However powerful the corporate lobby is, if those who supposedly represent the people pass a rule they can't pass the buck when it comes to the consequences of that rule.
...but look at how it works in practice. For example, in Honduras the US military and intelligence was tasked with millions of dollars to interdict arms supplies between the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and Salvadorean guerrillas. But there was a rule - the Boland Amendment - which said that US efforts were not to have the purpose of overthrowing the Nicaraguan government. Sponsoring the exiled, US funded Nicaraguan Contras to harass the Sandinistas without pressurizing their destabilizing was an exercise in contradictory semantics.
If in practice for decades, US companies controlled most of the exports of Central American republics, then - whatever words might be used on Capitol Hill - expecting those companies or the officials of those countries' governments to stop acting in those companies' interests was unrealistic. Of course, some form of words could easily be found to describe what a convenient official aspiration might be, but the underlying realities would not be significantly changed.
Similarly if Mexico, part of NAFTA, has for decades had much lower wages than the US, then it's in the US companies' interests to manufacture in Mexico, and then through NAFTA to have the opportunity to bring manufactured goods tariff-free into the US. No rule or aspiration otherwise - however sincerely cited - can be expected to cause the US corporations to cease to act in their own interests. The alternative would mean virtually abrogating NAFTA and creating a union-driven fortress US economy with import controls, in unrealistic defiance of globalization. The CIA would never buy this.
