Here's the short answer: they have to pander to the left in order to win the nomination. That's why their criticism of NAFTA is asymptotal-- it's a meaningless fight to see who can come closest to rejecting the treaty without actually doing so, because they're well aware that would be stupid.

I too am bashing my head against the wall. Clinton really is on the record as having been a supporter of NAFTA, and Obama generally has voted in favor of trade agreements. The solution to displaced workers IS NOT REPEALING TRADE AGREEMENTS!!! It's coming up with intelligent programs to help those workers.

Ugh.

I thought the solution to displaced workers is for them to get new jobs, even if that means learning new skills. I'm pretty sure there's nothing in the Constitution describing the government's responsibility to guarantee career paths.

I'm not convinced by the statistics. Surely there's a lag time between passage of NAFTA, the implementation of its various provisions, economic effects, and job losses? I'm no economist, but if the Reps could claim that Clinton's boom was based on Reagan's policies, why isn't it reasonable to expect the overall lag time to be 10 years or so? Look at the auto industry--Toyota's been outselling GM and Ford for years. How long was it between when they started to lose market share and when they started to cut jobs permanently? I suspect years.

Having said the above, I still support NAFTA--it's just the statistical case that's not proven.

attaching labor and environmental standards to trade agreements will have no appeciable effect on trade flows.

I'm not so certain about this, at least for trade agreements among small groups of countries. I think you can make a case that if the US makes a trade agreement with country A, and that agreement does include labor and environmental standards, which presumably would increase the short term cost of doing business in that country, then many companies will be more/less likely to invest in that country. The mores presumably sensitive to social pressures in the US. The lesses more focussed on narrow cost considerations.

Given high levels of inter-affiliate trade, it's quite easy to see how this could affect trade flows, especially for that portionof FDI that involves sequential country hopping in search of lower labor costs.

Two caveats to this are that none of these potential effects would actually lower US imports (would just shift the exporting country), and these effects (essentially trade diversion) become less important as the particular environmental and labor standards are applied to more countries (.eg., if they became parts of WTO).

Will someone please tell me what the hell a "trade time-out" is? I've heard HRC drop this twice over the last two debates and I have no idea what she thinks this means.

"poo countries"? (see last sentence). Where life is really crappy?

A little history may be appropriate: In the Uruguay Round Agreements Act of 1994 which let the US join the WTO, Newt Gingrich inserted a provision that the US must "review" the WTO, in particular dispute settlement, every 5 years... and each of the two reviews have obtained sound support for the WTO. Meanwhile, we still describe trade critics as "protectionists" or populists. This is all confusing to even the most sophisticated US observors overseas, who wonder how the US could "review" (which to them could signal "repudiate" or renegotiate existing internaitonal agreements. They now view the Democrats as anti-internationalists and as leery of international law as George Bush. See todays Financial Times at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b6dc1c0e-e669-11dc-8398-0000779fd2ac.html