Description
Above all else, NAFTA guaranteed U.S. corporations access to cheap labor in Mexico -- though it was presented as a progressive law that would help workers everywhere. John R. MacArthur investigates the cynical political and public-relations tactics and virtual vote-buying of the Democratic-Republican big-business coalition that favored NAFTA. He shows how this "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. How NAFTA was put across -- or put over on us -- is the central story in this book.
Journalistic and intellectual inspirations for this hard-hitting study include Joe McGinniss's The Selling of the President and Charles Wright Mills's The Power Elite. The ongoing decline of American democracy chronicled and predicted by these authors came vividly true, MacArthur shows, when the American people were sold on what they thought was free trade but was actually a subversion of their political system.
