Paul Craig Roberts has a very good piece on Obama's position on trade, and what real reform would look like.  The focus is on border adjustable tax issues.

The trade issue is heating up so that some are comparing it to abortion.  That's good because we need a high profile.  That's bad because we don't want partisanship to scuttle solutions. 

The context of the comparison was one of many commentaries on last night's debates: 

Mrs. Clinton’s advisers, meanwhile, have been putting out the word that she tried to persuade her husband not to support Nafta — which liberalized trade with Mexico and Canada — when he was running for president. (He did support it, aggressively, and signed it into law in 1993.) “I’m not just going to talk about what’s wrong with Nafta,” she said in Youngstown, the day after Mr. Obama had been there. “I’m going to fix it and I have a four-point plan to do exactly that.”

But when you read this plan, or Mr. Obama’s trade agenda, you discover none of it is particularly radical. Neither candidate calls for a repeal of Nafta, or anything close to it. Both instead want to tinker with the bureaucratic innards of the agreement. They want stronger “labor and environmental standards” and better “enforcement mechanisms.”

It is a good point.  What indeed will they really do?  Nafta is bad, but no repeal? 

A Washington Post story has this paraphrase from the debate:

The two also had a spirited discussion about trade, a huge issue here in this working-class industrial state. Both said they would threaten to opt out of the North American Free Trade Agreement unless Mexico and Canada agreed to renegotiate its terms. 

And here's the big question of the week:  Why did both of them support the Peru FTA?  Neither voted for or against it last December 2007 because they were campaigning, but both announced support.

Now I'm all for giving them a respectable path to climb down from silly free trader status,  but really.  Why  did they support Peru FTA - which is NAFTA lite?  Ya know that was not even 3 months ago.

A liberal blog site, the DailyKos, is live blogging the Obama-Clinton debate in Ohio tonight.  I hate watching debates... or campaign speeches... or political speeches for that matter.  So I don't live blog.

But this interesting tidbit is thrown out, paraphrasing Hillary:

And on to NAFTA. Was Clinton opposed at the outset but unable to say so because it was her husband's administration? It may not surprise you to learn that there is disagreement on this point.

I've always said she was for it, and should not say she was against it.  The better tack would be to say she saw the results and now changed her mind.  I also seem to remember a quote from her autobiograph (I did not read it) that says she supported NAFTA, but its late and I'm not going to look for it now.

Her explanation tonight is plausible.  I simply don't know whether to believe it.  And I'm not sure it matters now.

Just move on and fix today's trade problems.  Currency, VAT-tariffs, unsafe imported products, trade agreement moratorium to fix our policy and goals, etc.  Commit to that and I'm ok with it.

The Very. Serious. People. in Washington are smarter than the rest of us.  Free trade will give opportunity to the poor, they say.  Never mind the statistics.

Apparently the Peruvian farmers did not get the memo.  This is their response to the Peru FTA.

Peru's government declared a state of emergency after a farmers' protest left at least four dead and more than 700 under arrest.

The government granted the armed forces control over the departments of Lima, Ancash and La Libertad in a bid to free about 1,000 stranded buses after protesters battled police and blocked roads and railway lines, Cabinet Chief Jorge del Castillo said today.