Embed Doc
Copy Link
Readcast
Collections

2
CommentGo Back

Download

The NAFTA Two-StepHillary's Stock and TradeBy RALPH NADERIs Hillary Clinton a political weather vane or a political compass?Consider her latest detour from the NAFTA and WTO policies of her husband. Lastweek she announced her opposition to the proposed trade agreement between the U.S.and South Korea. The place for her remarks was a town hall meeting in Michiganorganized by the AFL-CIO.She described the agreement between Bush and the South Koreans, requiringCongressional approval, as "inherently unfair." "It will hurt the U.S. autoindustry, increase our trade deficit, cost us good middle-class jobs and makeAmerica less competitive."No kidding! Where has she been for the past fifteen years? For those words couldhave described the consequences of both NAFTA and the WTO. The U.S. auto industryhas been emigrating to Mexico and China. The trade deficit has gone off thecharts, nearing nine hundred billion dollars in 2007 and is four times greaterthan what it was ten years ago. Industrial job loss is being joined by theoutsourcing of white collar jobs in even larger numbers.About 90 percent of the products sold in the L.L. Bean catalogue are imports orproduced by foreign manufacturers.Corporate managed trade-mis-named free trade-is draining our country'scompetitiveness, as U.S. corporations take their factories and jobs abroad toauthoritarian or dictatorial nations, especially China. Imagine modern capitalequipment, and 50¢ an hour for workers who are making things for the U.S. market,without fair labor standards, pollution controls and other standards companieshere have to comply with.Senator Clinton felt reassured with her opposition. Ford Motor Company and theChrysler group of DaimlerChrysler came out against the Korea deal before Hillarydid.A politician like Hillary Clinton has her finger to the wind. The workers anddomestic companies are providing her with the wind. Still, she has not supportedthe renegotiation of NAFTA and WTO which the U.S. can force by utilizing theTreaties' 6 month notice of withdrawal from each of these autocratic systems oftransnational governance and secret courts known as NAFTA and WTO. Not enoughorganized citizen wind power compared to the corporate power behind those tradepacts.If Senator John F. Kennedy's best-selling book Profiles in Courage was updated,nothing Hillary Clinton has done in the Congress would come close to being afootnote.As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, she has not challenged themany GAO documented boondoggle military contracts. One gigantic weapon system theF-22 aircraft has been privately denounced by people in the Office of theSecretary of Defense who believe this aircraft is clearly unnecessary andsaturated with cost over-runs.Whether the causes are wasteful, corrupt military contracts or generally thecorporate crime wave from Enron to Wall Street, Senator Clinton has not been there

in the Congress to advance comprehensive corporate crime legislation and largerenforcement resources.Nor has she taken on the hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare-subsidies, giveaways, handouts and bailouts for big business-that consume thecontributions of millions of small taxpayers.Even in New York City, have you heard Senator Clinton object to taxpayer-fundedcorporate sports stadiums, while health clinics, schools, libraries and publicworks decay for lack of public investment? Tax dollars for entertainment are ok byher.Some of her paucity of candor is not going unnoticed, however. In explaining whyshe voted for George Bush's Iraq War resolution in 2002, she said she believedthat it called for an attempted diplomatic solution. There were no words in thatresolution to support that belief. She is a lawyer. She also knows that anamendment by Senator Carl Levin, a fellow Democrat, demanded just such a priordiplomatic effort. She voted against the Levin proposal.Still, Hillary, with Bill right there, is the frontrunner for the DemocraticParty's nomination. The money from commercial interests, which the Clintons havefavored and coddled for years, is pouring into her campaign coffers.So she travels around the country with her twofer strategy pandering to powerfulaudiences and flattering gatherings of Democratic voters. She has watched Bill'slack of political fortitude win elections in this two-party, elected dictatorshipagainst the hapless Republicans. Why should she be any different?If she wins the primary and the November elections the country will get anotherkind of twofer in the White House. Here they'll go again.Ralph NaderHitchens Takes a Roll in the HayThe Sleep of ReasonBy CHRIS FLOYDIt has long been fashionable to criticize Christopher Hitchens for his appallingadherence to the gangsters of the Bush Regime, whom he has for many years paintedin the kind of bold, heroic tones we've not seen since the heyday of SocialistRealism. And while Hitchens is now trying to get back to where he once belonged tosome extent -- washing his hands of a war whose failure he now blames largely onthe anti-war left and instead shooting a few fish in the barrel of religiousabsurdities to regain his "contrarian" cred -- he has remained a much-reviledfigure in quarters where once he was feted as a prince. (Indeed, no less than GoreVidal anointed Hitchens as his "dauphin" -- but that was many years ago, and aswe've seen, the indefatigable octogenarian shows no sign of needing a successor.)But I think it's time to give over the rancor surrounding Hitchens. Let usexercise compassionate conservatism toward him -- by compassionately refusing toread his embarrassing outpourings, thereby conserving our eyesight and senses formore important tasks. I came to this conclusion after reading his recent piece inThe Guardian, a florid -- paean, I suppose he would call it -- to the literaryfestival in the small Welsh border village of Hay-on-Wye.For those who don't know, the Hay Festival -- or "Guardian Hay Festival," as it'snow called, with the paper's corporate branding -- is Britain's premier gathering

