If the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA), negotiated last summer by the United States, Mexico and Canada, is ratified by Congress this year, credit should go to the leading voices of the US press—which displayed unyielding devotion to the conservative gospel of free trade.
In a major New York Times news series (7/21/92–7/23/92) that included most of the establishment press’ arguments for free trade, the Times (7/21/92) announced in an opening paragraph that NAFTA “will add jobs, wealth and economic activity throughout the continent, economists say.” Although a minority of people are said to face “hardship,” that caveat was contradicted the next day by an oversized subhead that trumpeted: “Better Standard of Living for All.” A subsequent Times editorial (8/13/92) amplified the same message: Although there will be a “few visible losers,” there will be “huge cumulative gains for everyone else.”
Similar claims were made about the free-trade pact signed by Canada and the US in 1989. But contrary to most US press accounts, Canada is now paying a high price for its decision. The London-based Economist (8/15/92) wrote that a ”clear majority” is now decidedly against NAFTA because of the negative effects of its first dose of free trade.
While acknowledging this growing resentment, the New York Times (7/22/92) still found a silver lining: Reporter Clyde H. Farnsworth, citing “some analysts,” predicted that Canada “is about to outpace all major industrial nations in economic growth” thanks to the 1989 trade pact, adding that there are “signs of increased strength” in the Canadian economy, which he said suffers from world recession, not the effects of free trade.
In fact, the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives has found that Canada has lost more than 460,000 jobs in manufacturing alone since 1989, due to a disastrous 23 percent decline in manufacturing in less than three years. “Employment in Canada has fallen two-and-a-half times as much as it has in the US since the current recession began in July 1990,” Doug Henwood wrote in Lies of Our Times (9/92).
Mexico: The Price of “Reforms”
Despite Canada’s experiences—and despite the fact that a free-trade strategy has never succeeded in leading an underdeveloped country out of poverty—media commentators are optimistic about NAFTA’s effects on Mexico. Washington Post‘s Stuart Auerbach (8/13/92) lauded the “economic gains” free-trade measures have already brought to Mexico, noting that foreign investment has “soared.” “Over time, the pact would help alleviate Mexican poverty and curb illegal immigration to the US,” reported Kenneth H. Bacon in the Wall Street Journal (8/7/92).
From south of the Rio Grande, however, the economic “gains” of free-trade don’t look so great. “Contrary to free-trade propaganda,” William Greider wrote in Rolling Stone (9/3/92), “industrial development has not spawned a new middle class of Mexican consumers for US products. In fact, real wages in Mexico have fallen by 50 percent during the last decade.”
The trade deal, moreover, will drive wages down even further, as millions of farmers are put out of business and forced into the swollen urban labor markets, according to John Cavanagh and John Gershman in The Progressive (2/92). They argue that “millions of Mexican subsistence farmers would be reduced to wage earners on plantations or to urban slum dwellers [because of cheap US corn imports] if the free-trade pact goes through.”
There has been already a loss of 500 engineering firms in the Mexico City, resulting from unilateral moves toward trade liberalization beginning in the 1980s, according to the Economist (8/15/92), and “thousands more small and medium-sized firms are threatened” by NAFTA.
US: Happy Consumers or Jobless Workers?
While the underside of trade reform in Mexico is downplayed, the supposed benefits for the US consumer are constantly played up. “The great value of free trade,” editorialized the New York Times (8/9/92), “is that it can raise the living standards of most Americans.” According to another Times editorial (8/13/92), “consumers will save billions.”
The Wall Street Journal (8/7/92) predicted “lower prices on a wide variety of goods as a result of lower tariffs and increased competition.” Time magazine (8/10/92) emphasized that reduced tariffs will aid “low-income households” who “suffer” the most from import tariffs.
These projections assume that lower production costs will turn into lower retail prices, not higher profits. But most people described as “consumers” are also workers—will they really benefit from lower-priced goods if their wages have eroded, or if their jobs have vanished?
