by BAR Managing Editor Bruce A. Dixon
It’s hardly a surprise any more when politicians redefine their campaign promises out of existence or break them outright. To the astonishment of nobody paying close attention to the trajectory of the Obama presidency the White House quietly admitted yesterday that it had no intention of opening up the wildly unpopular NAFTA, or North American Free Trade Agreement for revision or renegotiation.
Lying is an art practiced by all humans from about the time we master speaking in complete sentences. Hence the smarter we are and the more important the stakes, the more ways there are to lie. For a really clever fellow with lots more bright people on his payroll and an absent-minded press ready to help, the possibilities are endless.
Back in 2003, when Glen Ford and this reporter, then at Black Commentator, interrogated Obama, then a candidate for the US Senate from Illinois he told us he favored “significant renegotiation” at a minimum.
“I think that the current NAFTA regime lacks the worker and environmental protections that are necessary for the long-term prosperity of both America and its trading partners. I would therefore favor, at minimum, a significant renegotiation of NAFTA and the terms of the President’s fast track authority. ”
But that was only when he was questioned directly, and only when he was in a Democratic primary and needed the progressive vote in his home state. The magic of the Obama brand is that since then, the senator, and now the president has rarely been put on the spot in front of his supposed base at a time when he needed their votes more than they needed him.
Keenly aware of massive public disapproval of NAFTA, Obama has, since coming to Washington as a senator in 2004, and in his 2008 presidential campaign, tread a deceptive and hypocritical line, refusing to denounce the investor rights agreement with his own lips, but giving his supporters the impression that he opposes it.
“Bad trade deals like NAFTA hit Ohio harder than most states
Only Barack Obama consistently opposed NAFTA”
said one of his campaign mailers in the 2008 Ohio primary.
“Of the two candidates left in the race only Barack Obama has been a consistentl opponent of NAFTA and other bad trade deals…”
says another.
Locked in a death struggle with his Siamese twin Hillary Clinton, Obama had to invent points of differences between himself and his last opponent, even if they were false. Striving mightily to create the impression that he opposed NAFTA in states where it might help him, he denounced Hillary Clinton for supporting it. A equally hypocritical big business Democrat to the core, Hillary tried to put the same move on Obama, but with less success.
In a country where the press actually called candidates and officials to account, neither candidate could have gotten away with this. But this is not that country, and we don’t have that press.
What NAFTA Is.
NAFTA and all the other so-called “free trade agreements” are in fact investor rights agreements. They make businesses operated by international investors substantially immune to local laws and regulations on health, safety, wages, hours, labor rights, antipollution, financial and other practices. They establish secretive extrajudicial courts with no appeal where corporations appoint the judges who can decide in favor of them.