Everybody involved says Goolsbee didn't make that quote, rather it was the impressions of the guy taking notes at the meeting. In fact, everyone involved (except perhaps the guy taking the notes) says that isn't what happened.

Sounds a lot like you assisting in inventing a new fiction along the lines of Al Gore saying, "I invented the internet"

You suck.

If the Obama campaign position had been, "Well, yeah, it's true; we claim that we don't like NAFTA, but there isn't much that we could or would do to toss it out," then I'd have said that Obama might be kind of a typically craven politician, but at least he's not stupid.

If it is really true that Obama proposes to renegotiate NAFTA to make the U.S. more protectionist in relation to our biggest trading partner, Canada, and one of the biggest, Mexico, then Obama isn't just craven; he's stupid, and a disgrace to his former colleagues at the University of Chicago who all know better. And it proves that when it comes to getting and holding onto trade union donations and endorsements, Obama is not quite so much of consensus-builder, nor much of an international diplomat. He appears to prefer unilateral American bullying.

Could you tell me if that polling is for Democrats, Republicans, or both?

Makes a difference.

The growing anti-free-trade movement really needs an understanding of basic economics. It's tariffs that take jobs away, not free trade.

They take away jobs for several reasons, but one powerful reason is because tariffs wastefully soak up government effort, and taxes. Let me explain.

All tariffs do is take government money (i.e. your taxes) and use it terribly inefficiently to prop up ailing industries that are a poor match for local skills and conditions. Plus, to ensure this money goes to the "right" companies in the "right" industries, a huge govt. bureaucracy is required -- which ends up getting it all wrong anyway. Then there is the business owner problem -- as business owners look at all that lovely free money and then fail to make the changes that would enable their businesses to, perhaps, survive without it. Or they make a few quiet changes and pocket the difference. Tariffs are often (very often!) government handouts to the rich.

Business owners in a high-tariff industry have no incentive to innovate. In fact they are rewarded for running inefficient businesses that look (to the bureaucracy) as if they are failing: not expanding; not putting on workers; not spawning secondary industries.

This is an appallingly wasteful use of taxes. Using the same money to seed new industries that are a better match to local skills and conditions would see exactly the same money go a long, long way farther. That and retraining for any workers that need it.

The mythical, magical "Forever Employment" beast -- this idea that a "good job" is a soul-crushing factory job that lasts your whole life -- needs to be slain, along with the tariffs that prop it up.

Workers in the era when this beast supposedly lived understood very clearly that it was a myth. My grandfather (born 1918, died 2007) understood that perfectly. He worked half a dozen jobs, for 4 different industries. He always set aside money to retrain when the "jobs moved on" -- and totally retrained himself three times.

So understand this: you WILL retrain; you WILL NOT have this job forever; you DO need to make plans to shift to a different industry/job/skillset.

So vote for a party that promises to put tax money into helping you do those things -- and not into free handouts for business owners in dying industries.

To borrow a phrase from Tim Harford, saying "but other countries have tariffs!" is like saying "they're silting up their harbors --- let's do it too!"

Just saying. It could go either way on which one that would really hurt. Or maybe both.

1. Reglur Americans all of a sudden are against free trade because they know nothing about economics. Just recently, they have turned against NAFTA, because they imagine everything was okay before NAFTA, but it was not. Everything already had gone south.

2. Our hero Andrew Leonard, the best thing on the www, is against globalization in a vague idealistic way. He wishes he could find an alternative, because he wishes for local herbal bicycle factories... But he is waiting, waiting, because no viable alternative presents itself so far.

3. In real life, this NAFTA issue probably will turn into a bizarre fantasy problem for Democrats in this election. NAFTA is not much. The US economy already was pooped before NAFTA. And NAFTA is not even bad. Matter of fact, NAFTA already is moot.

The growing anti-free-trade movement really needs an understanding of basic economics. It's tariffs that take jobs away, not free trade.

Oh, please. So you've inhaled the vapors of free market ideology, and now you think you know something? It takes more than that, dude. Trust your data more than Ayn Rand, I say. From the latest BusinessWeek:

Figures collected by the Bureau of Economic Analysis suggest the multinational sector has in some ways been a drag on the U.S. economy since 2000. From 2000 to 2005, the last year for which full data are available, U.S. multinationals cut more than 2 million jobs at home, even as employment in the rest of the private sector grew—and there’s no sign the trend has significantly reversed. The U.S. operations of foreign multinationals also shrank over the five-year stretch, dropping 500,000 jobs as foreign investors cut costs and sold off U.S. companies. Toyota, perhaps the most successful foreign company in the U.S., added all of 9,000 jobs in the states between 2000 and 2007.

Note that MNC’s have hired more abroad than they have cut here. So there is growth under globalization, but at the expense of the American worker.

The great exodus of jobs for Americans has gone to ASIA which has nothing AT ALL to do with NAFTA.

For Godsakes people, just once, think critically instead of drinking kool-aide.