Another Free Trade disaster, and Obama owns it. [View all]

[Elwood P Dowd]

The latest email from Public Citizen...........


March 15, 2014

Friend,

Today is the second anniversary of the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement (FTA) taking effect.

The data are in: U.S. exports to Korea dropped 11 percent and our deficit with Korea ballooned 47 percent. That equates to more than 40,000 additional American jobs lost.

This, after the Obama administration promised it would expand our exports and create American jobs.

Despite the stunning evidence, now the Obama administration is making the same bogus claims that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will create more exports and jobs. The thing is, the Obama administration literally used the Korea FTA as its starting text for the TPP!

This is insanity — doing the same thing again and again, and expecting a different outcome.

Write your representative and tell him or her that America can’t take more of the same old “free trade” deals.

President Barack Obama wants your representative to give him Fast Track trade authority so that he can railroad the TPP through Congress with limited debate and no amendments. But under the Korea FTA — Obama’s only major trade deal, and the deal on which the TPP is modeled — U.S. exports dropped dramatically, imports soared and the U.S. lost more jobs to a trade agreement.

We don’t want another so-called free trade agreement that ships our jobs overseas, dumping wages and benefits overboard along the way.

Urge your representative to say “no” to the Camp-Baucus Fast Track bill and all efforts to Fast Track the TPP and other trade agreements that replicate this damaging model.

The White House and the corporate lobby are selling the TPP as a new and improved version of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). But the Korea FTA was also sold as a shiny new version of NAFTA — all fixed up to avoid the job loss and other NAFTA damage.

But now, just two years later, the data show that the Korea deal is not new or improved — it’s the same-old American-job-killing deal that corporations love.

Like the so-called trade pacts before it, the TPP threatens our representatives’ ability to set domestic policies, such as those ensuring food safety, promoting buy local policies, enabling access to safe and affordable medicines, safeguarding Internet freedom and more. And it includes the incentives also included in NAFTA to offshore American jobs to lower-wage countries.

Make sure your representative knows what you think about the Korea FTA failure, and urge him or her to reject any form of Fast Track.

We need a new process that ensures a meaningful role for Congress and the American public in trade agreement policy.

Thank you for all that you do.

In solidarity,

Melanie Foley
Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch