So progressives can't win elections? BULLSHIT.... YES they can, here's how.

[Union Yes]

Progressives candidates should..

Make the repeal of NAFTA, CAFTA, GATT the central theme of their campaigns.

Relentlessly run TV and web ads calling for the repeal of these disgraceful "free trade" agreements.

Across nearly the entire political spectrum, the people hate NAFTA. Except for our corporate overlords and the robber baron class.

Progressives hate NAFTA.

The Middle Class hates NAFTA.

UNIONS hate NAFTA.

The swing voter hates NAFTA.

The youth vote hates NAFTA.

College graduates hate NAFTA.

The unemployed hate NAFTA.

The job seeker hates NAFTA.

The homeless hate NAFTA.

Tent city residents hate NAFTA.

The Middle Class has been decimated by NAFTA, CAFTA, GATT.

ANTI-NAFTA populist outrage is SKY FUCKING HIGH!

Progressive candidates, seize on this populist outrage by making the repeal of NAFTA the central theme of your campaign and you WILL receive a surge of populist support.

Populist support means election success. AKA VICTORY!

Please DU, get active in your candidates campaigns.

Call, email or ask them to make the repeal of NAFTA a campaign issue.

:patriot:

[cowcommander]

1. So who's going to fund this campaign?

Money talks, if that hasn't been made so depressingly apparent already with Obama's election.

[leftstreet]

2. Meh, NAFTA is so yesterday. Single payer is the hot ticket

Why get people stirred up about "JOBS!!!!1111" when half your paycheck will be going to health insurers?

[ThomCat]

3. Every campaign is about multiple issue.

Free trade WILL get people stirred up because that is one of the root causes of so many people being in such horrible financial shape, and people know it

Health care should be one of the issues.

Investing our taxes in our public infrastructure instead of war should be one (two?) of the issues.

There a lot of progressive issues that can really get people stirred up.

I agree that progressives could win if we could get enough funding and backing to get a real media campaign going. The problem is the money primary, and the media making progressives either invisible, or losers in advance.

[Union Yes]

22. Stirring up anti-NAFTA outrage that is already at the boiling point..

is exactly what I'm talking about. Totally agree with your reply.

Well said!

:fistbump:

[Ozymanithrax]

4. Sounds like Perot...circa 1992

Just make sure that that giant sucking sound isn't a candidate crazier than a whorehouse cockroach.

[Union Yes]

21. Compare America 2009 to 1992.

Since 1992, America has been slowly decimated by Free Trade.

Compare anti-free trade populist outrage now vs then. It's a vastly different country today than it was in 1992.

My point, just sayin that most of America's many ills can be pointed straight at NAFTA and all following trade pacts.

[donheld]

29. If we'd listened to that crazier that a whorehouse cockroach candidate

we might be better off

[Capn Sunshine]

5. Bullshit talks. Action walks

Get your ass offline, start a mailing list, contact local progressives, and have at it.

Obama didn't just appear out of thin air. It was a conscientious, organized, ground up effort with people giving up several years of their lives to bring it to a reality. Many here either don't realize or don't know he didn't want to do this; we had to spend six months convincing him it was a viable plan. We found money and support wherever we could. The Hillary Campaign thought we were crazy. So did conventional wisdom, the east coast intellegentsia, and everyone inside the beltway.
But we perservered. We made it happen. By ground-level footwork, not internet bullshitting. That came later :)

[Goldstein1984]

6. Union Yes Nailed It

There is a lot of hatred out there for the subject of free trade--NAFTA, GATT, CAFTA. It's a HOT button.

Yest there are other issues, and you cover them too.

The working class knows that free trade means exporting jobs and importing inexpensive goods. Shit! Even Hershey moved a chocolate factory out of Hershey, Pennsylvania! It went to someplace in the Caribbean.

I apologize for restating what I've already written in other posts, but NAFTA, CAFTA and GATT are just components of Milton Friedman's free trade, privatization, tax cut, deregulation trickledown bullshit we've been force fed since Reagan and before. And Clinton was just as big of a Republican as Reagan--He signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which dissolved the separation between commercial and investment banks, ushering in you-know-what.

(Sorry. Slipped into preaching mode).

But yes there is more than one issue--cover the most important ones to you.
Yes, everything costs money to some degree, but writing, calling, emailing and picketing runs pretty cheap.

I'm witnessing the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company laying off hundreds of well-paid union employees with decades of experience and replacing them with low-paid workers from the Gulf Coast with less experience and no experience working in arctic conditions. They expect to save millions, but at a cost of laying off hundreds of Alaskans with mortgages, and at a cost of losing an effective spill response capability on an 800-mile pipeline crossing three mountain ranges and crossed by 800 rivers, streams, and creeks.

Sorry, got off track. But it all seemed related while I was writing.

