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And if you want a solid & superb education on the benefits of trade, then invest a few bucks & the time needed to read & fully understand it by buying & reading a basic text on the subject - like Paul Krugman's (& Maurice Obstfeld): "International Economics: Theory & Policy" 7th ed. 2006. Only informed activism makes the world a better place. Dumb activists do more harm than good.

Free trade is a net good for EVERYONE. What downside there is can be ameliorated by creating high-quality education AND health systems to ensure than no one gets left behind. Democrats should embrace free trade as the undeniably truely progressive force driving the increase of wealth & betterment of life for most people for the past 500 years. Marx was wrong about the immiseration of mankind under capitalism. The parts of the globe which embraced statism, Marxist or otherwise, are the ones where horrendous poverty is still the rule rather than the exception. Capitalism & free trade create wealth, which enlightened & well-informed government can tax to help the few who are temporarily hurt in the wake of their creative-destruction transitions. The anti-trade hysteria of the 1930s made the World Depression worse than it would have otherwise been, thereby creating the breeding grounds for fascism. Progressives must avoid repreating that stupid mistake today.

Amanda,

Which of Rick MacArthur's facts can you challenge?

I've seen claims about how American workers are going to move out of low-paid industrial jobs and into better-paying high-tech jobs from 50 years ago.

According to Paul Krugman, except for the rich, Americans are actually worse off than before Reagan. One of the largest-growing employment sectors in the U.S. is janitors (who clean office buildings), and maids (who clean hotels). Top-level computer jobs are staying here, but entry-level and mid-level programming is moving to the comparative advantage of India.

Take your cell phone example. Nokia is in Finland. Finland has free college education, free health care, and a welfare system that leaves unemployed workers better off than hard-working low-paid retrained workers in the U.S.

You assert that in 30 years the jobs economy will be totally different and better. How do you know? One of the jobs in the green economy (as the WSJ reported) is working in recycling plants, behind conveyor belts, sorting garbage in plastics, metal and unsanitary material, at minimum wage. How do you know that we won't move further into a winner-take-all economy with the very rich and very poor?

eCHANomics: There are a lot of white-collar jobs being outsourced to to India & China, but - for now - they are primarily high-tech manufacturing and back-room finance. The true innovation still occurs in the US, fostered by small compaines and venture capital. However, one doubts whether this combined with a low-pay service sector will sustain the US economy moving forward, without a huge stratification within society. And I'm talking akin to Latin America - not 1% with the wealth.

CAFTA, NAFTA....

these sound like tools to consolidate wealth
and power even further into the hands of very few.
The condition that Costa Rica open it's media markets should be a clue as to what the Agenda is.
Who would be the first trying to get in?
Rupert Murdoch of course. I don't think you have
to know the details of economics to see the big picture.

RC,

Rick MacArthur laid out a lot of facts to support his arguments.

You didn't say anything (except to assert that you're smarter than they are).

If you're so smart, could you tell us exactly where MacArthur is wrong? I'd love to hear a good critique of MacArthur.

eCAHNomics what do you do for a living and how much do you make per year? break it down for us.

Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush sounds like a shill for US Capital interest.
I wonder what else’s El Diario.support?

Boy, nafta was such a huge economic success. Can we expect the same for Central America? Oh Please?

CAFTA negotiations occur in secret and the text is classified "for foreign policy and
national security reasons," it is impossible for anyone outside the directly involved in the
negotiations to analyze what is actually on the table.

Amanda,

I'm an economist too, and I guess you are stuck in theory & haven't been watching what's actually been happening. Those new jobs that you tout are increasingly added in India, China, and other countries with highly educated segments of their populations, but much lower labor costs. Trade and economic integration has always been managed, and you can now see the chaos of not doing that in what is happening to U.S. workers today. Get out of the classroom & look at the data.

This lady sounds like a Neo Liberal. CAFTA

I just came back from Mexico. Nothing but sheer poverty all over the place. There is no real middle class. The few nice houses mixed in with the shacks for houses were there because someone in their family risked their life to go over the border to make money. So how is NAFTA helping anyone but making American companies richer with cheap Mexican labor in Mexico?

