US Senate Panel Clears Three Trade Pact

[Freddie Stubbs]

Source: http://www.nasdaq.com/aspx/stock-market-news-story.aspx?storyid=201110112035dowjonesdjonline000460&t

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday approved trade deals with South Korea, Colombia and Panama, brushing aside opposition from labor unions and some manufacturers in an effort to ratify pacts first negotiated more than four years ago.

The panel cleared the Colombia pact 18-6 and approved the other two deals by voice vote. The deals are forecast to generate $13 billion a year in exports and expected to clear both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate on Wednesday. The trade agreements have been cast by both the Obama administration and congressional leaders as a way to boost the U.S. economy.

Republicans and Democrats have been fighting for years over the trade deals, reflecting longstanding tension over whether phasing out tariffs winds up boosting growth or costing U.S. jobs. Unions are coming out against the trade pacts, and have stepped up a lobbying campaign since Obama submitted the agreements to Congress last week.

Democratic lawmakers began showing more support for the trade pacts since the deals have been reworked. A final breakthrough came when Republican leaders agreed to go along with the renewal of a worker retraining program that helps workers who lose jobs because of overseas competition. The program, known as Trade Adjustment Assistance, would be scaled back after a 2009 expansion as some Republicans complain that the assistance is a waste of money.

Read more: NASDAQ

[Demeter]

1. those illegal treaties, they mean?

[Freddie Stubbs]

14. How exactly are these trade pacts illegal?

[Arctic Dave]

2. What the fuck is the point of "retraining" when the jobs are overseas?

COMPLETE AND TOTAL BULLSHIT!


If Obama signs these then he can kiss my support goodbye.

[Dragonfli]

9. He is the biggest advocate for these illegal treaties, so I imagine it will be signed gleefully

with many pens that can be given to his constituency, The US Chamber of Commerce.

He will sign every idea in this letter if he can get them on his desk: http://www.uschamber.com/sites/default/files/110905_jobs_letter.pdf

[Freddie Stubbs]

20. How exactly are these trade pacts illegal?

[Dragonfli]

21. they should be passed as treaties

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=103&topic_id=631572&mesg_id=631572

[Freddie Stubbs]

24. This something clearly different than a treaty

These are only laws regulating trade with specific nations. Like any law, it can simply be repealed by an act of Congress which is signed by the President.

[Dragonfli]

26. That is simply blatantly incorrect,

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/treaty

trea·ty   /ˈtriti/ Show Spelled Show IPA

noun, plural -ties.

1. a formal agreement between two or more states in reference to peace, alliance, commerce, or other international relations.

(snip)

Selling job exports like this (especially using trickery) is a deplorable thing to carry water for.
You should take a close look at yourself and evaluate why you would do such a thing.

[Freddie Stubbs]

28. NAFTA has been in effect for almost 18 years now

It was put into effect as a law, not a treaty. In all of that time, why hasn't anyone challenged its constitutionality in court?

[Dragonfli]

29. I imagine because lobbyists paid good money to get what they wanted

Bush tortured people and lied us into war and no one is challenging that either, that does not make it legal, just corrupt.

Banks sold bad paper while misrepresenting it as good debt and BET AGAINST their own clients knowing it would fail (that is also illegal but remains unchallenged).

We should follow the rule of law rather than use past corruption as precedent to continue corruption, so I guess I just don't understand your point.

[Freddie Stubbs]

15. Not all jobs are going overseas

For instance, the United Auto Workers supports the South Korea trade pact, as it will open up that market to American cars.

[Arctic Dave]

17. Riiight. Same thi g was said about all the others.

I see you ignore the pact with Colombia's union murdering shitbag government.

[Freddie Stubbs]

19. Farmers support the Colombian trade deal:

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/10/11/2449296/california-farmers-welcome-free.html

http://dakotafarmer.com/story.aspx/sd-corn-supports-free-trade-pacts-9-53831

http://www.jconline.com/article/20111012/BUSINESS/110120306/Indiana-farmers-gain-from-trade-deals?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

[Dragonfli]

23. Thats true, but as with NAFTA that lost American jobs, there will be a huge net loss of jobs

Robert Scott, international economist for the Economic Policy Institute, estimates that the trade deals taken together will result in a loss of 214,000 jobs.

