Nakedcapitalism, Topic: “Free Trade” Pacts Were Always About Weakening Nation-States to Promote Rule by Multinationals - Matt Stoller
"Here’s part one of this series on the origins of NAFTA and our current trading regime. It’s amazing what you find in the Congressional Record. For example, you find American political officials (liberal ones, actually) engaged in an actual campaign to get rid of countries with their pesky parochial interests, and have the whole world managed by global corporations. Yup, this actually was explicit in the 1960s, as opposed to today’s passive aggressive arguments which amount to the same thing. Here’s the backstory. As I wrote in part one of this series on the origin of modern American trade policy , the first real mention of NAFTA in the Congressional record that I could find came from a hearing in 1967. This was a Joint Economic Committee hearing conducted just after a major series of global trade talks known as the “Kennedy round”, from 1964-1967. The Kennedy round went quite far in reducing explicit tariffs, and was a capstone to the trading regime of tariff...