Word: naftas
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...dustup is accomplishing one thing: getting the public interested. Clinton had previously signed up all five ex-Presidents and squadrons of other bipartisan cognoscenti to back the agreement, which would create a free-trade zone encompassing Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. Clinton can even count on such Republican NAFTA supporters as Henry Kissinger and James Baker, as well as multimedia star Rush Limbaugh. The President showed off some of NAFTA's big-name boosters at what was supposed to be a White House media event last Wednesday; so far as the public noticed, he might just as well have convened...
...showdown thus escalated what were for Clinton already immensely high stakes. The President initially was slow to put on much of a drive for NAFTA, which was originally negotiated by George Bush. He let the debate be dominated by Perot and others, principally labor unions who fear a loss of jobs to low- wage Mexican competition. But now the President has made the NAFTA vote one of the defining moments of his Administration and launched an all-out campaign to win. He is opposed by one of the strangest assortments of public figures ever to find themselves in one another...
...manufacture there? Contrariwise, whether or not many American factory owners even think of moving to Mexico, will many try to use the threat of doing so as a means of holding down American wages? Owen Bieber, president of the United Auto Workers, suggests this will happen so often if NAFTA passes that the Administration will have to set up an 800 number for unionists to call with their complaints...
...side, Perot keeps talking about a "giant sucking sound" of factories, money and jobs being vacuumed into Mexico from the U.S. He is almost the only one who can hear it. Some treaty opponents have been kicking around a figure of 500,000 jobs that might be lost, but NAFTA proponents consider that projection grossly exaggerated...
...Administration did not help itself by choosing initially to fight on narrow economic grounds (read: jobs) rather than invoke the foreign-policy considerations that actually are more important. It also has been somewhat hampered in making what could be one of its strongest arguments: to the extent that NAFTA promotes prosperity, job growth and wage increases in Mexico, it should keep at home some of the illegal immigrants now flooding into California, Texas and other states. In fact, it is hard to see anything else that might stanch that flow. Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Attorney General Janet Reno...