A failing grade on global trade: NAFTA's a disasta': what to do? More free trade, anyone?

A 10-YEAR PROGRESS REPORT ON NAFTA WAS RELEASED LAST November. The results were not quite as advertised by the free market priesthood who foisted the North American Free Trade Agreement on a skeptical public during the Clinton watch. Turns out that the good jobs that NAFTA promised never quite materialized, though, according to the Economic Policy Institute, almost 900,000 manufacturing jobs indeed headed--Perot-like--south of the border before leaving on a fast plane to China.

That's not to say that new wealth wasn't created within the free trade zone that now encloses the United States, Canada, and Mexico. All three countries enjoyed more trade and some minor economic growth because of the plan. Where did that new wealth end up? Certainly not in dying manufacturing zones across the U.S. nor in the abandoned cornfields of indigenous farmers in southern Mexico.

Where could it have gone? Perhaps executives at Nordstrom, Brooks Brothers, and other high-end retailers could tell us. Turns out that while they did gangbuster business last December, your Wal-Marts and Targets--the low end of the U.S. retail world--had themselves a sorry little Christmas. Most of us in the working classes apparently didn't feel quite as flush as our Rodeo Drive comrades.

Global trade may generate wealth, but it doesn't control how it is distributed. Too often the rewards of international commerce and the economic growth it generates are reserved for the world's already wealthy. In fact, despite this nation's improving productivity, high growth, and increasing global trade, middle-class incomes have hardly budged in 30 years. The federal minimum wage of $5.15 has not been raised since 1997, and now has one third less buying power than it did at its peak value in 1968--perhaps the last time the wage standard could have been described as a true antipoverty measure. Now it's more like a keep-you-in-poverty measure.

It's fair to wonder where the trickle-down is from all this great free trade stuff and why we should be excited that more of it, the Free Trade of the Americas Act, is on the way. But raise such doubts about the omni-beneficence of the free market juggernaut and you will be accused of being "against trade" as if commerce itself had somehow developed an artificial intelligence and decided to pile on the miseries of the poor. Could it be that it is not commerce but the outcomes of a system that seems rigged to send the wealth of all nations in one direction that concerns critics of free trade?

Worse, when confronted by less-than-terrific results from free market experimentation, wizened First World economists suddenly reanimate as 19th-century snake oil salesmen, prescribing more of the same tonic that ails us: "Been trying it for 20 years and your people are still starving, your foreign debt is even larger, and your politicians more corrupt? Hmm. Sounds like you could use a little more free market, son. Here, let me get you a new bottle; I've got one left, behind this big, fat farm subsidy."

Behind all the rhetorical malarkey about the free market and its cultural kissing cousin, America's radical individualism, is a blunt refusal to respond to that difficult, dogged question asked by a guy named Cain, lo these many years ago: "Am I my brother's keeper?"

SORRY, BUT YES, YOU--WE--ARE. AND HOWEVER BAD THINGS might be here in the middle of America's jobless recovery, most of us have a lot farther to fall than folks who are already living on less than $2 or $3 a day. The cultural and personal collateral damage from NAFTA will haunt Mexico for generations, and other jolting dislocations are likely in other parts of the world as the free trade drumbeat sounds in the latest labor-rich but capital-poor nation. Wouldn't it be better to devise a global trading system that mitigates rather than magnifies the world's existing inequities and indignities?

If the free market ain't working to end poverty the way its cheerleaders say it should, it's incumbent upon us to try and figure out why, where, and how the market is failing--while doing our best for the people it is failing the most. I'm betting it's failing because too many invisible hands out there have palmed a few extra aces. It's going to take a whole world of effort to get them to put their cards aside and begin playing fair on free trade with the rest of us.

By KEVIN CLARKE, senior editor at U.S. CATHOLIC and managing editor of online products at Claretian Publications.