Obama is still pushing for free trade agreements with Panama, Colombia, and Korea, albeit with the thin fig leaf of demanding they be accompanied by money for so-called Trade Adjustment Assistance, a "painkiller" program designed to blunt the harm to laid-off workers.
The Republicans don't like TAA, which has held up passage of these agreements momentarily, but both sides are still gunning to pass these agreements some time soon.
You think America has learned its lesson from NAFTA, which the Labor Department has estimated cost us 525,000 jobs? Think again.
Take the Korea agreement, for example. President Obama and the Republican leadership want it despite the fact that the Economic Policy Institute has estimated it will cost us 159,000 more jobs over the next five years.
Yes, you read that correctly. At a time when the president says that his number one economic priority is job creation, and has created an entire commission for that purpose, they're going ahead with it anyway.
Even the official U.S. International Trade Commission has admitted that KORUS-FTA will cause significant job losses. And not just in low-end industries: the ITC foresees the electronic equipment manufacturing industry, with average wages of $30.38 in 2008, as a major victim.
The supposed logic of America swapping junk jobs for high-end jobs simply isn't the way the economics really works out. Pace free-market mythology, there are actually well-understood reasons for this, if you dig a little into what economists already know.
Was this the Obama America voted for in 2008?
No. That Obama is at an undisclosed location somewhere. He campaigned against KORUS-FTA during the 2008 campaign. (It was originally negotiated, but not ratified by Congress, by Bush in 2007.) Among other things, that Obama said:
I strongly support the inclusion of meaningful, enforceable labor and environmental standards in all trade agreements. As president, I will work to ensure that the U.S. again leads the world in ensuring that consumer products produced across the world are done in a manner that supports workers, not undermines them.
Nice words. Unfortunately, none of them are reflected in KORUS-FTA, which contains no serious new provisions on these issues.
This agreement is essentially a NAFTA clone. It is, in fact, the biggest trade agreement since NAFTA, and the first since Canada with a developed country.
This agreement, like NAFTA and the dozen or so other free trade agreements America has signed since NAFTA, is fundamentally an offshoring agreement. That is, it is about making it easier for U.S.-based multinationals to move production overseas with confidence in the security of their investments in overseas plants.
The provisions to protect workers and consumers are unenforceable window dressing. (That's why they're allowed to be in there in the first place.)
Don't be fooled by the fact that some unions, like the United Auto Workers (UAW), have endorsed the agreement. This is just a cynical ploy by the White House to split the trade union movement in order to keep the AFL-CIO neutral.
The UAW's out-of-touch leadership is so punch-drunk from the 2008 collapse of the U.S. auto industry that it has lost touch not only with what is good for the American economy as a whole, but with what is good for rank-and-file auto workers. (There's a rumor in circulation they did a deal with the White House in exchange for protecting pension and other obligations in the auto industry bailout. I can't prove this, but it would certainly explain a few things.)
Don't take my word for it, either: in the words of Al Benchich, retired president of UAW Local 909:
The UAW Administration Caucus is the one-party state that controls the UAW at the International level. Every International officer is a member of the Caucus, and they surround themselves with appointed international reps that unquestioningly do their bidding.
No wonder other, more democratic and more intelligent, unions, like Leo Gerard's United Steelworkers, are criticizing the UAW for its decision to support KORUS-FTA.
Interestingly, the UAW's past record of criticizing KORUS-FTA is more honest than anything they're saying right now. For example, here's what they originally said about this agreement:
KORUS-FTA has inadequate protections and enforcement mechanisms to enforce either the spirit or the letter of the law.
Precisely. And changes made since then are, as noted, minimal.
As an example of how one-sided the treaty is, consider that it now allows -- to great rejoicing -- America to export 75,000 cars a year to Korea. This translates to a measly 800 jobs. Korea's exports of cars to the U.S. in 2009, on the other hand?
Try 476,833.
Furthermore, even if the U.S. does get to sell more cars in Korea, American companies will mostly not be making the steel, tires, and other components that go into them, because the agreement allows cars with 65 percent foreign content to count as "American."
Worse, it allows goods with as much as 65 percent non-South-Korean content to count as "Korean," opening the door not only to North Korean slave labor but to the whole of China. Talk about the camel's nose in the tent!
This is just one example of how KORUS-FTA isn't even as good as the deal the EU just signed with Korea. (The EU got a 55 percent standard on this item.) And remember that the EU and most of its member states, of course, don't really practice free trade anyway: they practice a covertly managed trade that has kept the EU's trade balance within pocket change of zero over the last two decades, while America has been running deficits around the $500 billion mark.
"Free trade agreement," in American English, means "free trade agreement." In other languages, it means "gentleman's agreement for managed trade at a low tariff." The Europeans invented this game -- called mercantilism -- back when trade was conducted with sailing ships. South Korea learned it from Japan, which learned it from Germany. Uncle Sam (and maybe John Bull and a few others) are the only naïfs who still don't get it.
Despite what the White House and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are saying, this agreement makes no sense as a strategy to reduce our horrendous trade deficit. America's trade deficits have a long record of going up, not down, when we sign trade agreements with other nations.
