Obama denounces NAFTA. Hillary *rejects* NAFTA.

[Ravy]

Just to prove a point.

:toast:






on edit: There positons are actually the same. They both denounce portions of NAFTA. They both want to force renegotiation by threatening to withdraw. I was trying to demonstrate the difference between "denounces" and "rejects"

Many DU posters, Obama, and the media are playing dumb on the difference.

[FlyingSquirrel]

1. Link?

;)

[Ravy]

3. I wish there was a move response button *grin*. See below.

[Ravy]

2. It was in the debate tonight. I am sure a link will be up somewhere soon.

[Skittles]

4. is that like she now rejects the war?

just curious

[Ravy]

5. Rejects *and* denounces I believe. nt

[Skittles]

7. easy to do when everything has gone to hell

maybe she should have done that WHEN IT F***ING MATTERED

[Ravy]

11. Well, it is easy to denounce her for it, but I won't reject her outright. nt

[Skittles]

14. that's your decision

supporting the worst foreign policy blunder in American history is a deal killer for me although in the GE I will still support any Democrat over any repuke

[BringBigDogBack]

6. I think I'm gonna need a pillow...

[Ravy]

8. LOL.

I bet her staffers were wishing *they* had a pillow to put in her mouth when she was saying that.

[anamandujano]

9. As usual his ambivalence morphed into Hillary's position before our very eyes.

He has no shame.

[FlyingSquirrel]

10. huh?

I don't get it

[Skittles]

12. it confuses me too

:o

[Ravy]

17. In the debate tonight, Obama refused to reject Farrakhan's support

when asked flatly if he would. He said denouncing it was enough. Hillary schooled him and gave him another chance and he said that he denounced Farrakhan *and* rejected his support.

Posters have been insisting that they mean the same thing, and if they don't, that denouncing is stronger than rejecting.

[Skittles]

18. to me

denouncing seems to apply more to the support itself whereas rejection implies rejecting both the support and the person offering the support - that may not be technically correct but that's how it feels to me

[nolabels]

21. That is a difference

You can denounce and still obey the rule of the treaty but to reject it is be ignorant of the thing you swore to uphold. One is autocratic or belligerent and the other one is working within the system but voicing against it. At least that is way i interpret it

[FlyingSquirrel]

20. I think I'm gonna have to wait for the video replay before

getting into this any further, 'cause I remember it exactly the opposite of what you are saying - I remember him initally "rejecting" but not "denouncing" as opposed to what you are saying.

I still think it's a matter of speaking style and really SO not a big deal.

[hfojvt]

15. the candidate who copied Edwards

has supporters that say Obama copies her.

[monomach]

16. It probably means that you hate women or something.

:shrug:

[anamandujano]

19. His position on NAFTA has shifted from many earlier statements of

support on it. Here is a thread documenting that Obama scrubbed his history on NAFTA from his website, just in time for Ohio.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x4664208

She was against it when Bill was compromising with the Repukes, had to fall in line for political reasons. David Gergen verified this on one of the political shows tonight (reported here at du.)

In her town hall and in a debate after it she clarified exactly what she planned on doing. Obama's newly acquired position sounds eerily similar to Hillary's.

So her history on NAFTA is long standing. Obama's is like shifting sands and he seems to like Hillary's plan since he took it as his own.

No huh about it.

[Obamanaut]

26. It looks here as though HRC's position has shifted a bit also

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/200419870...

<snip>"During Clinton's 1996 visit to Texas, United Press International reported that she "touted the president's support for NAFTA." In her memoir, Clinton trumpeted her husband's "successes on the budget, the Brady bill and NAFTA." The Buffalo News reports that in 1998 she "praised corporations for mounting 'a very effective business effort in the U.S. on behalf of NAFTA.' " And last year, her lead Wall Street fundraiser told reporters that Clinton remains "committed" to NAFTA's "free" trade structure."<snip>

Or, maybe not.

[Ravy]

27. Both of them seem to shift now a bit whether they are in Texas, where

they generally think it is great, and Ohio, where it has hurt them more and helped them less.

It is a tough issue, and unfortunately there will be a lot of nuanced positions for our candidate, with *all* trade pretty much lumped under the NAFTA banner. Republicans have the wrong idea, unrestricted trade, anywhere and anytime, but it is the easiest position to defend and look consistent while doing so.