When I first heard Bush talk of retraining "US workers"to better fit into the new global marketplace --

-- I couldn't help but picture a slender Asian gentleman showing to a circle of laid off Ohio spark plug workers the correct method to eat rice as a meal.

NAFTA is not a truly tri-directional free trade agreement. It only serves well the interests of US corporations, by helping them stay competitive in a globalized world.CAFTA is the same hoax.

The "free-trade" agreement with Colombia, being pushed by Bush and waiting congress approval, NEEDS to be OPPOSED and SHUT-DOWN. Before approving any commerce agreement with Colombia, conservative, right-wing Colombian President Uribe needs to be held accountable for human rights violations, massacres and dissapearings of scores of population by paramilitary armed militias.

Amanda... excellent point, but the innovation-driven jobs created by a knowledge economy are not available to ex-employees of a spark-plug factory in OH without significant retraining. This aspect is ignored by politicians of all stripes.

Great, now Kathy Lee can make her clothes in Costa Rica.

Costa Rica is famously anti humanitarian.

Harpers Magazine........hm.........is that like National Review? These guys are all the same. Upper East Siders with cigars and brandy and contempt for the "real people" the "little people" and the immigrant. I pity the poor immigrant.

I'm an econ prof, so call me biased, but workers in the US shouldn't be producing spark plugs any more than an i-banker should be farming corn in his NY apartment. Our economy is constantly in flux, from agricultiral to manufacturing, and now from manufacturing into more white collar sectors. We are losing manufacturing jobs, but in the next 20-30 years, we are going to have millions of new jobs in new industries that we don't even know about today. Think back 30 years to the late 70s. Cell phones, computers, Internet, wireless comm, even the tourism industry has expanded and changed.

I think that our jobs economy is going to look totally different in 30 years-- specifically, I think the green-conomy is going to spark industries and jobs we can't even imagine today.

We can't hold on to how our economy operated before. Allowing production and jobs to move to places where it's more efficient, i.e. Mexico, China, and India not only gives US consumers lower prices, but it opens our economy up for new jobs and opportunities.

Brian,

Why not simply put on trade economists who live and breath the data instead of these journalists. Heck I am studying for the Level 2 CFA exam and have a BA in Economics and an MBA and I am more qualified.

The minimum wage for a construction laborer in Mexico in the late 90's was $2.00 per day, now its about $6.00. Has this helped the raft of Mexicans dying to come to the U.S. to work?

To the anti-globalization guy -- WTO, not NAFTA, was the wedge to US-China trade.

Re: "free trade". Trade has never been free. All countries (including U.S.) have developed thru protectionism. China today is a perfect example.

No wonder the mexicans are all runing here to work and build houses and drive cabs with no licenses! At home, they're getting the ol' shaft! Hey can we make a China agreement where we ship jobs there and pay workers a penny a month and a bag of rice? How about it Hilary?

Hey Fred & your "deeper integration of all three economies" ...

Are you aware of the cost of integrating East Germany into West Germany? Is that really your desired outcome?

Tico Times...doesn't he play drums for Bon Jovi?

I heard that spark plug story before. Good story.

In his book, "The Selling of Free Trade: NAFTA, Washington, and the Subversion of American Democracy," Rick MacArthur quotes Larry Bossidy, Allied Signal, who (prompted by Al Gore) said, "This is a spark plug, an Autolite spark plug, it's made in Fostoria, Ohio. We make 18 million of them, we're going to make 25 million of them; the question is, where are we going to make them? Right now, you can't sell these in Mexico because there's a 15 percent tariff. If we can, if this NAFTA is passed, and that tariff is removed, we'll make these in Fostoria, Ohio. We won't have 1,100 jobs, we'll have more jobs. This is a small part of a car. We export 4,000 cars to Mexico today, we'll export 60,000 cars in the first year [of NAFTA], that's 15,000 jobs."

