April 28, 2015
Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Introduction:
It’s very difficult for me as a writer, someone who was once deeply involved in public life in New Jersey, a little less so in Maryland, not to speak up when the currents of history cross the course of my own life.
In the early 1990’s I was asked to lead a delegation of environmentalists and union members to see our local congressman in Hunterdon County, NJ, in Flemington, on the upcoming NAFTA legislation. His name was Dick Zimmer, and he was a rising star in the Republican Party.
Of course, NAFTA and its outcomes are inseparable from the story of Mexico and Immigration – and the jobs which didn’t arrive on either side of the border. It almost always comes back to the shortage, or complete lack of jobs, doesn’t it?
But it also so happens that in my new home in Western Maryland, I was reading Renya Grande’s autobiography, The Distance Between Us, for the Main Street Book club in Frostburg, Maryland, in October of 2014; that book had also been selected as “the read” for 2014 by “One Maryland,” a cultural organization which, arguably, gives a semi-official stamp of approval that a book is “worthwhile” reading for the state, including high school students.
This was a good book, and if the intent of the One Maryland endorsers was to trigger greater sympathy for the human plight of fractured immigrant families, I think it succeeded. The book however, never mentioned NAFTA, nor Mexico’s drug-cartel induced collapse. And, no small irony this, when Ms. Grande was on a week-long official Maryland tour, including a talk in Montgomery County, her home state of Guerrero, and indeed, her home town of Iguala, were the scene of the infamous disappearance of protesting college students – “the Missing 43.” Their deaths – executions, actually – have been laid, for now, at the feet of narco gangs and complicit local officials, the Mayor and his wife. In other words, a glaring instance of what democracy and the economy have become in Mexico.
I thought you and the One Marylanders ought to know that. And irony of irony, that ‘drug problem,” actually a deeply economic problem, shadowed my own NAFTA story in the early 1990’s in New Jersey, because it haunted the President of Mexico and his family whom my American Congressman was personally vouching for, giving us that standard Republican line – character counts – and he was vouching for Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s character.
And last, the current policy tale of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the attempt to ram it through Congress, so similar to NAFTA, brings to mind my earlier writings about an American nation on the brink of a non-shooting civil war between the Right and Center- Left, and the fact that sometimes the only consensus to be found is not on very good ground, far from “The High Ground” : it’s on the ground of what major American corporations want, in fact demand from our shaky political system. Democracy and the citizen voice on trade deals? They’re hard to find, which ties the essay which follows back to the struggle of Greeks for their voice and better outcomes at the hands of dominating European powers, public and private, and the reigning philosophy of Austerity.
If there is a common theme in these stories, seemingly so distant from the two counties of Western Maryland, it is that the shortage of jobs and the catastrophic impacts upon people and society from that lack of jobs connects bad trade deals, the TPP to NAFTA, Mexico to the US and immigration to drugs. The sale of drugs now forms an unwanted link between Cumberland, Frostburg and yes, the “infamous ghetto” of (West) Baltimore. That’s because, according to arrest announcements and the State Attorney for our region’s report, drug dealers from Baltimore have set up shop in our two largest cities; West Virginia apparently raises its own drug dealers. And now, once again, parts of Baltimore have gone up in flames and rioting after the death of Freddie Grey from a horrific injury while in the hands of the police. (To balance the racial equation, let’s not forget the rioting of white workers and their women supporters, in Baltimore, in the year of 1877, the year of the Great Railroad Strike, when the working class and supporting small businesses wouldn’t put up with repeated wage cuts, and dividend increases from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Here’s a good summary:
https://indyreader.org/... ).
So we are One Maryland, indeed, but perhaps not what our cultural leaders had in mind.
You can claim, I suppose, that this is all “Greek to me,” and you will not know how right you are.
