World Trade News: Battle for hearts and minds over Nafta - Guerrilla tactics versus White House pomp and press machine
GUERRILLA tactics by Greenpeace were swamped by the White House pomp in which Mr Clinton and three past US presidents this week endorsed the North American Free Trade Agreement. But the environmental activists, who momentarily disrupted a House hearing to unfurl a 15 foot anti-Nafta banner, saw their stunt repeated again and again on evening news shows. With dozens of similar exploits and clever strategic planning, grassroots organisations have succeed in fanning anti-Nafta sentiment into widespread public hostility against the pact with Canada and Mexico. A new Wall Street Journal poll, found opposition, at 36 per cent, had reached its highest level yet with only 25 per cent of those polled in favour of Nafta. The continued economic sluggishness and the drumbeat of corporate layoff announcements have hurt the pact's chances and presented the administration with a formidable challenge. Fifty per cent of the Americans polled disagreed with the administration's argument that more jobs will be created than lost and 54 per cent said that wages would be forced downward so that US companies and workers could compete with Mexico. Pro-Nafta congressmen and senators have been morosely admitting the opposition's success in framing the debate against Nafta as a pact which would cost jobs. But they took heart from Tuesday's presidential show: President Clinton's passionate insistence that the realities of the global marketplace be faced; President Carter's attack on Mr Ross Perot, the populist billionaire, as a demagogue with 'unlimited financial resources,'; President Bush's praise of Mexican President Carlos Salinas; President Ford's warning that the country would be overrun by impoverished immigrants from the South if they are given no work at home. 'It was a revival,' said Texas Congressman JJ Pickle. 'I think Nafta was born again.' To keep the pro-Nafta case before the public, President Clinton Wednesday took off for New Orleans and top officials in his administration fanned out on speaking tours across the country. Government agencies have been mobilised for the battle, given pro-Nafta literature and instructed to boost the pact in seminars and public forums. Congressional committees have begun to examine the details in preparation for writing its implementing legislation, now expected on the Hill in November. It is believed this process may satisfy some of the Congressional doubters, who are demanding a 'level playing field' and a speedup of Mexican tariff reductions. Pro and anti-Nafta forces are keeping the fax lines burning. A Greenpeace release warned that two decades of work on environmental protection would be undermined if the pact is approved. In response to similar charges by hundreds of grassroots environmental, citizen and labour groups, Vice president Al Gore, Senator Max Baucus and other lawmakers with green credentials, accompanied by six leaders of the largest national environmental groups who helped negotiate the environmental side pact, held a briefing to praise Nafta's environmental safeguards. Seemingly unfazed by Nafta's new show of life, the Citizens Trade Campaign, one of the umbrella opposition groups, called a press conference to 'debunk' the Clinton Administration claim Nafta would create 200,000 jobs in the next five years. Unmindful of a television camera, its leaders plotted new strategies: anti-Nafta resolution in 25 state legislatures; a letter writing campaign and more. Notable by his absence from the fray has been Mr Richard Gephardt, the House Majority Leader, who is said to be close to moving from tentative to committed opposition. He will join forces with Congressman David Bonior, the majority whip, and three of Mr Bonior's lieutenants, leaving the House Speaker, Tom Foley, nearly alone on the defence, among the leadership. 'I do not think we have articulated well - the supporters of Nafta - the very positive and energetic reasons that can be offered for supporting this,' Mr Foley acknowledged. Without Nafta, the US relationship with Mexico could 'deteriorate,' and 'much of what people are worried about will happen, perhaps more speedily without Nafta than with it. Those things have to be presented more forcefully.'
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