(You can find most of this book free on Google Books.)

Now, as he said, that spark plug plant is laying off workers, and moving production to Mexico where workers make $1 an hour, or China where they make 10 cents an hour.

Good book review in Business Week, 8 May 2000, "Did NAFTA backers bamboozle America?" Paul Magnusson.

I agree that a discussion of our trade agreements is important. But I wish someone --Brian? -- would address the way these debates are being run -- and how they are hijacking a serious discussion of these important issues. Presenting Hillary, Obama and other candidates hypothetical scenarios (that may or not even be accurate or reasonable) and then requiring them to essentially make hard and fast policy pronouncements (words that are guaranteed to come back to haunt them at some future time) in the heat of a debate does not serve our country well. It just adds to the general confusion and misunderstanding of these issues.

Of course, with the major news organizations in charge of these debates -- their agenda is to make or create news that everyone can rehash ad nauseum for days. It is not to create a forum for meaningful discussion. Who would want to talk about that???

Please take a close look at what questions have been asked. How many are about tactics between candidates (he said, she said). How many are theorical or hypothetical scenarios that may or may not be meaningful. How many engender a serious non-partisan discussion. What has really come out from these debates besides isolated sound bites for the next news cycle.

Neither candidate is likely to renegotiate NAFTA, and threats to "opt out" are rhetoric at best. NAFTA is not a great trade deal, but its the deal that was negotiated and that has been in place for the almost 15 years now. The damage of NAFTA is largely already behind us. Renegotiating the deal won't induce companies to reopen factories in the US, and even if it did we would be livid at the prices would have to pay for what they produced.

The more important issue at this point is probably deeper integration of the three economies, especially bringing the Mexican economy up to US and Canadian standards.

As an Obama supporter I'm almost glad he gave such a half-assed answer to the question during the debate last night.

Even with American-like enviro. & workplacae standards, won't Mexico still get business-relocations because its labor costs are lower?

I just hear Rick McArthur say that it's "preposterous" to create social legislation in Mexico from Washington. But isn't this the whole premise of the European Union? To gain access to the benefits of the common European market, potential member states have to engage in political and social reform. This seems to have worked pretty well for the EU. Why can't it work for NAFTA too?

Gee where can we get people to work for .23 cents an hour? Mexico! Yay NAFTA!

Oh boy is she harsh and annoying. What, she wasn't around when her Husband invented and championed NAFTA? Oh, that's not HER experience. I get it. What a harsh shrew.

How real is the NAFTA threat, in comparison with manufacturing jobs going to China and white-collar jobs going to India?

The steel & timber tarrifs are examples of how the US can "opt out".

Cliff
Workers in all three countries are suffering. It's the corps with lower labor costs that are benefitting. We now live in a corportocrisy, where workers don't count.

Obama on NAFTA--it's all kabuki. This from CTV via talkingpointsmemo:

Within the last month, a top staff member for Obama's campaign telephoned Michael Wilson, Canada's ambassador to the United States, and warned him that Obama would speak out against NAFTA, according to Canadian sources.
The staff member reassured Wilson that the criticisms would only be campaign rhetoric, and should not be taken at face value.

Personally, I think it might be a hoot to get rid of NAFTA and possibly close our other borders as well.

1. Spend early evening roasting root vegetables over locally-made firepit.

2. AFterward, knit shirt, darn socks for tomorrow's big meeting.

3. Cough self to sleep on toxins wafting through my tiny apartment share, originating from factory relocated back to my neighborhood.

Victory!

I don't recall Clinton asking anyone in America if Nafta was ok with them. He ran as a hick Arkansas liberal, then comes in and acts like a slick smooth talking centrist Republican who gets himself impeached. I resent the trickery and the switcheroo. I dont want American jobs or money going to Mexico or Canada. Let them help themselves. Let's improve things here.

Canada for years has maintained they are suffering from NAFTA. US says the same. Mexico has high unemployment. They all can't be suffering. Someone must be benefitting.