Paradoxically, trade agreements even seem to sabotage our own trade with foreign nations: according to an analysis by the group Public Citizen, in recent years our exports to nations we have free-trade agreements with have actually grown at less than half the pace of our exports to nations we don't have these agreements with. So these agreements don't hold water as trade-expanding measures.
Even leaving aside trade-balance issues, this agreement is a disaster, thanks to something called "investor-state arbitration." Like NAFTA, it compromises American sovereignty and subjects American democracy to having its own laws overruled by foreign judges as interfering with trade. Under NAFTA to date, over $326 million in damages has been paid out by governments as a result of challenges to natural resource policies, environmental protection, and health and safety measures. There about 80 Korean corporations, with about 270 facilities around the U.S., that would acquire the right to challenge our laws under KORUS-FTA.
What kind of problems could this cause? The U.S. was forced in 1996 to weaken Clean Air Act rules on gasoline contaminants in response to a challenge by Venezuela and Brazil. In 1998, we were forced to weaken Endangered Species Act protections for sea turtles thanks to a challenge by India, Malaysia, Pakistan and Thailand concerning the shrimp industry. The EU today endures trade sanctions by the U.S. for not relaxing its ban on hormone-treated beef. In 1996, the WTO ruled against the EU's Lome Convention, a preferential trading scheme for 71 former European colonies in the Third World. In 2003, the Bush administration sued the EU over its moratorium on genetically modified foods.
It gets worse. KORUS-FTA also signs away our right (and Korea's, too, not that this makes it any better) to a wide range of financial regulations of the kind that might have helped avoid the crisis of 2008. For example, it forfeits our right to limit the size of financial institutions. It forfeits our right to place firewalls between different kinds of financial activities in order to prevent volatility in one market from collapsing another. It prevents us from limiting what financial services financial institutions may offer -- Enron Savings & Mortgage, here we come... It bans regulation of derivatives. It ban limits on capital flows designed to tame volatile "hot money."
Why is the U.S. flirting with making such an appalling mistake yet again? Because a) multinational corporations have bought our political system and b) because our government would rather play power politics than keep its own (declining) economic house in order.
It is remarkable how stuck we are in the 1950s, with an invincible economy at home and a Cold War abroad. As a report by the Senate Finance Committee once put it:
Throughout most of the postwar era, U.S. trade policy has been the orphan of U.S. foreign policy. Too often the Executive has granted trade concessions to accomplish political objectives. Rather than conducting U.S. international economic relations on sound economic and commercial principles, the executive has set trade and monetary policy in a foreign aid context. An example has been the Executive's unwillingness to enforce U.S. trade statutes in response to foreign unfair trade practices.
Ironically, it may eventually be our own decline that solves our trade problems, by rescuing us from our own arrogance and stupidity. When we finally realize we can't take our economy for granted, we may finally stop giving away the store in international trade.
Follow Ian Fletcher on Twitter: www.twitter.com/IanFletcher
Now what about this: "For example, it [the Korean trade agreement] forfeits our right to limit the size of financial institutions."
Why on earth would we agree to this? Why is it even in a trade agreement with Korea? Surely the size of our banks is our own business -- isn't it? There's a lot of good reason not to have banks that are "too big to fail" yet we not only haven't made such a regulation, we are proposing to make such a common sense regulation illegal due to this Korean trade agreement.
Sometimes I think we have all taken leave of our senses -- and that we asked the multinationals to run the country for us -- which means for them.
International trade, trade among nations, has always existed.
The round of "free trade" agreements are disingenuous at best.
And those consenting people use the infrastructure of various countries to make their success happen, so the countries involved shouldn't be controlled by the corpos either.
right now the re-expansion of the TAA program is being held up in Congress and Obama has been told by union leaders -- the only way to get unions to stop their demagoguery over trade agreements is to throw around a billion and a half more into TAA. And the latest is that's about to happen and when it does, watch the unions go silent on free trade and Colombian labor unrest.
What the U.S. Gov. has done to Latin America and its hundreds of millions of people is the imposition – by its proctors in high office and its bullying threats involving capital – of market colonialism that has had the effect of imprisoning and enslaving the masses. Neo-liberal ideology has indebted most “third-world” nations, not simply those of Latin America, and it has furthered indigence, lack of education, the corrosive caste system upon which millions are born into, inequality, injustice, hunger, disease, suffering, loss of opportunity and death.
Labor has been made cheaper for US corporations, translating into cheaper goods for its citizens. Through back-breaking slave labor, conditions and wages Latin Americans are exploited so that we, the rich north, can consume to our hearts content. Yet millions upon millions live in squalor, surviving day to day, usually earning less than two dollars daily, living in feeble conditions, without a chance of ever improving their lives due to the non-existence of opportunity.
Ironically, one of his most impressive sculptures is a huge walk-through titled "We, the People."
Mexico doesn't creat or export their poverty, U.S. foreign policies do.
A minority of cowardly Americans find it easy to attack immigrants because they are blinded by racism or lack the gumption to go after the real culprits of this mess, the U.S. government and U.S. corporations.