Bill Neil
Frostburg, MD
P.S. Speaking of the new Greek government led by the Syriza party, which came to office in January of this year, Naomi Klein shares an interview she did in 2013 with its new Prime Minister, Alex Tsipras, in her book This Changes Everything, in which he openly confesses to the difficulty very poor regions have in reconciling economics with ecology. He admitted that gas and oil exploration off the eastern coast of Greece is still on the table. Greece has been, in 2015, flirting with Russia, China and Iran about energy matters, which I assume not to be wind and solar. It’s a shame, given the mountains, sunshine and ocean resources that Greece has. One hopes that if they ever get Eurozone development funds (that’s a crucial part of the tense negotiations) that a good portion are put to green energy creation. The new government is opposing, unlike the departed one, the Eldorado Gold mining company’s project near Ierissos. Still, even when the left finally elects an alternative to neoliberal Austerity, fracture lines appear. You can use this link to help you follow them, where ecology and economy still do not quite mesh:
https://canadiandimension.com/...
“THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US”: BEN CARDIN’S VOTE TRIGGERS NAFTA FLASHBACKS
My electronic inbox has been charged with denunciations of Maryland Senator Ben Cardin’s vote for fast-track authority for President Obama on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal. I’m unhappy with him – very unhappy – but I’m not surprised. I think the only thing that could have prevented the Senator’s vote to get the TPP out of Committee was a call from the Prime Minister of Israel.
I should add, to paint a broader canvas of worries here, that my inbox also reflects the question: where are Senator Barbara Mikulski and Representatives Steny Hoyer, Andy Harris and John Delaney? Representatives Donna Edwards, Chris Van Hollen and Elijah Cummings have all come out against Fast Track and the TPP. I did some outreach on Monday, April 28, to see where the laggards are on the issue. Rep. Ruppersburger’s office responded that they were opposed to Fast Track but undecided on the TPP. Rep. Sarbanes office responded by declining to comment. Rep. Delaney’s office – he’s my congressman, did not respond. Senator Mikulski sent me an Email, a little “position paper” that dodged and weaved in the “best” congressional style.
It’s hard to miss the allegations that President Obama has never labored this hard, working Congress this way, as he is doing for Fast Track trade authority. He certainly hasn’t exerted himself this way for a higher minimum wage, even $10.10 per hour, much less the more livable and realistic $15.00 per hour (for actually living, not meeting Republican Right notions of it…and the cautious Democratic sense of what business “propriety” requires).
Someone who is lobbying for that $15.00 dollars per hour has broken into the news, however, and he happens to be a breakfast cook in a private service that works for the U.S. Senate: the early morning shift. Good timing on that, isn’t it Senator Cardin? I saw the story from the collection in my mailbox by EIN News Service, and I wonder if the founder of that service, Chairman Joe Rothstein, remembers sitting next to me at a Washington think tank conference? I doubt it (I still have his card though) but the full story in the Guardian is well worth your read, because its subject, the poor citizen, the cook, Bertrand Olotara, has to work two jobs in a brutal schedule. He has gone on to get his college degree, and appears to be killing himself via his pursuit of the American Dream – which has come down to keeping his five children in the educational race, a big part of the contemporary Dream in what A. Lincoln already called, in his Antebellum America, “the race of life.” It wouldn’t acquire the full title “The American Dream” until the early 1930’s, when the Dream had collapsed. Here’s Mr. Olotara’s story:
http://www.theguardian.com/...
And now here is my story on trade deals. As the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg approached in late June, 2013, I was wondering why the nation was not going to show itself the full movie put together by Ted Turner, a four hour classic with acting far above average across seven or eight main characters. I concluded that given the stalemate in Washington, DC and the tensions between the center-left and right behind it, the very different visions for the country, that it was too risky to ask the nation to consider its last Civil War, a shooting one, with the battle of Gettysburg in the summer of 1863 being the decisive, bloodiest one which decided the war.
Yet in my background work before writing about the movie and the first Civil War, I noted that the Republican Right and the Democratic Centrists did still seem to be able to come together to defend the chasing of the last grand dream from the 18th century’s Enlightenment, the pursuit of one giant world “market,” via “free trade.” Actually, philosopher John Gray was right in False Dawn, his book about globalization: that one grand market dream is fragmenting into trading blocks and the pursuit of the TPP has become more about countering China and Russia and their attempts to enlarge their spheres of interest in Asia than about “pure free trade.”
