It's not a question of blaming trade deals OR blaming automation.

[OrwellwasRight]

31. It's too bad you don't know that corporations did dominate trade when NAFTA was passed.

Who do think dominated trade? Mom and pop hamburger restaurants mailing each other hamburger buns via parcel post? No, it was corporations, advocating self-interested neoliberal ideology, donating to political campaigns to get their way. They are who backed NAFTA and wrote its rules.

You are aware of the Powell Memo, right? http://billmoyers.com/content/the-powell-memo-a-call-to-arms-for-corporations/

It was a call to arms for corporations and it worked.

Global corporations didn't just happen recently. No one said that. And no one who knows anything believes it. Documentation: https://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/47068-a-brief-history-of-transnational-corporations.html

How do you think ISDS got into NAFTA? Because of the massive popular uprising of working people demanding that corporations be given the right to sue the US over laws they don't like in private tribunals? No.

How do you think the procurement chapter got into NAFTA? Because of the massive popular uprising of working people demanding that Buy American be undermined? No.

Your post actually exhibits a lack of understanding. Working people and leftists have been fighting corporate rules at least since the 1970s, well before the WTO and NAFTA came into existence.

Here is a scholarly article about it from 1994: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19187033.1994.11675388?journalCode=rsor20

Here is one from 2000, with citations going back to the 1980s: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08969205000260010701

Here is one from 1992: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225523/summary

You should probably stop insulting people when you don't have your own facts straight. So stop saying corporations did not dominate trade policy at the time of NAFTA. They did. That's why it was written: for their benefit.

As you say: "Ultimately, if we don't understand cause, solutions are not possible."