Show of hands, fellow Democrats. How many of you would choose to let your job go overseas?

[pampango]

34. The polls I post are Pew polls. "Misguided" is in the eye of the beholder. Protectionism has a lot

of bipartisan potential once you get past republican politicians and their institutions. Their base is your buddy whether you want to realize it or not.

Look, we trade less (much less) than any other developed country and yet you blame foreigners for all of our job loss problems. Does that mean you "have a problem with foreigners"? I don't know, but you sure spend a lot of time posting about them. I realize that the simple answer for you is to erect high walls (tariffs) around the country and everything will be fine.

As I'm sure you know from 1880 to 1980 republicans were the high-tariff party and Democrats were the low-tariff party. The whole GATT/WTO, IMF, World Bank structure was created under Roosevelt and Truman and the republicans fought them every step of the way. Then in 1981 reagan pushed the republican party to becoming a low-tariff party, too. (In a side note, tariffs actually increased during reagan's 8 years, regardless of his rhetoric.) At the same time he increased republican pressure to cut taxes for the rich, deregulate corporations and destroy unions and the safety net.

The truth is that when you look around the world the countries with the strongest middle classes, unions, safety nets - basically the most progressive countries in the world - all trade much more than we do. If low-tariff trade (or "free trade&quot really caused the economic devastation that you contend, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Germany and many other progressive countries would be much worse off than the US. Since we trade much less than they do, our middle class should be strong, our safety net in excellent condition and our unions strong and growing.

While progressive countries embrace trade what they do not do is slash taxes and make them more regressive; emasculated unions; shred safety nets and deregulate everything under the sun particularly the financial industry. Those who contend that a country can't have strong unions, an effective safety net, a thriving middle class and effective regulation and trade a great deal with the rest of the world, is ignoring what is actually happening in the rest of the world.

I have a big problem with protectionism. I think that European liberals, Canadian liberals, Australian liberals will echo my sentiment. For a 100 years the republican party believed in high tariffs. The right in Europe and elsewhere still does. The idea that liberals seek to build walls against "others" while conservatives seek to tear them down, goes against my grain and that of most liberals in the world.

I see that you are now merely judging me as unpatriotic towards American workers because I refuse to build walls around the country. If you are the 'patriotism judge', I can live with that. (I doubt that Canadian, Australian and European liberals consider themselves to be unpatriotic simply because they do not promote high tariffs.)