Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Arguments against the Free Trade Agreement. With Canada. 1987

As I was listening to some of the Congressional proceedings regarding NAFTA, I came across this video from 1987 in which Senators William Cohen (Republican) and George Mitchell (Democrat) of Maine argue against the free trade agreement with Canada on account of subsidies, especially to agriculture industry, by Canadian government. It is worth listening to.

Actually, the FTA with Canada did not provoke much discussion in the US. It, apparently, was front page stuff in Canada. Obviously, they were dead scared that the US would ruin them completely, and maybe even annex them. Maybe those fears continue to this day!

Random tangents:
William Cohen went on to become the Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton. His wife, Janet Langhart, is, among other things, a playwright. It was when her one-act play Anne & Emmett was to be screened at the US Holocaust Museum that James von Brunn shot Museum Special Police Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns.The premise of the play is quite interesting - an imaginary conversation between Emmett Till and Anne Frank!


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