Again, as I said in another post, my day starts at 3:00 a.m., so my failure to post after 7 or 8 in the evening (CST) doesn't man a lack of rebuttal; it simply means I've gone to eat, bathe and spend some time with my boyfriend before I go to bed, OK?
What Gov. Dean has to say on the issues you raise:
"...A More Effective Trade Policy
Governor Dean believes that international trade is essential to the continued growth and health of the American economy and to the creation and strengthening of the middle class throughout the developing world. Promoting middle class societies is not only the right thing to do; it's also in our own self-interest. Our efforts will create consumers for our goods and improve our national security because nations with middle classes are generally more stable, more democratic, and less likely to foster terrorism. So the question is not whether one is for or against trade: The question is under what rules should trade be conducted, for whose benefit should the rules be drawn, and how should they be enforced.
The Bush Administration’s trade policy is not working. The Governor has seen the impact of job losses that result from this misguided policy plus the sluggish U.S. and international economies. Trade agreements must be fair. Specifically, they must include strict and enforceable labor standards based on the five core standards of the International Labor Organization (ILO):
freedom of association,
the right to collective bargaining,
abolition of forced or compulsory labor,
abolition of child labor, and
freedom from discrimination.
Our trade agreements should also incorporate environmental standards. To persuade other countries to adopt higher environmental standards, the U.S. will have to restore its role as a global leader by becoming once again an active member of the international environmental community.
Strong and enforceable standards need to be integral elements of trade agreements themselves, not side agreements. To help America’s trading partners incorporate labor and environmental standards into their domestic body of laws, the Governor will call on the World Bank, the regional development banks, the International Labor Organization, other multilateral organizations and our own government to provide developing nations with meaningful technical assistance when needed. We should be acting to protect middle class jobs in the United States and labor and environmental standards abroad with the same enthusiasm that we apply to protecting intellectual property rights, capital, and the interests of investors.
The promise of NAFTA — that it would trigger an economic boom in Mexico, create a huge middle class market for US goods, expand the US trade surplus with Mexico, generate net new jobs at home, and drastically reduce undocumented migration — that promise has not been kept.
Since the inception of NAFTA, Mexico’s growth rate has been less than 3 percent — for the last two and a half years has been less than 1 percent. The US has lost well paying jobs as businesses have moved production to Mexico, in search of cheap labor. The promised Mexican middle class of consumers to purchase US goods has not appeared and migration to the United States continues relentlessly. But NAFTA is here to stay — our economies have become too integrated. So Governor Dean will negotiate a “New Deal” with Mexico — a real plan that will generate Mexican economic growth and save American jobs.
As President, he will work to persuade WTO members that that body should take the lead in implementing and enforcing labor and environmental standards. The WTO members have accepted a number of US proposals that they didn’t want, such as corporate intellectual property rights. If the US makes labor and environmental standards as important a priority as it has made corporate rights, the Governor believes our nation can get the concessions we seek — history shows we can make it happen.
An Eye on the Future: Investments in 21st Century Growth
For over a hundred years, a critical part of the United States economy has been manufacturing — building the goods the world wants to buy. The Dean economic agenda will emphasize creating a level worldwide playing field in which American manufacturers can compete with success.
But the Governor’s plan also emphasizes investing in the industries of tomorrow, so that the US will remain a leader in such important sectors as biotech, renewable energy and other technology and information based enterprises.
Over the coming decades, a global communications platform for voice, data and video will emerge that will generate large incremental productivity advances in business while also spawning an incalculable number of new enterprises and lines of business within existing companies. A technology sector that will have great impact on the pace and scale of this change will involve enterprises that are experimenting with and developing optical, molecular and atomic scale platforms that will replace the silicon based chips and storage devices in use today.
Federal investments in research and development can play a leadership role in these areas, and the federal government can serve as a convener, bringing together industry, academia and state and local governments to foster development in areas of opportunity. The Governor is also particularly concerned that broadband is made available to rural America, so that jobs dependent on the rapid transmission of large amounts of data can be created anywhere in the US.
The political and economic toll of our continuing dependence on imported carbon based fuels is not sustainable The Dean administration will expand energy research, which is now funded at half the rate it was 8 years ago, while reassessing other areas to assure that the ongoing work contributes to the nation’s economic strength...."
http://www.deanforamerica.com/site/PageServer?pagename=policy_policy_economy_reclaimingtheamericandream
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