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Americans, en masse, think of the 1990's as a boom time. NAFTA was ratified by an all Democratic majority House, Senate, and President in 1993, and so by default NAFTA gets lumped into the American mindset as something either neutral or positive.

Why do you insist upon lying ? Oh you're a free traitor. The vote on NAFTA speaks for itself. Most Democrats opposed it and the majority that passed it was all but 43 Republicans and 102 out of 258 Democrats.

Now that has got to chap your hide.

Then why has "giant sucking sound" entered the language ? Do you remember anything Gore said in that debate ? Obviously because Perot said something that stuck in the minds of the American people as a dire warning. And because time has proven that he was right.

Clinton made a maximum effort. All the business community, every voice of orthodox economic theory, all living ex presidents, all the pundits, all the talking heads, all the experts, all editorial pages of all news publications praised NAFTA. And it passed by only 34 votes in the House with most of the president's party in opposition. With that kind of firepower behind it, it should have been a slam dunk.

What you obviously refuse to comprehend is that support and opposition to NAFTA fell along class lines. College educated people supported it by a wide majority. Blue collar workers, rightly concerned about that "giant sucking sound" opposed it. They knew that the good factory jobs that their fathers had had, the jobs that enabled someone with only a high school diploma or less to buy a house, a car every three years, have health insurance, go away on vacation and retire on a pension were disappearing because of globalization. Indeed, the prosperity of the 90's was confined almost entirely to the college educated, who consoled themselves that all blue collar people had to do was to take Visual Basic courses at the local community college.

Now, what was a trickle of jobs overseas under Clinton has become a steady stream in the first Bush term and will become a raging flood in the next. White collar people who thought they would benefit in the form of cheap imports realized that they could be casually ruined precisely as blue collar people had been. Now they are hearing from you precisely the same crap that blue collar workers have been hearing for the past 25 years. You know what ? They aren't buying it because they know it is crap. Are you dimly aware that support for free trade was at 57% in 2000 for people making over six figures ? Today it is at 28%. You think someone making that kind of money wants to hear about "retraining" so he can start over again at the bottom at age 45+ ? You think he's willing to put "market efficiency" and the wellbeing of the "global economy" ahead of his future and that of his family ? You think he is stupid enough to buy your "I just know that by golly something will turn up and it will be just great" ?

Blue collar workers never supported free trade out of basic socioeconomic self interest. Now those white collar workers who had supported it 10 years ago see that they are in the same boat alongside blue collar workers.

"Blue collar workers never supported free trade out of basic socioeconomic self interest."

Nonsense. You don't even understand "free trade."

Here's Economics 101 for you: "free trade" is when two humans negotiate and *agree* to exchange something.

Free trade, at its most basic level, is precisely what the masses understand and embrace, contrary to the Marxist claptrap that gets tossed around with whatever buzzwords are in vogue today.

You have something of value. I have something of value. I want what you have. You want what I have. We negotiate. We haggle. We wheel. We deal. Finally we *agree* to exchange what we have for what we want. You end up getting what you want, and I end up getting what I want.

That's free trade, and Blue Collar workers have *always* supported it with their actions even during those times when they've been fooled into denouncing the very words "free trade."

Free trade gets people what they want. Go to areas that don't have free trade, such as Cuba and North Korea, and you'll find masses of people who *don't* get what they want.

Free trade gives out an incentive for you to obtain or produce something or some service that is valuable enough to let you trade it for those things and services that you want for yourself.

Take away free trade and you take away both the incentive to produce as well as the means to exchange and get what you want.

In short, free trade is the solution...not the problem...though it makes for a catchy-enough sound-bite that it is easily scapegoated as the problem even when it isn't.

In this case, i.e. offshore outsourcing, the problem isn't with free trade (e.g. we certainly have no NAFTA-style agreement with China or India), but rather with international currency manipulations. Both China and India are hoarding U.S. Dollars in order to prop up the foreign exchange value of the Dollar. That makes U.S. exports more expensive and less competitive, and it makes imports into the U.S. from China and India unnaturally cheaper than would happen in a free market.