Word: perots
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...Perot devotes much of his anti-NAFTA polemic (a book jingoistically entitled Save Your Job, Save Your Country) to listing the ways in which NAFTA will benefit Mexico, Asia and Europe. The incorrect implication is that anything good for the rest of the world must be bad for the United States...
Last weekend, Perot got another opportunity to exploit cultural caricatures. The FBI received a warning that Mexican gangsters had hired six Cubans to assassinate Perot. Prominent public figures receive such bizarre threats regularly, and investigators have been unable to confirm the existence of a real assassination plot...
...Perot is famous for his paranoia and conspiracy theories. Additionally, the threat allowed Perot to wield some particularly useful stereotypes in his battle against NAFTA: Oliver Stone-style Cuban mercenaries and Mexican mafioso drug dealers...
...disturbing that this evidence of racism in the anti-NAFTA rhetoric has received scant attention. But it is not all that surprising. The silence may simply reflect the ironic fact that NAFTA supporters are almost as guilty as Perot of fanning xenophobic flames to make their case. This apparent compromise recognizes that the current political climate rewards xenophobic rhetoric--and grants bonus points for bashing Mexico or Japan. Events like the World Trade Center bombing, Chinese immigrant-smuggling and reports Mexican immigrant soaking up tax-funded service in California have turned public mood against one of America's most cherished...
Fully recognizing the political benefits of protectionism and xenophobia, the Clinton administration has chosen an unlikely--and unconvincing--strategy to sell NAFTA. President Clinton tries to paint NAFTA as bad for Japan and Europe (using the converse of the Perot axiom: Anything bad for them is good for us). He recruits Lee Iaccoca to boast that other nations fear NAFTA because the treaty would create the world's largest unified trading bloc. And he asserts that if Congress rejects NAFTA when it votes on it November 17, by the next day the Japanese finance minister will be in Mexico saying...