Thread: NAFTA of the East: Korean Agreement Is a Job Killer

Korean Agreement Is a Job Killer

Phyllis Schlafly
Columnist, Townhall.com
Oct 11, 2011

President Barack Obama, with the help of some Republicans who take their orders from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is trying to pass a bill that will kill U.S. jobs, send more jobs overseas and make more Americans dependent on government handouts. That's the Frances Fox Piven strategy Obama learned at a Socialist Party conference in New York while he was attending Columbia University.

This dangerous bill is the 1,413-page Korean-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA), which is scheduled to come up soon in Congress. It's hard to see how anyone who cares about America's economic future could allow this job killer to become law, and any member of Congress who votes for it doesn't deserve to be re-elected next year.

We are told KORUS will create more exports, but the principal exports will be American jobs. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that KORUS will cost us 159,000 jobs. The U.S. International Trade Commission also admits that KORUS will cause significant job losses. Those job losses will extend from low-end industries to electronic equipment manufacturing, where the victims will be Americans who were making an average wage of $30 an hour in 2008.

Some Members of Congress are trying to camouflage what they are doing by joining KORUS at the hip with a government job-training program. That's an admission that KORUS will cost us jobs.

Obama claims that KORUS will create 70,000 low-paying in-sourced jobs (of Americans working for foreign employers). But even if that is true, which is doubtful, that's less than half the well-paying jobs the U.S. will lose.

KORUS advocates a claim it will allow the U.S. to export 75,000 cars a year to South Korea. Compare that puny figure with the fact that Americans are buying over a million South Korean cars this year.

Among the many ways that South Korea puts up barriers against U.S. products is to subject any Korean brave enough to buy an American car to a discriminatory tax audit.

KORUS allows Korean products imported into the U.S. to have 65 percent non-South-Korean content. Nobody will know how much of that 65 percent will be made by slave labor in North Korea or China.

KORUS will give Korean corporations the right to challenge any U.S. law they think might limit their market access or profitability, including our prevailing wage laws. These trade agreements generally give foreigners the right to define free trade, which they do in ways that always disadvantage the U.S.

KORUS will make it impossible for us to prevent foreigners from taking over entire U.S. industries, which they can buy with the U.S. dollars they accumulate from our balance of trade deficit. KORUS will effectively nullify U.S. laws and regulations that restrict economic monopolies.

KORUS will enmesh us in a legal labyrinth called "investor-state arbitration." That means subjecting our laws to review by foreign bureaucrats anytime we are accused of interfering with free trade.

The power "to regulate commerce with foreign nations" is one of the most important powers given to Congress by the U.S. Constitution. It is foolish and unconstitutional to turn any part of that power over to any tribunal of foreigners.

U.S. regulation of food imports is already under attack in the World Trade Organization, and KORUS will give Korea the right to limit our ability to regulate the quality of food imports. We will lose our ability to protect ourselves from contaminated and toxic foods.

Free trade has always been a one-way street, which is why the U.S. has built up an enormous trade deficit. The principal factor in creating this unfair trading system is that foreigners simply replace their tariffs with a Value Added Tax, and KORUS does nothing to remedy or reduce this gross unfairness.

KORUS allows South Korea to continue its 10 percent VAT. That means South Korea can subsidize its exports to the U.S. by 10 percent, called a VAT rebate, and impose a 10 percent tax on U.S. exports to South Korea, which obviously makes U.S. goods more expensive.

Any member of Congress who votes for this grossly anti-American agreement either doesn't understand what is going on, or is serving the interests of the multinational corporations who want to move their plants to Asia where wages are less than $1 an hour.

Some people are calling KORUS the new NAFTA. Since NAFTA didn't fulfill its promises and cost millions of American jobs, we can expect likewise from KORUS.

Fifty thousand Americans gave their lives in the 1950s to keep South Korea free, and we've maintained an expensive border patrol ever since to protect against Communist North Korea, so South Korea doesn't have to provide its own defense. We shouldn't give South Korea American jobs, too.

Phyllis Schlafly is a lawyer, conservative political analyst and author of 20 books. Her latest, written with co-author Suzanne Venker, is "The Flipside of Feminism" published in March by WorldNetDaily. She can be contacted by e-mail at phyllis@eagleforum.org. To find out more about Phyllis Schlafly and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Website at www.creators.com.

http://townhall.com/columnists/phylliss ... page/full/

to my fellow Conservatives... OUR Party PUSHED HARD for this Passage

you have no one to blame but yourself for voting the same Treasonous Fools back into Office

NAFTA
CAFTA
Korean Agreement

and the fantastic membership in

The WTO

Both Parties sold this country down the River for a few Trinkets from Special Interest Groups

again... the only ones to profit are the globalist companys/corporations; you do not profit

YOU LOSE JOBS

House Passes 3 Free-Trade Agreements

Wednesday, 12 Oct 2011 06:53 PM

Free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama were approved by the House on Wednesday and immediately headed for votes in the Senate as Congress rushed to complete work on deals that have the potential to spur economic activity and put Americans back to work.