I’m also sorry to say, Senator Cardin, it’s not about helping workers like Mr. Olotara, or early forced retirees like myself, much less the environment. And it is certainly not about democracy, because these deals have always been about what corporate America wants, not about what American citizens need, and they reveal the betrayal of democracy by the obsessive secrecy with which they are conducted – until it’s time to ram them through with Fast Track to avoid the messy democratic process Congress is so famous, or infamous for…Still, though, perhaps it’s the only way the citizen can learn what is in the deals (without the help of WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden.)
This terrible process helps confirm the prophetic voice of Greek negotiator Yanis Varoufakis’ thesis, that despite the formal institutions of Western societies, democracy has turned into an economic oligarchy where citizenship and voting choices have been reduced to oblique, narrow gestures:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/...
(Editor’s Note: Please see my essay called “The Heavenly City of the Republican Right here at the Daily Kos: http://www.dailykos.com/...
And this is how I wrote about one instance when the Right and the Center could agree back in the year 2013. (Whether they can or should come together in the spring of 2015 is far more unlikely, and if that reality kills Fast Track and the TPP, good.) The passages are from my essay “The High Ground: Gettysburg, 1863; ‘What Then Must We Do?’ 2013”:
"The one great exception, one that may be very well holding the country together, is that there is, surprisingly, still some crucial common ideological ground between the Center and the Right around “the free market.” You can say, oh no, look at the Right’s reaction to Obama Care, but observers with that reaction confuse Republican tactical absolutism (give the Democrats no lasting legislative achievement, none, in recognition of how long the glow lasted from FDR’s New Deal programs; deny them the tactical high ground, no matter what…) with ideological matters centered on the political economy: the President’s healthcare plan is corporate based, setting up regional marketplaces, just as the failed global warming legislation envisioned putting Goldman Sachs and the Wall Street trading desks at the center of the carbon credit “market.” I could repeat this analysis on the fraught topic of “debt and deficits,” but that would be an essay in itself (as it has been for me in 2010 and 2011). In matters of the political economy, President Obama is well within the conservative tilt of what we have considered our most “reforming” Presidents, from T.R. to Wilson and even FDR (and I would include Lincoln within this framework, following the wonderfully insightful work of Richard Hofstadter’s American Political Tradition, 1948.) Bill Clinton’s new model democratic party, with its outreach to China and its undermining of American labor, its unifying of the labor market via welfare reform, its financial deregulation and its clear anti-statism/big government declaration, cemented the remaining pieces of the Reagan legacy, assuring that the tools necessary to fight global warming (and the financial crisis) would no longer be available in a scope adequate to the new crises.
In many ways, the Right’s fears about Global Warming governmental activism, echo and reflect the fears of the federal government which the Antebellum South expressed, especially its chief ideologue, John C. Calhoun. No matter what the issue concerning the exercise of federal power: banking, tariffs, internal improvements, a government powerful enough to carry out those missions had the potential to tamper with slavery. War, especially war for more land, useful for the expansion of slavery as well as that of yeomanry farming, was a different matter. So much in the same way that an all-out effort to combat Global Warming threatens the nature of contemporary capitalism (and therefore key aspects of the American Dream that equate financial success with good character) by giving environmentalists and scientists a new standing and offering a critique of existing goals, values and lifestyles – and the direction of investment now controlled by Wall Street (including private equity capital, the shadow banking system and hedge funds) – the South of the 1850’s was threatened by what was increasingly viewed as a “radical” new economy in the North.
I’ll finish my point with one very recent news item buried on the bottom of page B6 of the New York Times Business section (June 20, 2013). It stated that “Michael Froman, a senior White House economic adviser and classmate of President Obama at Harvard Law School…won Senate confirmation to be the next United States trade representative…The vote was 93-4.” With grand European and Pacific (the TransPacific Partnership) trade matters at hand, this was an appointment of significance, as were the two additional biographical details stated at the very end of the AP story: “Mr. Froman worked as Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin’s chief of staff during the Clinton administration. He was a managing partner at Citigroup and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations before joining the Obama administration.” Now how could this happen at a time of otherwise total gridlock? It can only be explained by the existence, in certain core economic matters, of a consensus between the Center and the Right which escapes what we have come to expect in most other matters: total stalemate.
