North American Free Trade Agreement

Thirty years ago, when Detroit was the world's undisputed car-making capital and Canadians streamed through the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel every day to work in its factories, Mexico had virtually no automotive industry. Decades of government-industry coordination that rivals the cooperation among Japanese leaders and business executives have changed that scenario.

Robert Mosbacher, who served as U.S. Commerce secretary under his close friend, President George H.W. Bush, and helped lay the foundation for the North American Free Trade Agreement, has died. He was 82. Mosbacher died Sunday in Houston after a yearlong fight with pancreatic cancer, family spokesman Jim McGrath said. Mosbacher, a Texas oilman, was a powerful Republican fundraiser who served at the top echelons of Bush's presidential campaigns and most recently was a general campaign chairman for Sen. John McCain's 2008 GOP presidential race.

Among the late deals struck by the White House to help NAFTA passage: Mexico agreed to safeguards that will limit sugar exports to this country if NAFTA wreaks havoc in the U.S. market. The White House made specific pledges to take corrective action if American farmers are hard hit by cheaper Mexican vegetables and citrus, or unfair competition from Canadian wheat and peanut butter. Next Stop: The Senate The Senate is expected to approve NAFTA within days.

Thanks to the latest protectionist move by Congress to dodge our free-trade obligations with Mexico, in six to eight weeks, more than 20,000 pounds of California strawberries that ordinarily would be headed south of the border will have nowhere to go. The 80,000 people employed by the industry, however, know exactly where their jobs will be headed -- into thin air.

The fierce battle that U.S. unions waged against the North American Free Trade Agreement, despite ending in bitter defeat, may give new vigor to the American labor movement. Unions emerged from the fight against NAFTA with new potential allies, both at home and across international borders.

Let there be no mistake, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton deserves credit for having finally endorsed--however conditionally--the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement among the United States, Mexico and Canada. There are significant factions in the Democratic Party that would just as soon their presidential candidate oppose NAFTA outright. But the qualifications in Clinton's endorsement raise questions.

U.S. and Mexican negotiators have reached a crucial agreement that will allow U.S. banks, insurance companies and brokerage houses to operate in Mexico, moving the two countries one major step closer economically, a senior Bush Administration official said Monday.

Jim Torrance is one of the lucky ones. A 24-year veteran of the Hoover vacuum cleaner plant in a gritty industrial suburb of Glasgow, Torrance will still have a job next year--but only because his union was forced in January to make substantial contract concessions so that Hoover would not close the plant. Workers at the Hoover plant near Dijon, France, never had that chance.

It's Friday night in the Rio Grande Valley, and a weekend bucket brigade is lining up to get drinking water from the coin-operated spigot at Watermill Express. With its cute windmill and 25-cent-a-gallon charge, Watermill is one of several commercial outlets serving thousands of U.S. border residents who do not have potable tap water or, in many cases, tap water at all.

A painfully divided House of Representatives approved the North American Free Trade Agreement by an unexpectedly large margin Wednesday night, ending a hard-fought battle that grew into a referendum on the fundamental changes sweeping the American economy. The vote was 234 to 200, 16 more than the 218 needed for passage. The Senate is expected to act on the measure within days. Passage there is not in doubt.

Congress has hit the brakes on a Bush administration program to give Mexican trucks wider access to U.S. roads, putting President Obama in the middle of a politically sensitive trade dispute. A $410-billion spending bill that passed the Senate on a voice vote Tuesday would end funding for the cross-border trucking program, one of the most contentious issues to arise out of the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement. The House approved the spending measure last month.

President Obama's trade agenda is nothing if not ambitious. His just-released policy statement, titled "Making Trade Work for American Families," ties trade to energy efficiency and environmental concerns, entrepreneurship and market competition, workers' rights and global competitiveness. Of course, it remains to be seen how all of these interests will fit into one coherent policy.

Campaigning in rust-belt Ohio during last year's Democratic primaries, Barack Obama promised to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, despised by organized labor. But as he prepares for a seven-hour visit to Canada on Thursday, his first foreign trip as president, Obama is sounding much more cautious about altering the deal.

On Thursday, two days after triumphantly signing an economic stimulus measure that he had fought for nearly since taking office, President Obama will go to Ottawa to apologize for it. As is traditional for U.S. presidents, Obama will make his first official foreign trip to Canada, this country's biggest trading partner. There, he will quickly learn that the protectionist sentiments so popular with Democrats on this side of the border don't play at all well to the north.

President Bush and the leaders of Mexico and Canada delivered a forceful message Tuesday to the next president of the United States: Don't mess with NAFTA. Their warnings against tinkering with the North American Free Trade Agreement brought them into the presidential race on the day Pennsylvanians voted in a Democratic primary contest that focused on how free trade has cost their state many factory jobs.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton pledged Tuesday to defeat a free-trade agreement with Colombia, even as her presidential campaign was kept on the defensive by disclosures related to the proposed pact. Her camp acknowledged reports that Clinton's husband, former President Bill Clinton, supports the deal with Colombia. The New York senator's campaign also was hit by another call for the outright ouster of longtime aide Mark Penn.

The U.S. lumber industry, embroiled in a decades-long trade spat with Canada, said it would challenge the constitutionality of a North American Free Trade Agreement dispute settlement system. The Coalition for Fair Lumber Imports said the NAFTA process, called Chapter 19, made findings appealable only to panels of individuals, some of whom are not U.S. citizens and none of whom is accountable within the U.S. government.

Four campaign seasons have come and gone since presidential hopeful H. Ross Perot warned that NAFTA would create a "giant sucking sound" of jobs going to Mexico, and the trade pact is still generating plenty of noise. Calls to renegotiate the 14-year-old deal are rising from both sides of the border. Thousands of protesters paralyzed traffic in Mexico's capital in January to demand a redo of the pact, which they said had hurt Mexican farmers. In the U.S.

Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama have become tough critics of U.S. trade policy as they campaign in Ohio, a state battered by trade-related job losses that holds a crucial presidential primary Tuesday. In most of their exchanges on the issue, each candidate has accused the other of having spoken in positive terms about the North American Free Trade Agreement, a pact that is extremely unpopular among Ohio's blue-collar workers.