Welcome to a community supported and guest-produced edition of the Best of Left Podcast, with clips

today from the Sam Cedar Show, Ring of Fire, and Tom Hartman.

For years, the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, exercising a lock on the party's economic

policies argued that the economy could achieve sustained growth only if markets were allowed

to operate unfettered and globally.

Overcoming protests from labor unions, a traditional constituency like the Clinton administration

vigorously supported free trade agreements like NAFTA and agreed to China's admission

into the World Trade Organization.

If there was damage to workers and the Clinton camp proposed, dealing with it after it occurred

through wage insurance, for example, or worker retraining and other safety net measures,

and you should also know when they pass NAFTA, one of the big cells, and this was the

Republican-led Congress at the time.

One of the big cells that the Clinton administration was pushing was this notion that we can retroactively

add labor and environmental restrictions on these other countries we're doing business

with when it comes to NAFTA, specifically Mexico in this situation.

And the theory being that these labor standards and environmental standards would even out

the playing field, so you wouldn't get this giant sucking sound that Ross Perot was talking

about.

With corporations moving down to Mexico, exploiting the labor there, leaving a lot of Americans

without jobs.

And of course, that's exactly what did happen.

And on top of destroying the manufacturing base in this country, which some people

...