While he believes there will be 478,000 export related jobs created in the United States by the deals, he argues the increased exports to the United States from the countries will cost nearly 700,000 jobs.

"All we hear is about the export jobs being created," he said. "The problem is they count the home team's score and leave off the visitors' score."


This is the same method used to sell NAFTA, and will yield the same results.
How many times must you fall for a con job before you learn not to play 3 card montey with the shifty eyed guy on the corner?

[PSPS]

3. Senators dutifully performing the task they're paid to do by their corporate owners.

[nineteen50]

4. "In the final analysis

riots are the voice of the unheard". MLK

[jwirr]

5. Brilliant they put the jobs program down and vote the outsourcing

trade agreements up. Insanity.

[MannyGoldstein]

6. I, for one, am proud that our President can stand up to working Americans.

The job creators have suffered enough.

[values1]

38. The old parties of small business are dead. Face it.

[midnight]

7. K&R It is easy to brush aside the unions, and the workers... Always..

[JDPriestly]

8. These trade deals will benefit their corporate sponsors, not ordinary Americans.

You and I will just suffer more because of these deals.

The corporations have negotiated the inclusion of provisions that will benefit them and deprive us of having the ability to change those provisions without renegotiating the agreements.

And we just get cheap, horrible products. Our stores are stuffed with them.

My mom bought pants made in one of the underdeveloped countries including a pair of jeans she gave me. The pockets on the jeans are open at the top. Seriously, I would not dare put much of anything in them because, although from the outside it looks like I have pockets, they are open at the top, not attached to the waistband or the fabric of the jeans. There is a hole and nothing to prevent small things from falling out of the jeans.

How shoddy can you get?

An American working as a seamstress in a jeans factory would never agree to make a jeans pocket like that. The person who made those jeans did not understand how they would be worn or used, did not understand the cultural context in the US.

[iamthebandfanman]

10. Oh, they can pass a bill for jobs for other counties...

just not their own.


what a sad sad government of idiotic mindless payed off dumbfucks.

we have to find a way to get all this money outa campaigns and politics.

[AdHocSolver]

11. More NAFTA type trade deals will NOT help Americans.

The backers of these trade pacts (with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama) claim that they will generate $13 billion a year in exports. The question to ask is how big an increase in IMPORTS will they produce.

What hurts Americans is the trade DEFICIT. Increasing America's debt to pay for the increased imports will increase the devastation to the U.S. economy.

The ONLY solution to the U.S. economic problems is to limit imports of the type of goods that Americans buy on a regular basis such as clothes, shoes, appliances, electronics, linens, dishes, tools, and similar items in order to make their manufacture in the U.S. by American labor competitive.

In edition, employed Americans would pay taxes which would automatically reduce the federal and state government deficits without even increasing anyone's tax rate.

One doesn't need a PhD in economics to understand this concept.

Are our leaders that ignorant or are they just acting as enablers of the corporate scam that is destroying the American economy?

[Gore1FL]

12. I don't havea fundamental problem with free trade

The rules need to include worker's rights.

A world economy isn't inherently a bad thing. The competition needs to be something that brings us all up, and not reduce us to the least.

It's the only way we get to b e a class 1 civilization. If we don't transition from 0 to 1 in the next century or so, we die. Free trade agreements are a necessary step to come together. But again--there has to be worker protection. A xorporate move to slave labor isn't the goal, it's to be avoided.

I think Carl Sagan put it best in the perspective of this picture taken from Cassini on the other side of Saturn:



From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than his distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

--Carl Sagan

[Lasher]

13. Let me guess: You're not looking for a job.

This naive coming together is not in Americans' interests. You haven't seemed to notice that these Free Trade Agreements do not bring us all up.

