Engineered by big business lobbyists and carried out in the national media by pitchman extraordinaire Lee Iacocca, the push for NAFTA, in MacArthur's opinion, offers a view "deep into the heart of political mendacity and collusion as it is practiced in Washington." Using the controversial closure of New York City's Swingline staple plant as a touchstone for the more abstract "intellectual trade wars" to follow, MacArthur examines the campaign waged by a Democratic coalition battling Ross Perot's famous sound bite on the loss of NAFTA-related jobs: "There will be a giant sucking sound going south."

The book makes for grimly hilarious reading as it chronicles the intense saga of NAFTA's eventual ratification, notably when describing the elaborate process of vote buying embarked upon by pro-NAFTA forces. In one case, as MacArthur reports it, Rep. Bill Brewster, an Oklahoma Democrat on the board of the National Rifle Association, surrendered his vote via cell phone in exchange for a duck-hunting date with President Clinton. Throughout, MacArthur keeps his eye on the immigrant factory workers who ultimately pay NAFTA's price, and reports on the desultory border culture of maquiladora factories such as the brand-new Swingline plant in Nogales. The ultimate effects of NAFTA may still be debatable, but MacArthur's conclusion seems beyond dispute: "It's politics, stupid." Product Description: This brilliant expos shows us how Washington works to make something happen, even when confronted with widespread popular opposition. It chronicles the brutal and expensive campaign in 1993 that led to passage of the poorly understood, highly controversial law creating the North American Free Trade Agreement, but its story is urgently up-to-date. Above all else, NAFTA guaranteed U.S. corporations access to cheap labor in Mexico and protection against expropriation there, but it was presented as a progressive law that would help workers everywhere. John R. MacArthur, investigating the political and public-relations tactics of the Democratic-Republican big-business coalition that favored Gore, Bradley, Clinton, Gephardt, Bush, and the other members of what he calls the bipartisan oligarchy -- defeated the ad hoc groups of working people, skeptics, and mavericks on Capitol Hill who questioned the value of a manifestly unpopular bill. We learn how these oligarchs do their business with the Fortune 500 companies dominating American trade policy and how they have disregarded the workers' and environmentalists' concerns they now purport to care about. How NAFTA was put across -- or put over on us -- is the central story of this book. The Selling of "Free Trade" begins with the 1999 closing of the famous Swingline stapler plant in Long Island City, New York, and ends with the factory's relocation just south of the border, in Nogales, Mexico, where MacArthur watches President Ernesto Zedillo preside over the ribbon cutting. In between, he talks to the lobbyists, White House aides, congressional staff, and politicians who framed the debate over free trade and the American economy; he investigates the advertising, public-relations, and politicking maneuvers that, with White House help, put NAFTA across as a pure free-trade issue. And he talks to American factory workers who are losing their jobs: about their work and their working conditions, about what the unions have or haven't done for them, about what it's like when they come off their last assembly line and watch their jobs move to Mexico. He attends meetings at an Arizona resort where a U.S. company helps U.S. businesses learn to save millions of dollars by usi

 Hill & Wang 0809085313 / 9780809085316
Hardcover As New As New Book Jacket New York, New York, U.S.A. 

Price: 17.15 USD