[Mithreal]

7. Big K&R

[cali]

8. codswallop. in some places progressives are electable. In others they're not

Anyone who thinks you can elect a Progressive in OK or NE or MS, is not dealing with reality.

[Union Yes]

12. And in most places, the vote swings either direction.

My district, IL-10 has twice elected rethug Mark Kirk twice. Narrowly defeating Dem candidate Dan Seals in '06 and '08.

Populist support could have easily propelled Seals to victory. He lost by 1500 votes in a large district in '06.

If he only had a platform that appealed to populist outrage. Like repealing a policy straight outta hell, NAFTA. (CAFTA GATT too)

You'd be suprised at how many progressives could win if they learned to capture populist support and sieze upon the anti-NAFTA outrage that is brewing nationwide.

Cali, we don't all live in Vermont. Progressives may be popular and electable there. That's just not the case across America as you've pointed out.

Progressives need help. Populist outrage is a damn fine thing come eletion time if a candidate can only learn to grasp it. Make sense?

Or, are you a NAFTA supporter? (I've read enough of your posts here on DU to believe you're not a NAFTA supporter but that's just my own opinion.)

[cali]

19. I agree that in swing districts, it's a different story than in heavily red districts

and that in those districts a populist stance could help, but my point is that there are heavily red districts where it wouldn't.

And no, I don't support NAFTA.

[pampango]

9. How does Europe make free trade work for 27 neighboring countries? We can't make it work for 3

countries with NAFTA. Perhaps our problems are not caused by trade. Europe has more "free trade" (a misnomer since all FTA's have restrictions and qualifications) than the US, yet their societies seem to more "citizen friendly" than ours. Making our society a better place may not require restricting trade, but in dealing with more fundamental problems as Europe has done.

There are 14 countries that have chosen not to belong to the WTO (GATT itself is long gone). None of them is exactly a paragon of tariff-enabled bliss. They are: Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, North Korea, Tajikistan, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Laos.

[Union Yes]

11. Tough regulation and strict government oversight. nt

[NYC_SKP]

10. Agreed. Also, if the bottom 90% of earners really know how much wealth and power...

...is concentrated at the top, if they understood the changes toward greater concentration, they would wake up from their TV induced stupor.

:patriot:

[Union Yes]

16. They're learning, albeit slowly,

Thanks for the support in my many anti-nafta threads.

I'm quite passionate about my hatred for these disgraceful violations of human rights, known as "Free Trade".

Thanks for checkin in.

:hi:

:patriot:

[NYC_SKP]

23. Hey, my pleasure to keep your threads kicked and rec'd...

I watched with utter disbelief when NAFTA was proposed, supported by both parties, and enacted.

Unbelievable that ten bucks an hour these days is seen as good pay in jobs that in the seventies were fifteen to twenty-five.

I had plenty of friends making good pay in union jobs or at plants, right out of high school, and with benefits.

Our country has slid so far downhill that we have to fight, and fight together.

:toast:

[Union Yes]

24. Appreciate the kick. Solidarity Bro!

:toast:

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

13. Right.

Go try that in a rural district in Georgia. Let me know how it turns out.

[Union Yes]

14. Go into that rural district, the one of many decimated by NAFTA..

and ask the typical voter if they despise NAFTA.

Let me know how that turns out.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

18. Several points:

1) Railing against a policy is useless in the long term if you can't actually effect change. Since there aren't that many congresscritters who are keen to repeal NAFTA, it's hard to know how such a candidate would answer the question "OK, but what are you going to do about it?"

2) One candidate does not solely define the terms of the debate. Regardless of NAFTA, any progressive running in a southern, rural, mostly white district is going to be painted as a baby-killing, gay-loving, terrorist-coddling socialist by their opponent. Impotent opposition to NAFTA will not overcome the other factors.

[RB TexLa]

15. I think you grossly overestimate the country's alleged hatred of trade.

And even if you wish to carry that as a campaign theme it's a loser, ask Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan. Free trade will be expanded to cover the entire hemisphere by 2020. An actual political/economic union of the North American states will take longer, but it too will happen, but do feel free to piss at the future as it arrives.

[Union Yes]

17. I think you grossly underestimate populist outrage and outright hatred of NAFTA.

We'll have to agree to disagree.

Every human being I know hates NAFTA.

And I know alot of F'n people.

[rucky]

20. + Corporate Welfare n/t

[Mithreal]

25. Kick

[upi402]

26. 100% right. Most 'mericuns need to learn a bit first

Then they'll be 100% with us. But the corporate media has them bullshitted so thoroughly that it would take a ?????

[Liberal In Texas]

27. K&R. Yes, Fair Trade, not Free Trade.

[anonymous171]

28. Upper Class/ Upper-Middle class latte liberals hate it though

And they write the checks :(

[EFerrari]

30. Sing it!