See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RA-NzSZl0kA

I watched this and saw that Greg Palast is concerned that Gore hasn't likely changed his views on NAFTA since he was a proponent of it in 1993 in a debate with Ross Perot and later in 2000 on his candidate website he mentioned it as one of the issues he'd supported in the past.

Palast is mainly concerned that the WTO and NAFTA later became things that seem to be causing problems internationally regarding loss of jobs and exploitation of foreign nations and their workers.

A friend tells me that he thinks Palast hasn't taken into consideration that many of Gore's opinions have changed since 2000 when he went into an introspective period reviewing his beliefs.

Also my friend says that Gore is not responsible for the massive changes that have been added to the NAFTA agreements since Bush took office that have led us to the current situation. Palast details in his book some horrible excesses in government that seem related to NAFTA and WTO, such as exploitation of other countries and of course we all know about our loss of local jobs. He discussed incidents in Argentina where British and U.S. firms seem to have actually purchased the WATER SYSTEM of Argentins (which, as is increasingly the case even in the U.S. with our utility companies, is privatized, not owned by the public like it should be) and hiked up the price rates so that citizens of the land couldn't even afford their own country's water. I am not the most knowledgeable on the subject of everything that Palast dislikes about NAFTA, but those of you who read his books can check that out.

Palast is a liberal author, not one of the neocons out to sandbag Democrats. He just has a problem about NAFTA. Maybe someone can figure out if Gore has ever said anything about that topic in the past 3 years now that so much has changed or if he's still a big proponent of this globalization of jobs and the consequences.

Read Al's latest book, The Assault on Reason. While Al complains about all these American jobs going overseas, he doesn't seem to want to discuss NAFTA and the WTO, two agreements that have only hastened the job losses.

I do not oppose globalization per se. The worlds poorest need to be brought up out of exploitation, but I hope we can achieve it without too many more Americans being tossed from their jobs. Someday this world will be on a more-or-less level playing field, and when that day comes, we'd better be using solar power, or some other renewable, because the demand for power is only increasing.

The problem about the way globalization has been implemented is that we are exploiting these foreign nations and their workers. In our drive to privatize everything (which is bad for us to be doing to our own utilitiies too), including the water system of Argentina by British and American interests, is not healthy for the other countries. It is resulting in their enslavement, not their freedom.

Thanks for pointing me to Al's book that mentions a problem with loss of jobs. Check out the problems outlined in The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and later in Armed Madhouse. These are also available on audio download and cd and that's where I heard the part about the Argentine water system and other problems. Unfortunately I haven't memorized the different issues in Palast's book well enough to articulate them but you can look them over at a library and see what the reason is for his anger about NAFTA and WTO. Some of involved workers being slain by the national forces sent in to stop anti-WTO demonstrations, if I remember correctly and downplaying of these demonstrations.

I'm not even sure if "NAFTA" is what caused the problems that Palast recites because I don't know the issues well enough.

One of Gore's supporters in the Youtube video comments area responded to Palast's video by claiming that "the democratic NAFTA cared for people & environment & regulations. it would have equalized living standards. not created a new slave state like the r[epublican administration] version that passed." However, I don't know if that's true or not. I haven't found much about the differences between the pre-Bush administration version and post-Bush on the web. I do think that some of the problems may have begun before Bush took office possibly but I'd have to see the timeline of the problems mentioned in Palast's book.

I think we need to look at whatever are the "worst criticisms" Gore is looking at and address them and put them behind us now. This seems to be one of them. The comment about Gore saying something respectful toward Limbaugh is not very important to me though. Hopefully Gore could answer all the naysayers handily by explaining his current position or whether their analyses are wrong.

Putting private monopolies in charge of energy and water is an outrage. You have to have water, and when a profit-making company is in charge of a water monopoly, they will put their profit first. People are born into a country expecting that their homeland's water is something that is part of their heritage. They expect water to be provided at a low expense rather than a resource plundered for corporate profit. Worse still, the water supply was given, not sold, to the western corporations that took it over.