As this issue goes to press, President Clinton has just signed the legislation implementing the NAFTA treaty as of January 1st. As you might tell from the cover cartoon, I'm not too crazy about the idea. If Clinton had fought this hard for his jobs bill, I might have actually warmed up to the guy. As it is, by investing all his political capital in the Bush/Reagan NAFTA treaty, Mr. Bill has confirmed my earlier assessment of him: just a kinder, gentler stooge for corporate power.I was never overly fond of him to begin with, coming as he did from the far right wing of the Democratic party. His "Willie Horton insurance," scurrying home during the campaign to insure the execution of a brain-damaged prisoner, gave a sense of what kind of guy we were dealing with. And when I heard about Governor Clinton's studiously averting his gaze from the Contra resupply airstrip in Mena, Arkansas, I knew we were in for cosmetic change at best.
So while I certainly celebrated Clinton's defeat of George Bush, I had no grea t expectations for the return of the Donkey Party to power. And if anyone is surprised to find Clinton's foreign policy to be nearly as bad as Bush's, they should have paid more attention during the campaign.
None of this, of course, should come as any surprise. The oligarchy that owns the bulk of this country has tended to contribute to both presidential candidates for at least a century now. You pretty much have to be bought and sold to be allowed to run for president in the first place, at least if you expect anyone to pay attention to you. If you have any doubt about that, ask Larry Agran. Mr Agran, a Democrat, ran for President in 1992, and was excluded from nearly every official debate, sometimes forcibly.
If Mr. Clinton had any inclination to challenge the oligarchy upon assuming his office, he certainly kept it to himself. Which is a wise policy, considering the examples of several of his predecessors who displayed excessive independence of judgment. The bottom line is that corporate power usually gets what corporate power wants. And what they wanted, so badly they could taste it, was NAFTA. Which made it a foregone conclusion, despite the "uphill battle" they faced, that it was as good as done.
Basically, it's New World Order time. NAFTA, like the GATT agreement that will inevitably be finalized soon, is basically an end run around the pesky national governments which are so susceptible to democratic pressures (Well, some of them, anyway). The current GATT agreement has already been used successfully, for instance, to nullify environmental regulations enacted by the US Congress and several state legislatures. We can expect a lot more of this sort of thing.
The folks in the John Birch Society have been ranting for years about the coming of the One-World Government. The fact is, it's already here; been here for a long time, in fact. Not so much the UN, though that has certainly proven useful in the recent past. But institutions like the World Bank and the IMF have shown their value to corporate power time and again, by putting the brakes on any tendencies towards democracy that might arise from time to time across the globe. And the folks who run these organizations are celebrating, just as Bill Clinton is, the coming of NAFTA.