EDITORIAL

NAFTA 2.0: Details Bedevil

Donald Trump Aug. 27 announced a new “incredible” trade deal with Mexico that has the outlines of some positive developments, but labor and environmental leaders cautioned that details need to be finalized, and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, in a phone call broadcast at the White House press conference, stressed the importance that the agreement include Canada.

Trump wants to get approval for a deal to replace the 24-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement before the new Mexican President-elect, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a progressive populist who might demand concessions, takes office Dec. 1. To beat that deadline, Trump must send the proposed deal to Congress by the end of August to give them 90 days to review it.

Trump left open the possibility of cutting Canada out of the final deal, and simply putting tariffs on Canadian cars, which would amount to a tax on American carbuyers, but US Trade Rep. Robert Lighthizer told reporters that every effort would be made to include Canada, even if it took longer for them to sign on to changes. Lighthizer said it was still unclear what the letter to Congress might say, but the agreement would run for 16 years, with an option to revisit issues in six years, and extend it for another 16 years.

The tentative deal, wich focuses on auto manufacturing, would increase the percentage of each car that must be made in the US or Mexico to 75%, from the current 62.5%, to qualify for duty-free treatment. Both sides also agreed to a provision that would require 40-45 percent of each vehicle’s content to be made by workers earning at least $16 per hour. That would appear to promise a significant increase for Mexican auto workers, who now make $4 to $8 per hour.

US labor leaders said the NAFTA rewrite was still a deal in progress. “We are aggressively engaged in pursuing an agreement that works for working people in all three countries, and we are not done yet. There is more work that needs to be done to deliver the needed, real solutions to NAFTA’s deeply ingrained flaws,” said the statement issued by Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO President; Leo Gerard, United Steelworkers (USW) International President; Gary Jones, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW) President; Robert Martinez Jr., International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers International President; and Chris Shelton, Communications Workers of America President.

They added, “Any new deal must raise wages, ensure workers’ rights and freedoms, reduce outsourcing and put the interests of working families first in all three countries. And working people must be able to review the full and final text and have the confidence not only in the terms of the deal, but its implementation, monitoring and enforcement. We remain committed to working with the administration to get NAFTA right. Our members’ jobs depend on it. But, as always, the devil is in the details.”

Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, was skeptical of the bilateral agreement: “The Trump administration’s announcement that it has completed a ‘new and improved’ replacement for [NAFTA] should be taken with more than a grain of salt. A vague description of a bilateral deal with Mexico alone (the US-Mexico Trade Agreement) was announced in the White House today, with an eye toward forcing a reluctant Canada to the negotiating table. But we have no confidence that the Trump administration will truly address the many flaws in NAFTA. 

“The devil resides in the details of these corporate-driven free trade deals, and we expect that the fine print will include the kind of pro-polluter, pro-fossil fuel industry, pro-Wall Street deregulation that has been a hallmark of Trump’s domestic agenda. These rumored trade provisions would codify the administration’s savage attacks on environmental protection, food safety and consumer rights into trade deals that enshrine and globalize deregulation, making it harder to restore US environmental and consumer protections once this administration is shown the White House door.”

Melanie Foley of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch said, “We know progress was made between the US and Mexico on some key changes we have demanded for decades. But we also know that the enforceability of the new labor standards to which the countries agreed is still lacking, which is a serious problem that needs to be resolved.”

Canada has not participated in negotiations since May, so it’s unclear where it stands on the terms agreed to by Mexico and the United States, she noted.

Foley added, “As we’ve made clear since Day One, an acceptable deal must remove NAFTA’s job outsourcing incentives,” as almost one million American jobs have been lost due to NAFTA.

A NAFTA replacement must remove corporations’ Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) powers to attack our environmental and health laws before tribunals of three corporate lawyers and obtain unlimited sums of taxpayer awards.

And it must add strong labor and environmental standards with swift and certain enforcement to raise wages. Otherwise, US corporations will keep moving jobs to Mexico to pay workers a pittance, dump toxins and import products back for sale here.

Call Congress at 202-224-3121 to demand negotiators keep working with Mexico and Canada to get a deal worth supporting.

Trump’s Heart is Too Small

Donald Trump’s reaction to Sen. John McCain’s death due to brain cancer is emblematic of what is wrong with his presidency. We have mixed opinions about McCain’s political career. Yes, he was willing to occasionally cross party lines to work with Democrats in the Senate, but he mainly pursued conservative policies and apparently never met a military appropriation he didn’t like. Occasionally, he would do good things, such as co-sponsoring the 2002 campaign finance reform bill with then-Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis) — which was largely overturned by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 — and his key vote in July 2017 to preserve the Affordable Care Act which helps more than 30 million Americans get health insurance with meaningful coverage, even if they have pre-existing conditions.

McCain probably voted with Trump more than 90% of the time in the past year and a half, but Trump still couldn’t shake off McCain’s vote to preserve “Obamacare,” nor the sting of McCain’s criticism of him. After McCain’s death was announced Aug. 25, Trump offered perfunctory condolences in a tweet that offered his “deepest sympathies and respect” to McCain’s family but made no mention of McCain’s service in the military or the Senate. The White House flag was lowered to half-staff that Saturday night, as the law requires for a deceased member of Congress, but the flag was raised back to full staff just after midnight Sunday. (The flag was brought back down to half-staff after an outcry from veterans’ groups.)

Trump’s disparagement of McCain, even in death, is a relatively small matter, but it displays the small heart of a man who cannot take any criticism, has neither conscience nor empathy and a negligible sense of humor, which leaves him unable to laugh at himself or admit that he makes mistakes. That, and the fact that Trump is an habitual liar (4,229 false or misleading claims as of Aug. 1, by the Washington Post Fact Checker’s count), makes him a most dangerous and unreliable president. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2018

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