Hurricane Dolly is poised to strike the Gulf Coast near the Texas-Mexico border later today, maybe even escalating to a Category 2 storm. About 1.5 million Texans stand in the storm's projected path, and the governor of Tamaulipas, Mexico is planning to evacuate 23,000 people -- a reminder that nature knows no borders.

The storm is expected to hit 45 minutes east of Brownsville, the biggest city in the Rio Grande Valley. Similar to New Orleans, Brownsville is protected by a system of levees, in this case managed by the International Boundary and Water Commission. They were rebuilt after Hurricane Beulah devastated the area in 1967, killing 58 people and causing $1 billion in damage.

But with up to 15 inches of rain quickly dumped on the area, officials are afraid the levees will be breached, causing flooding damage reminiscent of Katrina:

"We could have a triple-decker problem here," Cavazos told a meeting of more than 100 county and local officials Tuesday. "We believe that those (levees) will be breached if it continues on the same track. So please stay away from those levees."

Also like New Orleans, the people who live on the Gulf's Texas-Mexico border are not economically well-equipped to withstand a storm's devastation. I first ran across Brownsville when covering environmental issues in 1992, when an epidemic of babies born without brains struck neighborhoods on both sides of the border. As Time magazine later reported:

From 1988 to '92, 25 children were born with the spinal-nerve defect called spina bifida; more than 30 others had almost no brain at all--a related and fatal neural defect called anencephaly. "It would look like somebody took a knife and just whacked the top of their head off," said Brownsville physician Manuel Guajardo.

Public health experts blamed the massive pollution coming from U.S.-owned companies in Matamoros, just across the border, where over 100 companies operated in maquiladoras to take advantage of cheap labor and loose environmental laws -- an ominous foreshadowing of NAFTA.

Families of the dead and deformed babies filed a lawsuit that included General Motors among its targets, which was found to be using four times the amount of toxic solvents in its Mexico plant as it did in a comparable plant in Dayton, Ohio. A massive study never conclusively proved the cause of the health tragedy but days before the case was scheduled for trial the companies settled for $17 million.

Outside the cities, most residents are tied to the Rio Grande's agricultural economy. 90% of the population is Latino, largely Mexican-American. A close-knit region with a strong cultural identity (and a rich labor organizing history), most live in the low-lying 2,000 colonias that often lack basic utilities and water, making them uniquely vulnerable to a storm.

As always, whether the storm Hurricane Dolly becomes a "natural disaster" or now will depend on very human -- not "natural" -- factors: the politics and economics of the Rio Grande before the storm hits, and the effectiveness of the government response after it strikes.

IMAGE: Hurricane Dolly, NOAA

Labels: brownsville, colonias, hurricane dolly, hurricanes, mexico, NAFTA, natural disasters, rio grande valley, texas

For a hot minute, our country actually had a debate about NAFTA over the last couple weeks, thanks to sparring between the Clinton and Obama campaigns heading into this week's Ohio and Texas primaries.

As columnist David Sirota points out, the debate wasn't particularly heavy on substance. But it was refreshing to see at least some discussion over a set of policies which have caused, on net, the loss of some 900,000 U.S. jobs and helped decimate manufacturing in Southern states like North Carolina and Texas.

But for all the talk about the world being flat and the need to think globally, this election season's NAFTA mini-debate was surprisingly U.S.-centric and parochial. In a short but excellent piece, Bill Fletcher of Black Commentator observes that NAFTA's impact beyond U.S. borders has been nearly totally ignored:

What is critical for us to grasp on this side of the Rio Grande River is that NAFTA has had a devastating impact on the Mexican economy. Through forcing the Mexican farmer to compete with USA farmers, rural Mexico’s economy has been turned upside down. The reality is that the Mexican farmer has been unable to compete, and as a result there began - in the mid 1990s - a migration of rural Mexicans into the larger Mexican cities. Finding few job opportunities, the migration moved north toward the USA. This was accompanied by the impact of NAFTA on the Mexican public sector, which also suffered severe body blows, thereby undermining what little social safety net the people of Mexico had.