[Gore1FL]

30. I am guessing you didn't read what I said

If workers were treated the same world wide in terms of compensation, jobs would be available.

I would be willing to be unemployed if it meant the survival of the human race, however.

On Edit: to clarify further, I make 60%-70% of what my skill set would normally pay because I work in the public sector. I have passed up job opportunities to stay where I am at because what I do is important.

[Lasher]

32. The 2010 US gross national income per capita was $47,140.

You advocate lowing our income to the $9,097 worldwide average and you call it survival. Fuck that.

http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DATASTATISTICS/Resources/GNIPC.pdf

[Gore1FL]

33. No.

I am advocating bringing the world up to us, not us down to the world.

If you had read my post you would have seen the words "The competition needs to be something that brings us all up."

Please don't say I advocate something that I specifically said the opposite of.

[Lasher]

35. I'm advocating for free sailboats for everybody but that doesn't mean it will happen.

Your wish is just as empty. If we share wealth equally with the rest of the world, all our incomes become what the world average is. It's a matter of simple arithmetic - that is, unless you know of some magic prosperity that is going to raise up everybody else who does not currently enjoy a standard of living equal to that in the US today.

Employers are not offshoring factories to China so that they can pay the prevailing US wage, and the resultant loss of US jobs has a negative impact on average incomes here. You want to accelerate this same process that is clearly not 'bringing us all up.'

And, yours being the empty hope that it clearly is, you are naively advocating a 'coming together' that would surely have the result that I cited - average wages everywhere, including in the US, would be $9,097 a year.

[Gore1FL]

36. OK. If you twist my point to mean something else you win!

Congratulations!!

[pampango]

16. Neither do European countries (among others) but they are progressive by comparison.

When a country has regressive taxes, weakened unions, a shattered safety net, a very ineffective health care system and a deregulated corporate environment (like the US with its highly inequitable distribution of income), it seems like "free trade" is a cause of many problems.

When a country (or a continent in Europe's case) has high/progressive taxes, strong unions, an effective safety net, national health care and effective corporate regulation (resulting in a fairer society with an equitable distribution of income), it seems like "free trade" and relatively open borders are part of being a liberal democracy. In Europe it's the right (particularly the far-right) that fights against open borders and for tariffs. Liberal democracy doesn't particularly interest them.

[Gore1FL]

31. That's what I am going towards.

If all things were equal, we could progress as a world, rather than playing zero sum.

[OhioChick]

18. More US jobs soon to be gone n/t

[No Elephants]

22. Brushing aside objections of unions to finalize Bushco's pacts.

And, when they hit the fan, Democrats will no doubt forget this portion and point out that these were begun under Bushco, as they do now when anyone points out Clinton signed NAFTA and Obamaco finalized Solyndra (after restructuring it).

Because none of this actually matters in people's lives. :sarcasm:

[Freddie Stubbs]

25. The UAW supports the South Korea trade pact

[Dragonfli]

27. AFL CIO opposes them (for good reason)

http://act.aflcio.org/c/18/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=2917

[L0oniX]

34. punt

[values1]

37. "Republicans say that retraining is a waste of time"

Republicans and some Blue Dog Dems committ attrocities by spinning that they provide enough regulation to ensure that Americans will make a living wage to support the debt that they have from the past period of debt enticement and entrapment.Past housing loan entrapment offers without regulation were also a huge scam. Having engineered their last scams before Cheney-Bush left office, Wall Street, their jockeys, and prostituted-to-Wall-Street-election-support Congressmen, set up more free trade agreements and are orgasmic over the recently signed "free" trade agreements.

These fools think that the middle class in the US will have enough income to support purchasing the "stuff" that they bring back to this country. They are finding out that NO, the middle and poor class has stopped purchasing, mainly because they cannot. Some people are also just beginning boycotts of US company products made at US facilities overseas. Do they never learn that money does trickle up also? It is just the beginning. Corruption and trumped up wars, are and will continue to be exposed. For the moment, boycotts are the only option...as much as possible.