Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Candidate Review - Fair Trade - Barack Obama

Obama doesn't seem to have a solid position on Free Trade yet; but he did make some revealing comments that were reported at his website.
"We're not going to draw a moat around the United States' economy. If we do that, then China is still trading, India is still going to be trading," said Obama, who voted against the recent Central American Free Trade Agreement and opposes the current pending trade deal with South Korea.

"I think that NAFTA and CAFTA did not reflect the interests of American workers but reflected the interests of the stock owners on Wall Street, because they did not contain the sorts of labor provisions and environmental provisions that should have been embedded and should have been enforceable in those agreements. ... You got the stock market sky-high. Corporate profits going up, but those workers who get laid off as a consequence of displacement, there's some sort of weak retraining program that trains people for jobs that don't exist in communities all across the country."
So he seems more in the reform of NAFTA and other trade program, rather than the elimination of said programs. Which makes sense.

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