The Deindustrialization of America

http://counterpunch.org/macarthur08052011.html

Pro-North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) forces staged on 9 November 1993 what may be remembered as the greatest salesman's trick in televised propaganda. Millions of Americans had just watched CNN's Larry King show, and its "debate" over the ratification of the agreement, between Ross Perot, the anti-Nafta crusader and independent presidential candidate, and then Vice President Al Gore, spokesman for mainstream political and business opinion about free trade and its alleged benefits to the US.

The professional politician Gore had bested the billionaire amateur Perot, but the show wasn't over, and neither was rhetoric about Nafta. CNN followed with a post-debate debate, in which four "experts" argued over the plan of former President George H W Bush and President Bill Clinton for eliminating tariffs and integrating the Mexican, Canadian, and American economies in ways they claimed would bring money and jobs to everybody — a "win-win" scenario. One expert, a soldier for David Ricardo's economic theory of comparative advantage, was Larry Bossidy, leader of the pro-Nafta business lobby and chairman and CEO of Allied Signal, an industrial corporation with worldwide interests, including the Autolite spark plug plant in Fostoria, Ohio.

With many fearing what Perot called the "giant sucking sound" of jobs heading to cheap labour in Mexico if Nafta passed Congress, Bossidy needed to promote the notion that the agreement would bring more work to the Midwestern rust belt, already in steep decline. So, on instructions from Gore's media adviser Carter Eskew, Bossidy held up a plug and pronounced: "I would like to say, about the jobs, this is a spark plug, an Autolite spark plug. It's made in Fostoria, Ohio. We make 18 million of them. We're going to make 25 million of them; the question is, where are we going to make them? Right now you can't sell these in Mexico because there's a 15% tariff... if this Nafta is passed, we'll make these in Fostoria, Ohio... we'll have more jobs... This is a small part of a car. We export 4,000 cars to Mexico today, we'll export 60,000 cars in the first year , that's 15,000 jobs."

As of 1 November 2010 General Motors was a ward of the federal government, the country was in prolonged economic slump, and there were 86 assembly jobs in the Fostoria factory. The remaining Autolite employees were there to make just the ceramic insulators around the plug. The rest of the jobs had moved to a maquilladora in Mexicali, where nearly 600 Mexicans were manufacturing mostly Motorcraft spark plugs, the house brand of Ford Motor Company, healthiest of the Big Three US auto companies.

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