North American Free Trade Agreement

And if government would shut the doors and sneak away for about three weeks, we'd never miss them.

Forty years after Ronald Reagan rejected large-scale government intervention in the economy, and thirty years after Bill Clinton signed the NAFTA Free Trade Agreement, US politicians had been pushing through tariffs on foreign goods and subsidies for domestic producers in strategic sectors with the hope of boosting the US economy, reinvigorating the manufacturing sector and creating new jobs.

Obviously, a big reason for this change in direction has been competition from countries like China, whose planned economies have seen great success over the last 20 years.

But does that really mean that heavy-handed government intervention is the right direction for Western economies to move in? Industrial policy is a term for a set of policies that governments use to bolster national industries or companies deemed strategically important for either economic competitiveness, social outcomes, or national security.

Mexico offered a skilled workforce, good IP protection, good transportation infrastructure, a huge shared border with the United States, an established export industry and privileged trade access.

This seemed to be a once in a lifetime opportunity for Mexico, perhaps even more promising than the signing of the North America Free Trade Agreement had been in 1994.

It didn't really work out though.

Between 2018 and 2021, the proportion of manufactured goods imported into the United States from Mexico rose a bit, but the big winners in global trade were low-cost Asian competitors, including Vietnam and Taiwan.

It was a way of getting these firsthand and fairly rapid commentaries and analysis and speeches from revolutionary leaders in various movements around the globe into the hands of incarcerated activists here in the United States.

I want to also talk a little bit about the fact that the whole idea of Seattle and the WTO, we really here in the United States, you know, we had had obviously NAFTA and a lot of protests against NAFTA, which many of them rooted in the groups of activist farmers who were most affected by that.

The Zapatistas, of course, was also a response to NAFTA.

But the idea of this global trade was kind of off the radar for most people in the United States prior to Seattle.

And it was really the Latin Americans who had been seeing this develop and watching it and being predictive and proactive that really got the U.S. activist community informed and inspired and made the Seattle protests what they were.

There's stuff... us Canada free trade agreement.

That was the beginning of, uh, NAFTA.

That's where it started.

Now we can debate whether that was healthy for us.

It was the whole country.

And I'll go far enough to say we wouldn't have NAFTA if it wasn't for that deal he made with Tip O'Neill.

Tip O'Neill stood there and lied in front of the country and said, oh, yeah, we're going to tighten the border security because we're making a deal now.

They never intended to do that.

for someone in Michigan to uproot the entire family and move to Texas just because there are jobs in Texas and not in Michigan.

And then we had Bill Clinton signed NAFTA.

And it turned out we didn't really have a good answer to how to deal with this.

At the same time, you also need to understand or people need to understand that a massive change was occurring in the sense that inequality across countries was actually going down in the 80s, 90s to 2000, partly because about 3 billion people in China and India became rich or richer,

But that was because the IRS allowed that.

Okay? So that was part of NAFTA.

That was the agreement that they got into NAFTA.

But now things change.

Everything is more difficult.

Here's what I hope, right? I have been...

paying close attention to politics since I was like 13 and Ross Perot, you know, standing on the stage debating NAFTA and, you know, been in it since then, uh, turned 18 and 98 have voted in every major election since 2000.

We got to get to a point, I think as a country where somebody lets the air out of the room a little bit with every conservative leader has been literally Hitler since George W.

Right.

Didn't watch it.

Major events, apartheid ended, NAFTA started, the North American Trade Agreement, the, what else? Well, that's just one of those things.

Bill Clinton was president, of course, having fun.

Hummers in the Oval Office.