Average real wages in Mexican manufacturing are lower than they were 10 years ago, if you can believe that.

I am told that the clinical definition of insanity is the tendency to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results.

Proponents of the Central America Free Trade Agreement have conveniently ignored this fundamental fact: the effect of trade on incomes in Central America and how to alleviate the adverse consequences of trade liberalization on the poor.

If you consider that a typical Central American consumer earns only a small fraction of an average American worker's wages, it becomes clear that CAFTA's true goal is not to the increase U.S. exports.

Hey, I'm a former union president myself and also an attorney that represented a lot of unions.

Trade reform has also been linked to increased income disparity as skilled workers have captured more benefits from globalization than their unskilled counterparts.

The biggest share of U.S. exports to the six CAFTA nations is not the traditional job-creation kind. These are products that are not consumed in the purchasing nations.