thoughts

by Bo Richardson

Most everybody knows that NAFTA is a big deal, and will have been voted on by the time you are reading this. With all the media noise about NAFTA, most people still don’t understand what NAFTA is, or what it will do.

NAFTA is an agreement that was negotiated in secret. The first ideas came out of the Reagan White House, as early as 1982. It is a Reagan-Bush package. If there were a Democrat in the White House at this time, NAFTA would be in the recycling bin, all 7 inches, and 15 pounds of it. [ed: This is a ludicrous assertion with the advantage of 20 years retrospective.]

The disagreement over the effects of NAFTA, as presented by the corporate media, is whether NAFTA will staunch or encourage the hemorrhage of jobs to Mexico. But “if they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” Jobs are already fleeing as fast as GM and the rest can shut plants down, and build new plants in Mexico. Or Brazil.

The real effect of NAFTA will be to bring Mexican working conditions and wages here. This is the “leveling of the playing field” desired by corporate business interests. The mechanism for achieving the importation of third-world working conditions is that wage differentials, benefits, environmental regulations and other protections can be over-ridden, if they are determined to be “in restraint of trade.” Unelected, elite not-necessarily-American NAFTA bureaucrats will determine, in secret, what is “in restraint of free trade.” The criteria they apply are not public.