Taking a global view on global deals like NAFTA not only makes sense -- that's the whole point, right? -- but Fletcher observes that it also helps us better understand that other hot-button political topic, immigration:

This side of the NAFTA equation is critical to discuss because it helps us understand why hundreds of thousands of Mexicans chose to leave their homes and head north. Contrary to the xenophobic, anti-immigrant rhetoric many of us have heard, it was not because "everyone wants to be in America" but rather as a direct result of policies initiated by the USA and their allies in Ottawa and Mexico City.

Maybe Tom Friedman needs to spend some time in Chiapas.

Labels: barack obama, bill fletcher, black commentator, david sirota, hillary clinton, jobs, mexico, NAFTA, thomas friedman

Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards spent years trying to make NAFTA and the impact of global investment deals (mis-labeled "free trade" deals) a major election-year issue. But it's taken a recent spat this week between front-runners Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to inject this important issue into the political debate.

As columnist David Sirota noted earlier this week, Obama has been embracing many of Edwards' populist themes since Edwards left the race, including attacking Clinton's record on NAFTA and investment deals. Here's this from a recent Obama speech:

It's a Washington where decades of trade deals like NAFTA and China have been signed with plenty of protections for corporations and their profits, but none for our environment or our workers who've seen factories shut their doors and millions of jobs disappear; workers whose right to organize and unionize has been under assault for the last eight years.

As we've reported before, NAFTA and its legislative spawn like CAFTA are hot topics in the South, where these deals have wreaked much of their havoc.

In 2005, the Economic Policy Institute did a breakdown of which states had fared the worst since NAFTA was signed in 1993. Out of the 1 million + jobs that were "displaced" by NAFTA, here are the states that lost the most in terms of their total employment:

Michigan (-63,148, -1.44%)
Indiana (-35,157, -1.19%)
Mississippi (-11,630, -1.03%)
Tennessee (-25,588, -0.94%)
Ohio (-49,886, -0.92%)
Rhode Island (-4,482, -0.91%)
Wisconsin (-25,403, -0.90%)
Arkansas (-10,321, -0.89%)
North Carolina (-34,150, -0.89%)
New Hampshire (-5,502, -0.87%)

So Southern voters are listening carefully when Obama charges Clinton with saying that NAFTA was a "boon" to our nation's economy. But did she really think that?

Sam Stein of the Huffington Post says that Hillary Clinton privately had misgivings about NAFTA but couldn't voice them for fear of derailing a cornerstone of her husband's economic agenda. For evidence, he looks to quotes like this one from Clinton biographer Carl Bernstein on CNN:

"'Bill,'" [Bernstein] recalled Hillary Clinton as saying, "'you are doing Republican economics when you are doing NAFTA.' She was against NAFTA. And if she would somehow come out and tell the real story of what she fought for in the White House and failed in a big argument with her husband she would end up moving much closer to those [John] Edwards followers."

But Sirota has plenty of counter-evidence, in the form of Hillary Clinton's enthusiastic public statements about NAFTA's promise:

Hillary Clinton has made statements unequivocally trumpeting NAFTA as the greatest thing since sliced bread. The Buffalo News reports that back in 1998, Clinton attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and thanked praised corporations for mounting "a very effective business effort in the U.S. on behalf of NAFTA." Yes, you read that right: She traveled to Davos to thank corporate interests for their campaign ramming NAFTA through Congress.

On November 1, 1996, United Press International reported that on a trip to Brownsville, Texas, Clinton "touted the president's support for the North American Free Trade Agreement, saying it would reap widespread benefits in the region."

The Associated Press followed up the next day noting that Hillary Clinton touted the fact that "the president would continue to support economic growth in South Texas through initiatives such as the North American Free Trade Agreement."

In her memoir, Clinton wrote, "Senator Dole was genuinely interested in health care reform but wanted to run for President in 1996. He couldn't hand incumbent Bill Clinton any more legislative victories, particularly after Bill's successes on the budget, the Brady bill and NAFTA."

Sirota has a good point. We can always second-guess how a politician privately feels about an issue. Do they really agree? What do they have to say for political reasons?

But at the end of the day, all we have on the record are a candidate's public statements and actions. And in this case, if Hillary Clinton had misgivings about NAFTA, she didn't go out of her way to demonstrate that to the world; in fact, she did the opposite.

Labels: barack obama, Election 2008, free trade, hillary clinton, NAFTA