Most press accounts of NAFTA made only perfunctory mention of the issue of job loss, usually passed off as just “concerns” or “fears” of “organized labor,” or worse, “protectionists” (depicted as entrenched interests opposed to the deal for purely selfish reasons).
“Most economists think fears of massive job losses are exaggerated,” Kenneth Bacon reported reassuringly in the Wall Street Journal (8/7/92). “The fear of companies fleeing across the border to hire dollar-an-hour labor,” editorialized the New York Times (8/9/92), “is grossly exaggerated.”
These “fears” are usually countered by statistics from the ubiquitous, pro-NAFTA Institute for International Economics, which go unchallenged in news report after news report. A widely reported study by the group, for instance, projected that 325,000 new jobs in the US will more than make up for the job loss caused by the trade deal.
In a rare example of evenhandedness, the Philadelphia Inquirer (8/12/92) cited the rival Economic Policy Institute, which estimates a loss of 550,000 high-wage jobs. Indeed, massive job losses caused by companies leaving for Mexico is not a “fear,” but an ongoing fact, as news outlets have occasionally acknowledged. (See “The Great American Layoffs,” Time, 7/20/92; “Detroit South,” Business Week, 3/16/92.)
The focus on the supposed benefits for the US consumer also ignores the threat of more pesticide-laced and irradiated foods arriving from Mexico, and skirts the well-founded concern that US environmental standards will be undermined as “technical barriers” to trade (Harper’s, 9/92). A New York Times editorial (8/9/ 92) dismissed this concern: The NAFTA agreement “makes impressive strides to block the threat,” the paper insisted—even though the text of the agreement had not yet been released.
And a news article in US News & World Report (5/6/91) glibly reassured those concerned about pollution along Mexico’s border by US-owned factories: “President Carlos Salinas de Gortari is more determined than any predecessor to clean up pollution, suggesting a brighter future for workers and the environment.”
In fact, the Mexican government’s own National Institute of Ecology (Latin America Regional Reports, 10/1/92) has found that 95 percent of the 106,000 factories in Mexico “are releasing toxic waste in violation of existing rules,” and that “in practice, the official attitude toward compliance was at least very lax.”
The Invisible Opposition
NAFTA has prompted the emergence of a “new, broad-gauge citizen politics that is genuinely tri-national,” unified by the multiple threats posed by the trade deal, William Greider reported (Rolling Stone, 9/3/92). But the broad-based US coalition groups, like Citizen Trade Watch and the Fair Trade Campaign, are almost always subsumed in press accounts as nameless “critics” or “opponents” of the deal. These grassroots groups are almost never allowed to make their case that raising labor and environmental standards in all countries, not forcing workers to compete by lowering them, should be the goal of trade agreements (Dollars & Sense, 10/92).
In Mexico, “over 60 independent unions and democratic movements formed the United Union Front” in April 1990 (Multinational Monitor, 1/91), to fight against government economic policies and corruption, and to “exchange views with their US and Canadian counterparts” about free-trade and the increasing power of multinational corporations. But in eight major US dailies indexed by the database ProQuest, not a single story was devoted to this growing opposition inside Mexico between January 1991 and September 1992.
Instead, the New York Times‘ Tim Golden disingenuously reported (7/23/92) that even Mexico’s poor are big supporters of NAFTA. The Mexican government’s “success in ending nearly a decade of economic crisis,” wrote Golden, “has also inspired many Mexicans, even among the nearly 40 million who live in poverty, to grasp its vision without reserve.” While not quoting a single opposition leader, the story was loaded with quotes from the US Chamber of Commerce and other pro-NAFTA representatives from business and government.
The conservative US News & World Report (7/27/92), looking through its anti-Communist lenses, did warn of a growing “leftist opposition” in Mexico that is drawing support from “the rural poor who have seen little benefit” from free-market reforms. But this is the nearest one gets to learning of opposition to the authoritarian and pro-business policies of President Salinas, who is widely believed to have stolen the 1988 presidential election through fraud.
