Morning Must-Read: Jeff Faux: The Neoliberal Mind at Work: Brad DeLong’s Muddled Defense of NAFTA

Jeff Faux: The Neoliberal Mind at Work: Brad DeLong’s Muddled Defense of NAFTA The election of 1988…

…stolen by the U.S.-backed ‘winner’ Carlos Salinas, revealed widespread resistance among the Mexican electorate. Protecting the rights of foreign capital in an international treaty… was designed to put the neo-liberal regime beyond the reach of Mexican democracy. DeLong seems to know there was an ugly American politics to NAFTA. In an aside he says he now agrees that Mexico’s energies would have been better put to a development strategy. Unfortunately, it’s a little late. This was the reason Mexican progressives opposed NAFTA. When I raised it during the debate, NAFTA-backers responded that this was exactly the kind of ‘statist’ thinking they had to crush. During the congressional debate, Clinton’s U.S. Trade Representative blurted out to me that ‘we have to keep the Left out of power down there’. While Cuauhtémoc Cardenas was trying to save Mexico’s capacity for self-development, DeLong was busy helping Rubin, Clinton, and the U.S. Business Roundtable do all they could to make it impossible. NAFTA was not some default ‘second-best’ policy; it was designed to kill the first-best…