[Ravy]

13. He wasn't very convincing. I *know* he knows the difference...

... but will the press dig into why he didn't want to say it?

[robcon]

22. Both are wrong. NAFTA should be expanded to the rest of the hemisphere.

NAFTA and other free trade treaties should become Americas-wide and expanded to include those exceptions to free trade, like the sugar quotas that were bought and paid-for by the sugar lobby.

[Ravy]

23. I wish there were more specifics on the trade stuff. I am

not as educated about that as I would like to be.

[Obamanaut]

28. I know exactly what you mean. Ever since I came upon DU, I'll

run across something whilst reading posts, and then spend a half hour googling. DOn't know how I would have handled this in the old days, before google. I used a slide rule in all the math courses I enjoyed (showing age here) :hippie:

[robcon]

29. My suggestion... read Paul Krugman

His famous essay "Ricardo's Difficult Idea" simplifies the economic argument for free trade. The argument is based on David Ricardo's Comparative Advantage idea in the early 19th century, which has held up since that time as an economic truth:

"My objective in this essay is to try to explain why intellectuals who are interested in economic issues so consistently balk at the concept of comparative advantage. Why do journalists who have a reputation as deep thinkers about world affairs begin squirming in their seats if you try to explain how trade can lead to mutually beneficial specialization? Why is it virtually impossible to get a discussion of comparative advantage, not only onto newspaper op-ed pages, but even into magazines that cheerfully publish long discussions of the work of Jacques Derrida? Why do policy wonks who will happily watch hundreds of hours of talking heads droning on about the global economy refuse to sit still for the ten minutes or so it takes to explain Ricardo?

In this essay, I will try to offer answers to these questions. The first thing I need to do is to make clear how few people really do understand Ricardo's difficult idea -- since the response of many intellectuals, challenged on this point, is to insist that of course they understand the concept, but they regard it as oversimplified or invalid in the modern world. Once this point has been established, I will try to defend the following hypothesis:

(i) At the shallowest level, some intellectuals reject comparative advantage simply out of a desire to be intellectually fashionable. Free trade, they are aware, has some sort of iconic status among economists; so, in a culture that always prizes the avant-garde, attacking that icon is seen as a way to seem daring and unconventional.
(ii) At a deeper level, comparative advantage is a harder concept than it seems, because like any scientific concept it is actually part of a dense web of linked ideas. A trained economist looks at the simple Ricardian model and sees a story that can be told in a few minutes; but in fact to tell that story so quickly one must presume that one's audience understands a number of other stories involving how competitive markets work, what determines wages, how the balance of payments adds up, and so on.
(iii) At the deepest level, opposition to comparative advantage -- like opposition to the theory of evolution -- reflects the aversion of many intellectuals to an essentially mathematical way of understanding the world.

Both comparative advantage and natural selection are ideas grounded, at base, in mathematical models -- simple models that can be stated without actually writing down any equations, but mathematical models all the same. The hostility that both evolutionary theorists and economists encounter from humanists arises from the fact that both fields lie on the front line of the war between C.P. Snow's two cultures: territory that humanists feel is rightfully theirs, but which has been invaded by aliens armed with equations and computers...

...What is different, according to Goldsmith, is that there are all these countries out there that pay wages that are much lower than those in the West -- and that, he claims, makes Ricardo's idea invalid. That's all there is to his argument; there is no hint of any more subtle content. In short, he offers us no more than the classic "pauper labor" fallacy, the fallacy that Ricardo dealt with when he first stated the idea, and which is a staple of even first-year courses in economics. In fact, one never teaches the Ricardian model without emphasizing precisely the way that model refutes the claim that competition from low-wage countries is necessarily a bad thing, that it shows how trade can be mutually beneficial regardless of differences in wage rates. The point is not that low-wage competition never poses a problem. Rather, what is significant is that despite ostentatiously citing Ricardo, Goldsmith completely misses one of the essential lessons of his argument..."

http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/ricardo.htm

[MyNameGoesHere]

24. I have a dictionary to understand the difference between the words

fortunately those have not been banned yet. Nice try to blur the meanings of the words BTW, but I will stick to what the dictionary says.

[Ravy]

25. I wasn't trying to blur.... I am just not very good at posting such things :(

I was trying to show that they *are* different, regardless of who says they are the same.