Jeff Faux

During the 1993 battle over the North American Free Trade Agreement, the proposal’s promoters’ most politically effective argument was that NAFTA would keep Mexicans out of the United States. As political writer Elizabeth Drew later observed, “Anti-immigration was a sub-theme used, usually sotto voce, by the treaty’s supporters.” The voce was not always sotto. “We […]

Two political movements representing distinct visions of the global economy will hold their annual conventions the last week of January. The World Economic Forum — an organization of some 1,000 multinational corporations — will meet in Davos, a picture book ski resort in the Swiss Alps. The forum was organized 30 years ago to provide […]

The business interests that promoted the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have gotten their money’s worth. Since the agreement went into effect in January 1994, American and Canadian corporations have moved production and jobs south to take advantage of cheap Mexican labor. Subsidized agribusinesses in both northern countries have blown small-scale Mexican farmers out […]

The Democratic party — like Enron, the FBI and the Catholic Church — is a dysfunctional institution that cannot reform itself from the inside. If the party were a well-run corporation whose products weren’t selling, its board of directors or its CEO would bring in outsiders to give an honest assessment of what was going […]

The value of the U.S. dollar has dropped more than 15 percent against the euro since February. That may not sound like a big deal — a bit of bad news for American tourists this summer, a bit of good news for American manufacturers selling things abroad. But, in fact, it could be a sign […]

On the day television beamed around the world images of tearful Enron employees stunned at the looting of their 401(k)s by the company’s top brass, pension reform became a top congressional priority. As the scandal rippled across corporate America, even George W. Bush could sense the smoldering class resentment. “What’s fair on the top floor […]

The Enron scandal seems like a heaven-sent opportunity to reform the business excesses of our recent Gilded Age. But the fetish of markets retains a powerful grip on the American political psyche. Already, corporate lobbyists, elevating stock-market gambling to the level of a fundamental human right, are undercutting modest efforts to prevent future abuses of […]

There is a moment in every successful con game when the victim thinks that he or she has gotten the better of the deal. Thus, going into the 2000 elections, Democrats congratulated themselves on having become the party of fiscal responsibility. Urged on by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Bill Clinton had made eliminating the […]

Pulled along by the war on terrorism, the multinational corporate campaign to deregulate the global economy seems back on course–at least for the moment. By shrewdly buying votes and appealing to patriotism, the Bush administration engineered the jump start of a stalled new round of trade talks at the World Trade Organization in mid-November. Three […]