Years in the making, the Obama administration says the three deals, by reducing or eliminating tariffs that disadvantage American producers, could boost U.S. exports by $13 billion a year and foster tens of thousands of new jobs.

The votes come just a day after Senate Republicans were unified in rejecting President Barack Obama's $447 billion jobs creation initiative, and were hailed by lawmakers eager to show disillusioned voters that Congress can work with the president to help get the economy back on track.

The trade agreements, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said, are "an area of common ground where we have worked together."

The agreement with South Korea, the world's 13th largest economy, was the biggest such deal since the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada in 1994.

The votes were 278-151 for South Korea, 300-129 for Panama and 262-167 for Colombia. The Senate was scheduled to vote later Wednesday.

Despite the strong majorities, the debate was not without rancor.

Republicans criticized Obama for taking several years to send the agreements, all signed in the President George W. Bush administration, to Congress for final approval. Many among Obama's core supporters, including organized labor and Democrats from areas hit hard by foreign competition, were unhappy that the White House was espousing the benefits of free trade.

Democratic opposition was particularly strong against the agreement with Colombia, where labor leaders long have faced the threat of violence.

"I find it deeply disturbing that the United States Congress is even considering a free trade agreement with a country that holds the world record for assassinations of trade unionists," said Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif.

To address such dissatisfaction, the White House demanded linking the trade bills to extension of a Kennedy-era program that helps workers displaced by foreign competition with retraining and financial aid. The Senate went along; the House passed it Wednesday, 307-122.

But with the focus in both the White House and Congress on jobs, the trade agreements enjoyed wide bipartisan support.

The administration says the three deals will boost U.S. exports by $13 billion a year and that just the agreement with South Korea, America's seventh largest trading partner, will support 70,000 American jobs.

Groups that oppose the pacts, including the AFL-CIO, point to past cases where free trade agreements were linked to factories moving overseas and they dispute the job growth figures.

Supporters argue that the three trading partners already enjoy almost duty-free access to U.S. markets and the agreements will lower tariffs on U.S. goods, making them significantly more competitive.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce notes that U.S. farm products sold to South Korea face 54 percent tariffs, compared with 9 percent for Korean agricultural goods in the United States, and that U.S. automakers are hit with a 35 percent tariff in Colombia, compared with 2 percent for any vehicles coming from Colombia.

The administration says the trade deal with South Korea could increase exports by $10 billion, enough to eliminate the current $10 billion surplus Seoul has with the United States. It would make 95 percent of American consumer and industrial goods duty free within five years.

That agreement, the White House said in a statement, will give American businesses, farmers, workers, ranchers, manufacturers, investors and service providers "unprecedented access to Korea's nearly $1 trillion economy."

Supporters say that the Colombia deal, in addition to opening up markets that have been restricted because of high tariffs, would provide a gesture of political support for President Juan Manual Santos, a strong U.S. ally.

Republicans welcomed the prospect of increased exports but said those benefits could have come sooner if Obama had acted more quickly. They said American businesses have paid $3.8 billion in tariffs to Colombia since the trade agreement was signed, and that Americans are losing markets in South Korea because of a Korea-European Union free trade agreement that went into effect in July.

"There's no reason we should have had to wait nearly three years for this president to send them up to Congress for a vote, but they're a good start nonetheless," Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said.

Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said there had been "nothing but passive indifference" from the Obama administration.

Finalizing the three deals has been difficult: Democratic majorities in the last year of the Bush administration opposed them and Obama demanded renegotiation of certain sections of each deal.

In the past year the administration has succeeded in winning concessions from South Korea to open up its markets further to U.S. vehicles and concluded an agreement to bring transparency to banking practices in Panama, known as a tax haven.

It has prodded Colombia into putting together a plan designed to protect labor rights and crack down on violence against labor leaders.

The congressional votes come a little more than a week after Obama submitted the agreements to Congress. The quick turnaround reflects the importance with which House GOP leaders regard them as economic aids.

The goal was to finish the voting by Wednesday, a day before South Korean President Lee Myung-bak is scheduled to address a joint meeting of Congress.

Lee, in a speech Wednesday to the Chamber of Commerce, said the U.S.-Korea agreement would "send a powerful message to the world that the United States and South Korea stand together in rejecting protectionism and that we are open to free and fair trade."

The United States has free trade relations with 17 nations. The last free trade agreement was completed in 2007 with Peru. It could still take several months to work out the final formalities before the current agreements go into force. The South Korean parliament is expected to sign off on its agreement this month.

http://www.moneynews.com/Economy/Congre ... /id/414240