Hey Betty, do you see last night's PBS Newshour? The had a segment on Clinton's failure to sign Nafta with Chile - seems the Canadians went ahead and your favorite company - Cisco Systems - lost a contract for $200,000,000 worth of equipment. It went to Newbridge because of the 11% tariff.
Seems Clinton's union paymasters have control of trade even though they cripple US high tech:
Chile Con Carey:
What Bill Did
For the Teamsters
By PAUL A. GIGOT
So you want to sign a treaty with Uncle Sam? Better hope the Uncle who's
signing hasn't cut an under-the-table deal with the Teamsters to help himself
win a second term.
That's what Latin American leaders may be thinking this weekend in Chile
as they listen to President Clinton promote "free trade for the Americas." It's
a fine vision. It ought to be part of his legacy.
But this is also the same president who has quietly reneged on part of his
most recent American trade deal, the one with Mexico. Thus do other
leaders understand how White House scandal has damaged U.S. foreign
policy, even if most Americans avert their eyes.
This too-little-known tale starts with Mr. Clinton's
Nafta achievement of 1993. While the pact was
George Bush's idea, this president did well to sell it
to his own hostile Democratic coalition. One of
Nafta's most important planks was to allow full and
easy access by U.S. and Mexican truckers across
the border. Commerce would be speeded up,
transport costs reduced, living standards raised.
"We're unequivocally ready for December 18th,"
said then Transportation Secretary Federico Pe¤a,
just two weeks before the cross-border trucks
were supposed to roll in 1995. He must have been
out of the loop. Because on Dec. 18, the very day of implementation, the
White House unilaterally backed out. It postponed the trucking deal
because of concern about "safety."
This was odd. Mr. Pe¤a had discounted the safety worries just two weeks
earlier. Every Mexican truck would be subject to the same rules as U.S.
trucks. Texas alone had hired 109 new troopers and opened four new
inspection stations for the job. All four U.S. border-state governors were
eager to move ahead.
So what really happened? All signs suggest this was part of the quo that Mr.
Clinton paid for the quid that the Teamsters provided during the 1996
election campaign. The evidence is piled higher than the Himalayas in the
Senate's recent report on campaign fund-raising.
Keep in mind that the Teamsters had long been the
one big union that sometimes backed Republicans.
But with new (and since defrocked) president Ron
Carey at the helm in the mid-1990s, the Clinton
team saw a chance to make the union a wholly
owned subsidiary.
"We are in a good position to rekindle the Teamster
leadership's enthusiasm for the Administration," says
a 1995 set of "Teamster Notes" underlined by chief
political fixer Harold Ickes. "But they have some
parochial issues that we need to work on."
Work they did. One issue was the trucking deal, which would open U.S.
roads to nonunion Mexican truckers. A memo from then-Teamster political
director William Hamilton says he expressly brought up Mexican trucking in
a meeting with Vice President Al Gore. Another Hamilton document
includes "stopped the Nafta border crossings" on a list of White House
favors performed.
What did Mr. Clinton get in return? Almost certainly lots of cash and
thousands of man-hours to help re-elect him and fellow Democrats. Exact
numbers aren't known, because the Teamsters are still refusing to turn over
most of their own documents to Congress.
But we do know that the U.S. attorney for Southern New York has already
won guilty pleas from Teamster consultants for breaking campaign laws.
Especially suspect is a "contribution swap scheme" hatched between the
Teamsters and the Democratic National Committee in 1996. Democrats
hunted for a big donor to Mr. Carey's re-election campaign while Teamster
cash flowed into Democratic coffers.
We also know that Mr. Hamilton took the Fifth rather than testify before
Congress. And we know that a House committee investigating the
Teamsters has turned up evidence suggesting that a union with net worth of
some $150 million in the early 1990s is now all but broke. Wonder where
all of that money went?
Odder yet, even this long after his re-election, Mr. Clinton still hasn't
budged on Nafta trucking. Mexico has protested to no avail, despite a
Clinton visit last year. Border-state congressmen who ask questions, such
as GOP Texas Rep. Henry Bonilla, get the run-around.
My guess is that as long as the threat of scandal hangs over him, Mr.
Clinton figures he can't afford to upset his union allies. Especially not anyone
who could cooperate with investigators. That's also why the president won't
try again to get fast-track trade power passed this year, though he claims he
wants it. There's also Mr. Gore's election in 2000 to think about--he'd like
Teamster help too.
All politicians do favors for friends. But no president until this one has dared
to trade a hard-won national commitment merely for campaign cash. Nafta
was a sovereign U.S. promise, made by no less than Mr. Clinton himself.
To renege on even part of it hurts not just his credibility but also America's.
Such behavior has consequences. In Chile this weekend, Brazil's president
will sign trade deals that mean something, but America's president won't.
Mr. Clinton will talk a lot and pose for photographs. That's one legacy of
selling a chunk of American foreign policy to the Teamsters.
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