The Sting, which came out in 1973, was the second great movie starring
Paul Newman and
Robert Redford. The first, of course, was
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969, but it is
The Sting we want to talk about because it has a moral, sort of, which is applicable here, sort of.
The title of the film may have been "the sting," but if there is a single word that dominates the film it is "con." It is a rich word, and no single synonym really sums it up, but "swindle" comes close. Newman's character, Henry Gondorff, is the more seasoned con man. Redford's character, Johnny Hooker, more the apprentice. The wonderfully mean character they want to swindle is Doyle Lonnegan, played by
Robert Shaw.
Relatively early on Newman offers this advice:
"You gotta keep Lonnegan's con, even after you spent his money."
It is good advice and doesn't just apply to dishonest transactions. As most good salesmen will tell you -- reinforced by their company's advertising -- "Your last purchase with us was a great investment (just as your next one will be)."
NAFTA's big problem was that really no effort was ever made to keep the con of the American electorate after the deal was done. There are several strands to that rope. One of them, of course, is that no one was elected to negotiate an FTA with Mexico, the new element of NAFTA. A second is that a third party candidate,
H. Ross Perot, managed to garner a whopping 18.9 percent of the popular vote by running against NAFTA in the presidential election that came after NAFTA had largely been negotiated but before it was implemented. That was in 1992.
There is one more strand that needs to be mentioned. It is just as real but harder to put your finger on than the other two. And it is this. Over the last century, American politicians have regrettably been increasingly quite successful in their efforts to shield the public from unpleasantness, especially unpleasantness that might hurt candidates at the ballot box. In the Vietnam War, they first gave the middle class draft deferments and then went to an all volunteer Army. In the environmental arena, it was polluter pays. Citizens need not worry. The companies would take care of it. And as for NAFTA, well, people don't like it. So we won't talk about it.
Whatever one might think of candidate Trump's extreme anti-NAFTA language, it provoked a national conversation, and that conversation has, among other things, begun to bring out just how important NAFTA has become to the United States. Earlier TTALK Quotes took note of some of the sectors that have become highly dependent on the North American and particularly the Mexican market over the course of the last 23 years. Later today, we will highlight another such sector, namely U.S. pork producers.
Our impression is that these discussions have begun to reshape the public's view of NAFTA, and they have clearly had a demonstrably salutary effect on policy. The widely shared first and, we think, accurate impression of the NAFTA negotiating objectives published by USTR on Monday is that they are indeed designed to upgrade and improve a valuable agreement and not, as many feared, to destroy it. That is not to say that these objectives are not ambitious. They are. Nor is it to say that the negotiations that are set to begin next month will not be tough. They will be. There is also every reason to believe, however, that in the end they will be successful.
We will conclude this entry with something
Nick Giordano of the National Pork Producers Council said at the GBD NAFTA event on May 25. It was during the final Q&A session.. A reporter asked what would happen if the negotiations failed. Mr. Giordano said he thought a genuine failure of the talks, an end to NAFTA, would trigger a farm crisis in the United States. The heart of his response, however, was more positive. He said:
"The way I look at this, North America is the low-cost production platform for agriculture -- really for manufacturing as well. So the opportunity... There's opportunity all over the world, but the greatest opportunity is in the Asia Pacific Region. It's in Asia. They need our [North American] products there. And so, we benefit by working together. We benefit by further harmonizing our standards. ..."