Five transnational corporations control the U.S. mass media for imperialist interests and say nothing or spread lies about the people’s uprisings in Mexico and the Mexican the baimmigrants in the United States. This is because the U.S. government is focusing its sights on the rising Mexican opposition in order to gain greater control over Mexican oil, minerals, uranium, water, biodiversity, and immigrant labor. And it wants to keep immigrant labor cheap, and so aligns with the Mexican business elite and its government. The elite loves Uncle Sam like kids love Santa Claus. The elite’s Business Coordinating Council of big capitalists is crying for more aid in fighting the cartels, and the aid is pouring in. It does not come in a reindeer sleigh, mind you, but as Blackhawk helicopter gunships that spit fire and death.
http://www.alternet.org/books/149489/what_are_the_u.s.%27s_real_motives_for_launching_a_drug_war_in_mexico?page=entire
Cheaper goods for citizens huh? Last time I checked imports have experienced inflation and quality has also gone down.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rkgx1C_S6ls
YouTube - Giant Sucking Sound - Ross Perot 1992 Presidential Debate.flv
Perot said when U.S. and Mexican wages would equalize, after the U.S. economy was destroyed.
Perot also mentioned the revolving door between Congress and lobbyists:
A recent example is Liz Fowler:
1. VP Wellpoint
2. Member of Sen Baucus' staff where she helped draft the HCR bill
3. Joined the Obama administration.
Mr. Perot co-led a rescue effort to free EDS employees being held hostage...
http://feraljundi.com/2010/07/21/history-ross-perots-private-rescue-of-eds-employees-in-iran-1978/
History: Ross Perot's Private Rescue Of EDS Employees In Iran, 1978
But the reality is that corporations moved the manufacturing jobs to places
with slave labor wages while collecting a tax credit for doing so.
America needs to be re-industrialized to the point where from bathroom slippers to plasma-TV’s, automotive and aircraft components are produced on American soil by American labor while work safety and environmental laws in place and enforced.
One commentator suggested that we also bring back service jobs like call centers (a start has been made here) and back office operations of banks, brokerages and billing operations.
All this of course has to be protected by tariffs. The result will be an increase in employment here in the US, with increased spending power of the people and tax revenues for the public coffers.
This will soon start to reduce the budget deficits of the federal and state level.
From this article I also learned about the idiocy of the "investor-state arbitration." Well, cancel these clauses and replace them with something that leaves a sovereign administration in control of what is going happening on its territory.
Yes, there will be major interruptions of international trade. These interruptions will be larger when America eventually collapses.
Both parties talk about jobs when they think the american people are watching, but support the off
shoring of american jobs at every opportunity. The Fritz Hollings piece Huff'Po published a few weeks
ago said it all - the fifth column- in america, are American Corporations. They have no loyalty to
america, they have no intention to rebuild america through jobs, and they have Washington firmly in the hip pocket. Disgraceful.
Who can dispute the good that will do? Immediately remove any and ALL trade agreements which give any advantages to foreign producers. This should have been done a long time ago. A concentrated shift by many people to simply begin BUYING AMERICAN MADE GOODS would have an immediate, strong effect on our ailing economy!
For every single product on the market today, we have a choice between "theirs" and "ours." Let's simply give more support to OURS!
Are you kidding? Anyone that can use their mind to think just a hair deeper than the surface can easily find that such a position is rather ridiculous and infantile!
How about this, let's all advocate for "Buying smart!" - purchase goods that provide the best value to you as you see fit - take into account your values of price, quality, and whatever else might be pertinent.
and please stop with this disguised bigotry which manifests through fear and so-called 'national pride' - it ain't a case of 'us' vs 'them', both groups can benefit from trade.
There is a large number of folks who have worked extraordinarily hard to delude themselves into thinking that Obama isn't only making awesome change, but he's one of the best presidents we've ever had. And that is really depressing. Because with so many enablers, there is not going to be any motivation for the administration to shift away from republican policy.
That's OK I left that part blank last election too, including national Congress and one Senate seat.
I should be free to buy from whomever I care to at whatever price we can agree upon.
I should be free to sell to whomever I care to at whatever price we can agree upon.
All the rest (trade agreements, protective tariffs, content mandates, usage requirements) are simply protection for politically connected producers (domestic manufacturers, UAW, Steelworkers Union, agricultural producers, etc), all ultimately paid for by the consuming public.
Suffice it to say - it is clearly morally wrong for a government to tell its citizens how they can spend their money. Effectively, you are assuming your use of my cash takes precedent over mine - on what basis?
Equal protection under the law (14th amendment) means effectively that government must strive to be an impartial umpire in regards to its dealing with the citizenry.
Now, let's look at a concrete example - the US levies a tariff on sugar imports, which raises the cost to US consumers/users of sugar 1/3 over world market prices.
This protective tariff provides untold revenue streams to a handful of US producers, for no other reason than that they have the political connections to make it so.
So my question to you and the Mr Fletchers of the world - why is it fair that hundreds of millions of US citizens pay higher than world market prices for sugar simply to benefit a handful of US producers? How is that equal protection under the law.
Aren't they "swinging their fists" right into my pocket & taking my money?