Hilarious, and very nicely done. Robert Reich on Conan O'Brien:
An addendum: Did that NAFTA reference catch your ear? It did mine. Reich has been one of the good guys during this economic crisis, but not so much during his time as Secretary of Labor. He was indeed a big NAFTA guy.
Click here for Gerald McEntee's 2008 take on Reich and NAFTA. McEntee is President of AFSCME, the huge government employee's union.
The best I can find in Reich's NAFTA defense is this exchange from Democracy Now on June 18 of this year (my emphasis):
JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to bring back Robert Reich, and we’ve only got a couple of minutes before your feed goes down there, but I’d like to ask you about another issue: NAFTA. Many years ago, back in the early '90s, when you and other members of the Clinton administration were going around trying to convince the editorial boards of newspapers to back NAFTA, we had a spirited debate at the Daily News editorial board meeting over the issue. I'm wondering your assessment. Did Mexico benefit from NAFTA that the Clinton administration pushed? And in retrospect, what do you think was good or bad about the deal?Small comfort; we both got screwed. He's a free trader, so take him with a grain of salt. Great sense of humor though.
ROBERT REICH: Juan, in retrospect, I think both sides, those who were very concerned about loss of jobs due to NAFTA in the United States and also those in Mexico and also in the United States, such as the Clinton administration, who thought that NAFTA was the best thing since sliced bread, both of those sides were proven wrong. Those jobs didn’t go to Mexico. They went to China. But the one winner in NAFTA, and a big winner, was Mexico in terms of the peso crisis. I think that peso crisis, you may remember, in 1998, would have been much worse, were it not for NAFTA.
GP
