Here's the video.

The problem is not with the foreign trade - that's propped up our economy for the last 25 years and took the stink of shitty factories out of LA.

It's that we haven't found a way to distribute the proceeds from this to facilitate our mobile economy. Taxes would seem to be an obvious way, but the 1% have gamed that so badly it's a joke. So as Bucky Fuller would say, find a way that addresses the way people actually behave.

Frankly, people will bitch about barrista jobs, but it's roughly the same as an assembly line but a lot nicer, and if it paid nearly the same (with lower expenses due to lower costs for imported goods), who should complain? But as supposedly the most productive economy in the world, our dream jobs of 2015 shouldn't be fitting components off a conveyor belt - half of 7 billion people can do this effectively.

But instead of re-investing our success or sharing in the proceeds, the oligarchs have taken away any cost savings away with drastically higher medical, housing, education* and energy** costs over the last decades, while few of the China manufacturing or global sales profits get taxed to pay for new infrastructure and job transitioning. Any discretionary spending savings are trivial in comparison. *Yeah, we essentially tax the workforce up front to fuck them in advance for their first 10-15 years. **Yeah, half of the energy we just burned up like toilet paper in thin air in our huge effort to raise gas prices & weapons spending to pay off the oligarchs.

Oh, and of course the other aspect to this is worker conditions. But the equation "don't send jobs to Asia" certainly doesn't create better conditions for people without work. There *are* other options besides "unemployment" vs. "Dickensian sweat shop". And if we pit 330 Americans against 7 billion Earthlings, 1 to 20, we better have a better answer than "foreign trade bad, Americans should close the doors", because it's clear which economy is the future unless we figure out a way to do it together. (there's only so long we can hold together our monopolistic advantages such as with gold then later the petrodollar - we've been amazing at holding it together this long.). For now, the US is still a huge interesting market, but in 30-50 years, it could be more trouble than its worth when most of the world's business and population is in SE Asia.

From what I know, the biggest problem with NAFTA wasn't the loss of our manufacturing lines (we were going to lose those to China anyway - I remember trying to find work in the early 80's, and I showed up at one place in South LA, and yes, it was a nice huge sweatshop full of Chinese doing soldering work - the future was written on that wall). It was the destruction of Mexico's agricultural sector by allowing free access to US conglomerates, with no safeguards or methods to transition the workforce.

So, in short:

0) lower costs benefits of free trade seldom discussed, in large because the oligarchs are stealing the consumer's benefit in one way or another. But they do exist.

1) free trade will happen, and mostly beneficial if not completely unregulated - need ways to make it fair & mutually beneficial, and to allow substitute activities at home rather than unemployment/drastically reduced skill work

2) need to find way to distribute the revenues, and if taxes are gamed, need another way

3) need plan to support upwards mobility of US jobs - otherwise we're competing against commodity labor where we'll undoubtedly lose (except where being local is a requirement but even those wages will be depressed)

4) issues like environment, worker conditions, etc. have a better chance of being maintained now, but need someone to actually fight for these priorities before fast track trade deals move ahead without them, promising to "revisit" them later.

I agree, ocean-kat. The discussion was entirely one-sided and Matthews has been fairly transparent with his support. It was a good presentation of Obama's view - obviously not a debate. For a bit of pushback, here's Elizabeth Warren on Maddow tonight