But let me be clear, since I write from the left, not the Center: this economic consensus between the Center and the Right is coming at the expense of the common man, not just here but in Europe and geographical spaces around the globe, and although we have seen and heard Lincoln invoked and celebrated, and will hear much more of that living through the 150th anniversary of the Civil War years (and Spielberg has “spoken” already, hasn’t he?), the best of Lincoln’s “free labor” economics was “born and raised” in the 1830’s and 1840’s, the “classical” years, the Utopian years of “the producers,” the small farmer, the small merchant, the local manufacturer. When the economic Right sketches out its ideal world, which it rarely does in clear historical terms, accompanied by, in this policy area, at least, the Libertarians, this is the time they are really talking about, even if one never hears them name it, despite Mr. Rove’s admiration for President McKinley and his Gilded Age."
Now it just so happens that I have a personal history on trade deals that goes all the way back to the “Mother of All” Bad Trade Deals, NAFTA, in the early 1990’s, which overlaps with my environmental career. I never thought the two would come up again, especially after I landed in Frostburg, MD in late August of 2014. Two months later, I was reading Reyna Grande’s book, the one with the wonderfully evocative title, The Distance Between Us, a title for all Americans and nearly every “situation” in our country at this time, with a veritable Swiss Army knife’s range of applications. Certainly here in Western Maryland, it applies to the way citizen’s feel about their chances in Annapolis; and who doesn’t feel that way about our chances in Washington, DC? Grande’s book also was chosen to be the selection of the cultural apparatus called “One Maryland.” I speculate that it was voted for with the hope that it would provide a supportive emotional angle from an immigrant-American Dream success story that would make the Right, and maybe the broader culture, reconsider its hard-heartedness. Did the book “lean in” towards the Democratic Party’s own inclinations? I think that’s a fair reading and the defense will be that she tells a very moving story and tells it very well, powerfully and simply. I liked the book, but I noted in a formal review that it left some very important issues out, left them out entirely. And one was NAFTA. And here’s my story, unpublished still, so this is its first full daylight. I’m speaking to Reyna Grande in the first person, during an imagined coffee hour:
"I couldn’t help but notice that in all your 322 pages, you never once mentioned the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, which was so much in the American press and our politics from the late 1980’s right up to its Congressional passage in 1993 – and beyond. In one sense, I understand. You left Mexico in 1985, and were in your early teens in California when this debate moved center stage, and had your hands full learning a new language and meeting the demands of your father. More than enough.
Yet it is hard to understand the world of immigration and the backlash against it in the U.S. without talking about it. Promises were made in Washington and Mexico City that the agreement would help keep Mexicans inside their country working at new jobs, and would ease the tensions inside the U.S., the costs of caring for immigrants and the costs of jobs taken by them. Neither has turned out to be true. And I have my own NAFTA story to share. During my decade long environmental career in New Jersey, I had the honor of being asked to head a delegation of union and environmental leaders to meet with our influential Congressman, Richard Zimmer, a Yale law school graduate and a rising star in the NJ Republican Party. We were opposed to NAFTA, he was leaning towards supporting it, but was formally undecided if I recall correctly. The meeting was in December, that much I am certain of because it was an unusual time for a meeting like that. I think the year was 1992. What I remember the most was his personal pledge based upon a meeting he had with the Mexican President, Carlos Salinas de Gortari that our worries would be taken care of. Carlos Salinas was getting the stamp of approval from the U.S. leadership, elected officials and the private sector. Not only were his economic policy inclinations getting the nod, but there was also an emphatic endorsement of his character.
