This article is nearly a month old, but it makes important points about several of the candidates. Thanks to GlobalNetNews for sending it.

...The Global Trade Watch website rates all the candidates on their trade votes going
back to the 1970s for those who were in Congress that long.
Clinton gets 43 percent. Obama gets 50 percent. Edwards gets 63 percent. The only
candidate with a higher percentage is Kucinich, with a nearly perfect score. 

December 19, 2007

Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch has just released a report entitled “Santa’s
Sweatshop: Made in D.C. with Bad Trade Policy” which documents in great detail how
the push by U.S. corporations to send production overseas has led to a crisis in toy
safety.

Despite all the news stories about toddlers chewing the lead paint on Thomas the
Train, eating toxin-saturated wax lips, and sustaining injuries from exploding and
lacerating toy parts, the report notes, precious little attention has been paid to
how this all came about. Deadly toys are largely the result of U.S. companies moving
production to countries with little or no safety standards.

In the last five years, there has been a 224 percent jump in recalls of dangerous
toys in the United States. Almost all of these toys were produced overseas. China
alone accounts for 94 percent of the recalls.

Among the report's findings: "Lead paint and other raw materials are being used
increasingly in part because of U.S. companies’ efforts to procure sweatshop goods
from China at the same low prices even as Chinese wages continue to slowly
increase."

"The toy import safety crisis did not happen over night, and it did not come out of
nowhere,” says Global Trade Watch's Lori Wallach. “But Congress -- and a future
president -- can turn the situation around by renegotiating decades of bad trade
policy so that it serves the public interest and protects our kids.”

"On the campaign trail, no one has done more to bring attention to the problem of
bad trade deals and the poison toy issue than John Edwards."Unfortunately, Edwards
voted for legislation that is arguably the main cause of the crisis: Permanent
Normal Trade Relations with China. By voting to allow China to join the WTO in 2000,
Edwards and his colleagues who voted yes on PNTR signed off on a provision that
requires WTO member nations NOT to inspect anything imported by another member
nation any more rigorously than a domestic product.

If the United States were to apply greater scrutiny to imports from a country with
lax safety standards like China, foreign corporations have the right to sue the
United States.

To be fair, overall, among the Democrats, Edwards has a good rating from Public
Citizen on trade.

The Global Trade Watch website rates all the candidates on their trade votes going
back to the 1970s for those who were in Congress that long.

Clinton gets 43 percent. Obama gets 50 percent. Edwards gets 63 percent. The only
candidate with a higher percentage is Kucinich, with a nearly perfect score.

Having made it such a high profile issue in his campaign, Edwards has arguably done
the most to spotlight the problems with trade agreements. Still, the vote is a
problem.

Edwards has made a point of saying that his kids will not get anything made in China
for Christmas. Perhaps he needs to go further and declare, as he did with his vote
to authorize the Iraq War, that he made a mistake.