| Submit your comments on this article | |
| Home Front: Politix | |
| Obama: maybe NAFTA isn't so bad after all | |
| 2008-06-19 | |
| Nina Easton, Fortune magazine In an interview with Fortune to be featured in the magazine's upcoming issue, the presumptive Democratic nominee backed off his harshest attacks on the free trade agreement and indicated he didn't want to unilaterally reopen negotiations on NAFTA. 'Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified,' he conceded, after I reminded him that he had called NAFTA 'devastating' and 'a big mistake,' despite nonpartisan studies concluding that the trade zone has had a mild, positive effect on the U.S. economy. . . . Obama's tone stands in marked contrast to his primary campaign's anti-NAFTA fusillades. The pact creating a North American free-trade zone was President Bill Clinton's signature accomplishment; but NAFTA is also the bugaboo of union leaders, grassroots activists and Midwesterners who blame free trade for the factory closings they see in their hometowns. . . . In February, as the campaign moved into the Rust Belt, both candidates vowed to invoke a six-month opt-out clause ('as a hammer,' in Obama's words) to pressure Canada and Mexico to make concessions. . . . 'Cept he really didn't really mean it even then. Now, however, Obama says he doesn't believe in unilaterally reopening NAFTA.
| |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #5 Obama: maybe The ULTIMATE Obamanian flipflop. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2008-06-19 21:30 |
| #4 Don't look now Jim but most of the world's "wage scavengin billionaire industrialists" are no longer US citizens and the certainly aren't setting up shop around here anymore. Hint: this is not necessarily a good thing. |
| Posted by: AzCat 2008-06-19 12:06 |
| #3 NAFTA- A globalist scheme, set up and pushed through by a Democrat, now greedily coveted and protected by Republicans and wage scavenging billionaire industrialists. Trade corridor my ass, it was set up to bust unions and lower wages and overhead for companies, and that's just what it did. I don't give a rat's ass who reports it had a "mild, positive effect on the economy", that's bullshit. It quite possibly did have a positive effect to medium and large business OWNERS, but I've never met any working person who got a job out of NAFTA. |
| Posted by: bigjim-ky 2008-06-19 10:24 |
| #2 The problem is all the people he would appoint are True Believers and they are the ones who actually $#@& things up. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2008-06-19 09:43 |
| #1 This is a reassuring move on Obama's part. He may be a normal, self-interested politician rather than a Marxist true believer. If so, expect to see MoveOn and the rest thrown under the bus once he is in office. Still not a risk we can afford to take. |
| Posted by: Excalibur 2008-06-19 09:36 |