Flash forward now with me to my new home in Maryland, in 2006. I was a member of a “progressive” book club of mostly left leaning Democrats who had been demoralized by the electoral defeats of 2000 and 2004. I had successfully persuaded the club to read Jeff Faux’s The Global Class War: How America’s Bipartisan Elite Lost our Future – and What It Will Take to Win it Back (2006) Despite the ferocious sounding title, Jeff is personally not like that and his analysis, while tough by the standards of the Center-Right economic consensus that had been evolving ever since 1980, is still gracious and understanding, if not quite forgiving towards people whose policies have harmed many around the world, people like Robert Rubin. Long before Thomas Piketty came out with his magisterial summary of the results of these terribly skewed policies in the spring of 2013 (Capital in the 21st Century), Jeff Faux had understood where peasants in Mexico and workers in the U.S. stood in the new world order, the one led by “the party of Davos,” and its “happy faced social Darwinism,” which was initially sold to the American people by Ronald Reagan. And he knew where they were headed: down. But what helped me argue for this book’s relevance was the fact that he spent a lot of time explaining the run up to and passage of NAFTA, both inside Mexico and the U.S. Jeff is fluent enough also on the issues between the two countries to have been selected as an official observer to the fraught Mexican presidential election of 1994, fraught in the sense that the previous one, in 1988, is widely acknowledged as having been stolen by none other than the PRI and its candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the very same man Congressman Zimmer was selling to me a few years later.
And the man who lost that 1988 presidential election to Salinas, a dissident challenger who broke away from the ruling party, the PRI, to challenge him, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas? Faux quotes Enrique Krauze’s judgement upon him favorably. I now quote from Krauze’s 1997 book, Mexico: Biography of Power, a fuller quote than Faux provides:
‘The public would never know the real results of those elections… At the height of his presidency, Salinas de Gortari ordered the records – hidden away in the cellars of the Legislature – to be burned. It is hard to believe they did not contain the evidence of his defeat. Cuauhtemoc Cardenas struggled tenaciously – in the public forum – against what he considered to be the theft of the country. An order from him would have sent Mexico up in flames. But perhaps in memory of his father, the missionary general, a man of strong convictions but not a man of violence, he did the country a great service by sparing it a possible civil war. Instead he formed a new political party of the left. Its name was also a commitment: the PRD, the Party of Democratic Revolution.’ (Pages 770-772.)
Reyna Grande, please bear with me a bit longer, you are so kind to have me over for coffee, and to listen so well, and I am hardly the one to give a talk to you on Mexican history, being only a reader of, and not a scholar on the subject, but sometimes matters unfold that way. And honestly, the book you chose to write, from the perspective of your childhood, invites me to at least fill in some of the context which you could not, in fidelity to your world as a young child in Mexico, and then as a young teenager in Los Angeles, as the events I mention unfolded, 1988-1994. So they would begin just three years after you entered the U.S. in 1985, when you were twelve years old. You chose to write an almost purely personal story and you have done a wonderful job of that, and the heavens, and literary historians too, surely know how hard it is to mix the personal with the political – the combination rarely succeeds as either when attempted. But your fine book, and books in general, none-the-less still intersect with the personal paths of their readers in ways unknown and unintended by the author, and sometimes that sends the readers back to scour their own memories, the crossroads of their own lives, personal and political. So, please, Reyna, bear with me a little while longer.
What also caught my attention about Jeff Faux’s book was his strong suggestion that the U.S. political and business elites knew of, and hid, their knowledge of the “baggage” that Carlos Salinas carried with him into office, and did so to help sell him and NAFTA to the U.S public, because, at the time, they came wrapped together. And of course that baggage was the connection between his father and his brother with the drug cartels. Salinas, after the 1994 elections, and the collapse of the peso, would have to flee abroad to escape the legal and economic disasters that followed in his wake, just after he formally left office. Now the personal side to this for me was that I still remembered, fourteen or fifteen years later, upon reading Faux’s book, especially the detailed case made in Chapter 2, “ ‘Good Jobs’ and Other Global Deceptions,” those assurances that Congressman Zimmer had given us, that he could personally vouch for Carlos Salinas and NAFTA. Whether the Congressman had himself known the troubling facts about Salinas, and was part of the snow job, I’ll probably never know, but this is the story of when my own career crossed that of Mexican history."
And that, Senator Cardin, is a bit of the life, just a glimpse, of one of your constituents who is not very happy with your support of Fast Track. I’m a citizen with a memory, although strong memories in America are not a culturally adaptive feature, at least not in certain historical circumstances.
Best to all my readers,
Bill Neil
Frostburg, MD