Passage of the Free Trade Agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea

I write to commiserate with all those who wrote their congress members to urge them to vote against these harmful FTAs.

The one good note is that our efforts in Connecticut with Representative Larson convinced him to vote against the Colombian FTA. Rep. Jim Himes [R-CT 4th] voted in favor, of course. I need to send our Representative Larson a "thank you" for getting his CT Democratic Caucus members to vote "no" on the Colombia FTA, bucking the stream against a majority of his other Democratic colleagues. I have to look up the CT vote on the other two FTAs, but I'm guessing the vote on them went about the same.

Blumenthal and Lieberman, as might have been expected, were split on the Colombia FTA, nay and yea respectively.

There was a snowball's chance in hell that these FTAs would be voted down. The elements working against defeat seem to be:

1. Five years of congressional wrangling

2. The administration's need to get something...anything...passed through this congress

3. The purported addition of job creation resulting from its passage. . . despite every one's remembering [or did they?] the negative effects of NAFTA & CAFTA on the jobs market. In an election year who could risk appearing to be against the [promised] creation of jobs?

As I wrote on my Facebook page today:

The passage of these FTAs, we will see, is a panacea for neither the drooping U.S. economy nor for the economies of Colombia, South Korea and Panama. Based on the results of such previous FTAs like NAFTA and CAFTA, the economies of the U.S. and those of the countries with whom the agreements were made faced ongoing challenges. Those who benefited from those agreements were large corporations, not the small businesses and unions whom they were purported to benefit.

When will our legislators learn that this kind of trade agreement reinforce the image of the U.S. in the eyes of the people--not the governments and businesses--of these countries as a "trade bully" that eliminates the little folks from the market place in favor of big business? The long term effects of yesterday's passage of these FTAs will come back to bite us in the butt.