of glittering literati. Although it's probably interesting in many respects --some good discussions, lively debates -- it is also a luvvy-fest of fearsomeproportions, the Olympics of literary log-rolling. At least, that's how theGuardian's gushingly self-serving coverage of the event -- more People Magazinethan Paris Review -- makes it seem. (I've never been to the festival, although Ihave been to Hay-on-Wye, out of season. It had a lot of nice little secondhandbookstores, although none of them offered the kind of treasures and rarities Iused to unearth regularly at McKay's Used Books in Knoxville way back in the lastcentury. So the place was a bit of a let-down in that respect. Maybe they bringout the hard stuff when the big crowds come calling. But I digress.)Hitchens has long been a regular at the Hay Festival, of course, coming from thesmall pool of chummy/backbiting Oxbridgeans that looms so large in Britishpolitics and culture. His Guardian was apparently meant to be an enticing curtain-raiser for the Festival, an ostensibly beguiling reminiscence of Hitchens' firsttime at Hay, and the many dreamy times that followed. But take a gander at thisprose, and see if you can find it in your heart to feel anything but pity andembarrassment for the poor creature who wrote it:"Shall I soon forget the time that the whispering limo came to pick me up, atabout midnight from a dinner at the Amis/Fonseca house, and disgorged a driver whosaid: "It's time"? Through the flickering night we went, darting through anantique township or so, and crossing the Severn or the Bristol Channel at somepoint, until having been shown to a room in some stone-built hotel, I fell asleeponly to wake to the sounds of bleating sheep. To this very day, I think of Hay-on-Wye as a place standing at some slight angle to the rest of the known universe:perhaps a sort of Brigadoon that isn't really there for the rest of thetwelvemonth..."A "twelvemonth" is what everybody in Britain calls a "year," by the way. They talkfancy like that over here. Also, all the limousines in Britain whisper, when theydon't actually purr. Just so you know. But back to the literary journalism:"Led away from the tent and towards the well-stocked Green Room, I was at firstastonished to find myself meeting friends I had not seen for 30 years, and thenalarmed when shown to a lavatory that seemed half Lilliput and half Brobdingnag.(It turned out to be the bathroom of an infants' school, which was some balm to myalready disordered senses.) As I took my leave, I was asked if I would like tocome back, and replied that I would be willing to risk the trip if I could beassured that it didn't involve some kind of dream-state. Some fairy gold was thenpressed into my hand, and I went back to Washington DC and the reign of thebanal."Yes, no doubt it was all very banal back in DC when "Paul Wolfowitz and myself[needed] to go and convince the President to go to war," as CounterPunch notedlast year. For what is a few hundred thousand dead innocents when one can betransported each year to that magical Brigadoon of tiny toilets and dream states?"They tell me that all this is now available on some digital system, but I don'ttrust myself to check. Talking on stage with Martin Amis about his Welsh nanny?Dreamt it. Debating with Stephen Fry about faith? Come on. Discussing brainsurgery with Ian McEwan, in front of a gigantic audience? What am I, some kind ofname-dropper?"With heroic forbearance, we'll skip over that last remark, and move on to theamusing anecdote that closes the piece:"On the Evelyn Waugh centennial, after doing a Vile Bodies/Black Mischief/Scoop