Luckily for Al Gore (and Hillary Clinton), politicians can evade their past decisions fairly easily. NAFTA didn't help working class folk, didn't really help the trade imbalance between North American nations, and the repercussions and modifications are apparently still percolating on the border of Mexico.
In Quiet West Texas, Residents Fight an Anticipated Trade Corridor
The idea that in a few years hundreds of diesel-puffing semi trucks from Mexico could be tooling through two small towns in this area of West Texas every day has upset residents.
The towns are on the route of a projected trade corridor from Mexico called La Entrada al Pacifico. In the proposal’s present form, La Entrada would route semis through single-stoplight Marfa, population 2,400, and neighboring Alpine, population 7,000, which has three traffic signals on two one-way streets through town.
Though, I haven't heard yet if Ms. Clinton or Mr. Gore have repudiated their strong support for NAFTA or not, so I'm probably talking out of my digestive tract again. Wouldn't be the first time, nor will it be the last.
Here's a little background on environmentalism (and NAFTA) during the Clinton years, from Joshua Frank of CounterPunch:
Other than his alleged environmental convictions, Gore was politically timid when push came to shove in Washington. During Clinton's campaign for president in 1992 Gore promised a group of supporters that Clinton's EPA would never approve a hazardous waste incinerator located near an elementary school in Liverpool, Ohio, which was operated by WTI. Only three months into Clinton's tenure the EPA issued an operating permit for the toxic burner. Gore raised no qualms. Not surprisingly, most of the money behind WTI came from the bulging pockets of Jackson Stephens, who just happened to be one of the Clinton/Gore's top campaign contributors.Perhaps Al Gore's greatest blunder during his years as vice president was his allegiance to the conservative Democratic Leadership Council and their erroneous approach to environmental policy. Gore, like Clinton who quipped that “the invisible hand has a green thumb”, extolled a free-market attitude toward environmental issues. “Since the mid-1980s Gore has argued with increasing stridency that the bracing forces of market capitalism are potent curatives for the ecological entropy now bearing down on the global environment,” writes Jeffrey St. Clair in Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: The Politics of Nature. “He is a passionate disciple of the gospel of efficiency, suffused with an inchoate technopilia.”
Then came the first of the Clinton administration's neoliberal wet dreams: NAFTA. After the passage of NAFTA, pollution along the US/Mexico border dramatically increased. And Gore should have known better; NAFTA allowed existing environmental laws in the United States to be undermined. Corporations looking to turn a profit by skating around enviro statutes at home moved down to Mexico where environmental standards and regulatory enforcement were scarce.
These follies were followed by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt's destructive deal with the sugar barons of South Florida, which doomed vast acreages of the Everglades. Then Gore and Clinton capitulated to the demands of Western Democrats and yanked from its initial budget proposals a call to reform grazing, mining, and timber practices on federal lands. When Clinton convened a timber summit in Portland, Oregon, in April 1994, the conference was, as one might expect, dominated by logging interests. Predictably, the summit gave way to a plan to restart clear-cutting in the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest for the first time in three years, giving the timber industry its get rich wish. Gore, again, said nothing.
(article continues here)
Tags: Al_Gore, /Clinton, /environment, /NAFTA
