Conservative commentator Pat Buchanan wants Republicans to know that not just liberals oppose the North American Free Trade Agreement.
"NAFTA is a fraud. It's not a free trade agreement at all," Buchanan said at a news conference Thursday with other conservatives.Prominent Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas and former Housing Secretary Jack Kemp, plan to help President Clinton push the treaty through Congress this fall.
It was negotiated by the Bush administration, and proponents say it will create the world's largest free trade zone, from the Yucatan to the Yukon, boosting the economies of the United States, Mexico and Canada.
However, liberals and union leaders say it will encourage U.S. companies to relocate their operations to low-wage Mexico. Environmentalists worry that it will not do enough to force Mexico to clean up pollution on its side of the border, despite side agreements negotiated by the Clinton administration.
Billionaire Ross Perot, an independent presidential candidate last year, also is waging a vigorous campaign against the treaty and has found an ally in civil rights leader Jesse Jackson.
Perot, who has been campaigning vigorously against the treaty, told a Thursday town meeting in the Washington suburb of Rockville, Md., that the only people who will benefit are Wall Street speculators and businessmen planning to move their operations to Mexico to cut labor costs.
And he told delegates at the annual convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that the first jobs that will go to Mexico will be those that otherwise might be funneled into inner-city economic development in the United States.
Jackson praised Perot's comments, saying the proposed treaty amounts to "a slippery slope southward" of American jobs and will lead to the closing of U.S. factories.
Buchanan said many conservatives oppose the treaty because it will make it difficult for the United States to roll back environmental rules that are burdening businesses and because it will infringe on U.S. sovereignty by creating a "trinational bureaucracy" to enforce the agreement.
"It's an insider's deal for the leveraged buyout of American liberty," he said.
Buchanan, who challenged George Bush for the 1992 GOP presidential nomination, said Republicans are making a mistake by allowing Perot to capitalize on the issue.
"The people are against this treaty and I think Republicans ought to listen to them," he said.