In endorsing Salinas’ free-trade “reforms,” mainstream US news outlets seem to have turned a blind eye to human rights abuses committed by his government. No major US news outlet noted a report by Canadian churches (Latin America Regional Reports, 5/7/92) that called on their government to use the NAFTA negotiations to press Salinas on human rights violations—which, according to the churches’ report, include “the assassination of peasant leaders, the torture of prisoners in detention, violations of labor rights, corruption in the judicial system, and virtual police and military impunity.”
While the opposition to NAFTA is generally ignored, also overlooked is the fact that multinational corporations are not only supporting the negotiations but actively participating in them. According to Dollars & Sense (10/92), the Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations (ACTPN), which assists the US government in trade negotiations, consists of 42 representatives of corporations or trade associations, and only two representatives of labor unions.
But rather than painting these corporate “advisors” as politically powerful forces who are helping to shape trade policy for their own interests, the US press tends to paint unions and environmentalists as the only special interests. As Craig Merrilles of the Fair Trade Campaign notes, news reports tend to “confuse the national interest with the interests of Corporate America, when they are not the same.”
SIDEBAR:
With Jobs at Stake, Women Are Ignored
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) will disproportionately affect women, yet the voices of women workers have barely been heard in the mainstream media’s discussion of the pact.
NAFTA’s most likely impact. according to the World Bank, will be on multinational corporations operating south of the US/Mexico border and on those who work for them—predominantly women and girls. Multinationals already employ almost half a million people in Mexico, 70 percent to 80 percent of whom are women between the ages of 16 and 25. NAFTA may open up new job opportunities for these women, albeit in industries that pay as little as 40 cents an hour for 14- to 16-hour days, but the freer rein their employers will enjoy is widely expected to decrease what slim protection the women have had against violence and abuse in the workplace.
Similarly, in the United States, the smaller textile and assembly plants, which are particularly likely to close if the US/Mexican border is opened, employ a high concentration of women workers. Women in these US factories tend to be the last hired, most weakly protected workers on the job, as they are in Mexico.
Given the above, it would have made interesting copy to consider the attitudes of women workers toward the pact. But a study of coverage in the New York Times, the LA Times and ABC News broadcasts during the week the pact was signed (10/4/92–10/11/92) found only 10 quotes from women in 42 stories.
Four of those quotes were from Carla Hills, the US special trade representative who represented the Bush administration in negotiations. One quote came from Lynn Martin, Bush’s secretary of Labor; two more from Bush campaign staffers Mary Matalin and Tone Clarke. The remaining women quoted were businesswomen: the president of a Newport Beach marketing firm that helped Bush on the agreement, and two securities and bonds saleswomen, interviewed by Lydia Chavez in a story in the LA Times (10/4/92).
Women workers (and their advocates) were overlooked by all of the outlets studied. They did, however, remain the favorite subject of advertisements aimed at industry, tempting them to relocate south of Texas with promises of cheap, vulnerable female labor.
—Laura Flanders
SIDEBAR:
The Media’s Favorite Trade Experts
Reporters often turn to the Washington-based Institute for International Economics (IIE) for a trade quote. The IIE, directed by former Carter administration official C. Fred Bergstein, is funded by multinational capital of many currencies. Its board includes a former British chancellor of the exchequer, a former head of Japan’s Sony, the chairs of US companies like Merck and the Morgan bank, an adviser to the former Brazilian military regime, and David Rockefeller. Also on the board is Paul Volcker, the sado-monetarist who ran the Federal Reserve from 1979 to 1987: Volcker’s successor, Alan Greenspan, is an honorary director.
When folks like these talk about free trade, what they really mean is capital’s freedom to move across borders with minimal restrictions. But saying it that way might alienate lots of people. Better to stick to friendly-sounding words like “free” and “open.” Who wants to be closed and unfree?
A representative of a think tank funded by multinational corporations is unlikely to argue that regulation of imports is essential to any development strategy, or to point out that the US was successfully protectionist in the 19th Century, or that Japan and South Korea would not be so formidable if they hadn’t protected local industries.
—Doug Henwood
