Public Employee Press

Book Review
Who gets what — and who loses — in the global class war

After Bill Clinton won the 1992 election, he abandoned his populist campaign promise to accept the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) only if strong labor and environmental safeguards were included in the treaty.

NAFTA was sold as a win-win bargain, bringing economic growth to both the United States and Mexico.

Instead, as Jeff Faux argues in his powerful new book, “The Global Class War,” it displaced 2 million Mexican farmers, lowered wages in Mexico and expanded immigration to the United States. The United States lost almost a million jobs to Mexico, and the low wage competition depressed pay in the country.

But the corporate elite that convinced Clinton to support NAFTA benefited so much that they soon proposed and got the World Trade Organization, which was NAFTA writ worldwide and soon included China.

They have begun to morph into an international governing elite. While their global corporations are more profitable, they long ago lost interest in investing in U.S. infrastructure and abandoned any commitment they had to the wages, benefits or pensions of U.S. workers.

As Faux put it, “Capitalists and labor need each other when they are bound together in the same economy,” but with plenty of cheap goods available through the global market, why pay decent wages at home?

In the process, the United States is running up a mammoth annual trade deficit — the difference between what we sell worldwide and the vastly greater amount we import. Our huge worldwide debt gives us the appearance of prosperity, but payback time could mean a massive crisis and a sharp decline in the standard of living for U.S. families.

To avert such a catastrophe, Faux proposes a program to reinvest in America, a national health care program to make us more competitive, changes in the global trade agreements, strengthening labor laws, and a European-style common market with Canada and Mexico — including a strategy to develop the Mexican economy into a more productive member of the threesome.

There are already signs of discontent with our stagnant real wages and deteriorating infrastructure. Hopefully, it will not take an economic crisis to open our eyes.

“The Global Class War: How America’s Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It will Take to Win It Back” is available for $27.95 or in the Education Fund Library, Room 211 at DC 37.

— Ken Nash