Senators urge renegotiation of U.S. trade deals

[Joanne98]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A group of U.S. senators urged President Barack Obama Monday to back legislation requiring the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement and a long list of other trade pacts they blame for millions of lost U.S. manufacturing jobs.

"We want trade and plenty of it, but we want trade under new rules. The TRADE Act will help Congress and the White House craft a trade policy that makes sense and learns from our many mistakes over the past couple of decades," Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, told reporters in a conference call.

The bill, which has seven co-sponsors in the Senate, shows the strong opposition Obama could face from many members of his own Democratic Party if he pushes for new trade agreements without addressing concerns about past trade pacts. Six Democrats are among the co-sponsors, as well as independent Bernie Sanders.

U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said in a speech on Monday at a World Trade Organization meeting in Geneva that the United States was "ready to move into the endgame" of the eight-year-old world trade talks if other countries made meaningful market-opening commitments.

The proposed Trade Reform, Accountability, Development, and Employment Act requires the U.S. Government Accountability Office to evaluate the impact of NAFTA, which groups the United States, Canada and Mexico, and other trade deals on U.S. jobs, wages and business investment and for the White House to give Congress a plan for renegotiating those pacts.

The United States has free trade deals in force with Canada, Mexico, Australia, Singapore, Chile, Peru and 11 other countries and has pending agreements with three other countries -- South Korea, Panama and Colombia.

"We believe it's important to require the president to submit renegotiation plans for existing agreements prior to negotiating new agreements and prior to the congressional consideration of agreement that's are now pending," Senator Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, said.

Brown first introduced the TRADE Act during the height of the 2008 U.S. presidential election campaign, when Obama often told supporters he wanted to renegotiate NAFTA.

SIMILAR BILL IN HOUSE

It would effectively require 60 votes in the 100-member Senate for approval of free trade agreements by mandating they meet certain criteria on labor, environment, investment, food and product safety and U.S. rights to slap duties on imports it believes are unfairly priced.

A similar bill this year in the House of Representatives already has 127 co-sponsors, or more than one-fourth of that body's voting membership.

Obama has backed off promises to renegotiate NAFTA and said recently he wanted the United States to re-engage in talks on a regional free trade agreement in the Asia Pacific

Continued>>>
http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSTRE5AT52T20091130

[endless october]

1. boy, NAFTA sure worked great, didn't it?

maybe we just didn't outsource enough jobs yet.

those damned fired workers just won't buy enough stuff. why do they hate freedom?

[Sebass1271]

2. I really don't care about trading criteria or agreements to

improve the environment, labor laws and product safety IF those jobs will still be outsourced overseas. I am sorry, but i have become very egoistic. Why fucking care about labor laws in other countries when we don't' even jobs here?

We need those jobs back and soon! our country is deteriorating by the minute, americans can't find work. Our middle class was destroyed by nafta and by trading without regulations.

[h9socialist]

4. See my post called "Long Overdue"

I think the establishment of a long term sustainable economy for the world is the only viable way to turn around "out-sourcing." The smokestack industries in the US are not coming back -- that is part of the previous organization of capitalism which has been in the process of dying off for the last 40 years! We need a new green economy that incorporates and expands upon the rights won in the previous period.

[h9socialist]

3. Long Overdue . . .

. . . but don't get carried away: even a throrough castration of NAFTA's more objectionable language will be of marginal impact. What would make a huge difference would be the revival of the Brandt-Palme-Manley proposals of the 1980s. That proposal called for the world powers to reduce military spending by1% and put the savings into a global fund for economic development. I emphasize "development" NOT "growth" because growth in consumption would make our environmental efforts useless.

The world needs a "sustainable economy" scheme in which the developed countries share more wealth with underdeveloped countries in exchange for better regulation of the environment, greenhouse gases and conservation of natural resources. ANY trade agreement should fit within that context.

In other words, the goal is a fairer more functional distribution of the world's resources put in the context of a sustainable economy. Trade agreements can be negotiated and renegotiated ad infinitum once those principles are established.