President Obama is committed to pursuing an ambitious trade agenda that will help grow our economy and support good jobs for U.S. workers by opening new markets. To achieve that objective, we seek to provide a level playing field that creates economic opportunities for U.S. workers, companies, farmers, and ranchers, and that ensures our trading partners have acceptable working conditions and respect fundamental labor rights. As part of this broader trade agenda, the Obama Administration has worked closely with the government of Colombia to address serious and immediate labor concerns. The result is an agreed “Action Plan Related to Labor Rights” that will lead to greatly enhanced labor rights in Colombia and clear the way for the U.S.-Colombia Trade Agreement to move forward to Congress. The U.S.-Colombia Trade Agreement will expand U.S. goods exports alone by more than $1.1 billion and give key U.S. goods and services duty free access in sectors from manufacturing to agriculture. It will increase U.S. GDP by $2.5 billion and support thousands of additional U.S. jobs.

Largely hailed by Republican lawmakers, the preliminary details of the deal, dubbed an "Action Plan for Labour Rights," were received skeptically by some Democrat representatives, while labour and rights groups noted that they lacked breadth, depth, and accountability measures.



The U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA) was negotiated under the last George W. Bush administration and has been log-jammed in the pipeline since due to serious concerns about the South American country's lax labour laws, history of violence against union leaders, and shaky human rights record.



"Trade union and labour rights violations are taking place within a broader context that is not addressed by this action plan," Gimena Sanchez, an Andean expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, told IPS.



"That context includes a continued internal armed conflict, re-grouped and reconstituted paramilitarism that operate throughout the country, and alarming impunity on labour and all other human rights cases," she explained.



Meanwhile, Republicans in the House of Representatives, who favour the FTA's boost of U.S. exports and creation of domestic jobs, have been pushing for the Colombia pact to be approved in a batch along with the also pending Panama and South Korea agreements, ostensibly to fast-track the deals, as the latter has been pegged a priority by the White House.

As the Obama Administration signaled its intent to send the U.S.-Columbia Free Trade Agreement (FTA) to Congress for ratification, Mary Kay Henry, President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), issued the following statement:



“SEIU cannot support the U.S.-Colombia Trade Agreement negotiated by President George W. Bush and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe in 2007.



“This agreement is another example of failed trade policies that have resulted in the loss of millions of U.S. jobs. The Economic Policy Institute has estimated that this agreement will result in the loss of 55,000 jobs in the U.S.-- the last thing our economy needs.



“In addition, our brothers and sisters in the Colombian labor movement, in the Afro-Colombian community and human rights advocates face a climate rife with crime and violence. In Colombia, more trade unionists are murdered than anywhere else in the world and the perpetrators are very rarely brought to justice. Since 2007, nearly 200 trade unionists have been murdered, including two in the past week.



“While we commend the Administration’s efforts to address some of our concerns by negotiating a separate action plan on labor rights, this agreement is not sufficient to ensure that these atrocities will cease and that the Colombian government will protect workers who wish to form a union.



“On these grounds, SEIU flatly opposes the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.”

In February, GOP congressional leaders made an evil genius move. If the Obama administration wanted credit with potential corporate donors for moving Bush's Korea FTA-- the biggest NAFTA-style job-offshoring deal since NAFTA, beloved by Wall Street for its financial deregulation terms-- then the ultimate price had to be paid: also move Bush's Colombia deal, reviled by labor and other key elements of the Democratic base.



Obama had the power to call the GOP's bluff. The Korea FTA remains under the extreme White House power rules of the Fast Track procedure. Fast Track votes are the only ones over which the White House controls timing. Under Fast Track, if the White House sends a trade pact to Congress, it gets an automatic vote within a set number of days. Stopping it would require the House GOP to take action.



Anyone care to bet that if the Obama administration made Speaker Boehner face this reality, he actually would pull the plug on the biggest dollar trade deal since China PNTR that every GOP corporate constituency is salivating over? (And passing the Korea deal alone would do plenty of political damage to Obama, given that a wide swath of Democratic base groups oppose it, if for no other reason than it is projected to increase the U.S. trade deficit and cost tens of thousands more manufacturing jobs.)



Yet, instead of countering the GOP gambit by exercising its strength, the administration scrambled through March to dust off basically the same list of easily doable "demands" that had been blasted by Democrats and labor during the Bush administration. The motivation was transparent: Enactment of this kabuki dance facilitated compliance with the GOP demands to move the Colombia FTA.



...[T]oday we face a situation-- an Obama Colombia-Korea NAFTA expansion-- that is equal parts damaging, heartbreaking, infuriating and disgusting. Does anyone even remember that there was supposed to be change we could believe in?

Let's see... what else can Obama negotiate away for his corporate masters? Background: George H.W. Bush couldn't get the fast track authority out of Congress he needed to pass the job-destroying NAFTA legislation that turned out to be an absolute catastrophe for the middle class, although not so bad for the American corporate managerial class that got Clinton to push it through Congress instead. (And the emergence of Rahm Emanuel out of that ugly mess... what a bonus for corporate America!) Anyway, Bush II never did get the horrible, job killing trade deals he negotiated with Colombia, Panama and South Korea done. Obama promised he'd do it. What better time than right now, with the middle class reeling from his inadequate and shameful presidency. (It's easy for me to say, living in California, but there isthat would ever make me vote for Obama again, not a Palin, a Bachmann, a Newt... not even Huckabee or Pence.) The White House announcement sounded bland enough at first, then downright Orwellian in it's deft twisting of the facts to mean the exact opposite of reality:Fighters for working class families, far more so than Obama was even (long, long ago) in the best of times-- Louise Slaughter (D-NY), Jim McGovern (D-MA), Linda Sanchez (D-CA), Betty Sutton (D-OH), Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), Mike Michaud (D-ME), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) and George Miller (D-CA)-- begged to differ... and quite publicly. So did the SEIU and the United Steelworkers Union, who can usually be counted on to eat out of the Administration's hand. In fact, no one who gives a damn about working people-- either here or in Colombia-- is behind the Obama/Bush trade deal Boehner never stops carping about. And Obama didn't even make this part of a negotiation kabuki, like he did with the spending cuts he relishes; he just gave this one away 51 labor organizers were assassinated in Colombia last year; so far Obama's partners got 6 more this year, 2 of whom were murdered this week. The SEIU statement is pretty brutal-- and pretty clear:Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, asserts that Obama's announcement was "a remarkably cynical maneuver to facilitate passage of yet another of President Bush's leftover NAFTA-style Free Trade Agreements."Capitulation we can believe in? You bet, meanwhile I bet everything Bush was crying about regarding Pelosi is all solved now that Obama is pushing it.

Labels: Bush trade policies, Colombia, free trade