More Free-Trade Agreements Coming

[inna]

As if NAFTA wasn't bad enough. :-(

'Stars are aligning' for trade accord, Caterpillar's Lane says

http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=394559

The Obama administration is focusing more on trade than ever before, a sign that the World Trade Organization may be able to clinch a global commerce deal next year, said William Lane, an executive at Caterpillar Inc. Locally, Cat has operations in Montgomery.

"For the last year and a half, the U.S. took a proverbial timeout on trade," Lane, Washington director for Peoria, Illinois-Based Caterpillar, told journalists in Geneva today. "That's clearly starting to change. The train is beginning to move and 2011 is clearly doable. The stars are aligning."

Lane was part of a delegation of senior executives from companies including Philip Morris International Inc., Fedex Corp., Qualcomm Inc. and AT&T Inc. who met this week with WTO and government officials to gauge the status of global trade talks. They came away convinced that 2011 is the "window of opportunity" to reach an accord to break down barriers to global commerce, Christopher Wenk, the trade lobbyist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told journalists in Geneva today.

Next year will be a "big year" for trade in the U.S., Wenk said. President Barack Obama said on July 7 that his administration is increasing access to export financing for small and medium-sized U.S. businesses while removing barriers to trade. He also promised to work with South Korea, Panama and Colombia to retool pending free-trade agreements.

"There's a dramatic difference right now in the U.S. on the ability to move forward on trade," Wenk said.

~snip~

The longest-serving House Democrat on Friday denounced a free-trade agreement President Obama is pursuing with South Korea.

http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/801-economy/109323-dingell-denounces-south-korea-trade-deal

Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) has long opposed the South Korean trade deal negotiated by the Bush administration for fear it would hurt Michigan autoworkers, but the vehemence in his statement was notable. ... ”I call on the president to re-negotiate the free-trade agreement with South Korea, in particular to address the needs of the working men and women of the domestic automobile industry,” Dingell, known as the Dean of the House, said in the statement.

President Obama gave new life to the South Korean trade deal last month, when at a meeting of the G-20 he announced the United States would seek to complete the deal by November. Obama indicated the U.S. would seek to change the legislation to meet the concerns of Dingell and other Democrats who say the agreement as structured would hurt the U.S. auto sector.

Business groups in recent weeks have hammered Obama’s economic agenda, accusing the president of being bad for business. They’ve pointed to his trade policy, arguing the United States has been sidelined while other countries are entering into new trade agreements that will help their domestic industries. Chief executive officers from Microsoft, General Electric, Wal-Mart and several other companies wrote Obama this week to move quickly on the free-trade agreement. They warned that a deal the European Union and South Korea have signed will disadvantage U.S. companies.

Labor groups oppose the South Korean trade deal, along with two other agreements with Colombia and Panama. They argue the Korean deal would hurt U.S. workers and lead to the outsourcing of jobs. House Democrats are also deeply divided over the three agreements.

[Yuugal]

1. Here comes our pacific rimjob

[branders seine]

2. jobs are apparently Obama's focus--well, jobs in other countries anyway

[DJ13]

3. What a great idea

Kick us while were already down.

[LWolf]

4. The stars seem to be aligning for more than one dangerous, harmful policy.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=8738084

[jtuck004]

5. The knee-jerk response is, of course, to throw up the barricades, but

I wonder if that is really in our best interests.

Maybe re-tooling our manufacturing, creating some policies that take away the favorable tax provisions for companies that move their work offshore - in other words, compete.

People tell me that walling ourselves off and putting up tariffs would work, but 90% of the rest of the world is connected now, and if we don't want to play, they may just decide they don't need us. And this ain't 1940 anymore, so that is quite possible. For example, Brazil is lobbying for a large Chinese investment as we speak, while we aren't even in the discussion.

We destroyed Mexico's protected agriculture with our corn, which sent tons of undocumented immigrants here looking for work. We could get rid of them, but at the risk of destroying a substantial portion of the market for our agriculture (as if it is not already bad enough for some family farms).

There are thousands of connections like that. China is another - they are quite good at copying other's work, but, (so far) not so good at their own basic research and bringing that work online, although they are working on it. We excel at that, so perhaps if we change some policies to take advantage of that work here, instead of shipping it out...

Your thoughts?

[MadHound]

6. Considering that our economy can't survive without a robust manufacturing sector

I would say that more trade agreements like this are going to be the death of us. You can't expect a country to survive by morphing to a service/financial based economy. Look at the other great modern empires, Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, all of these and more have collapsed due to, in large part, switching from a manufacturing based economy to a service/financial based one.

The reason for this is that service jobs are low paying jobs, which drives consumption down, which drives the entire economy down. Even Henry Ford, bastard that he was, recognized that you've got to pay your labor a fair wage, otherwise who is going to buy your products.

The only ones that a global economy benefits are multinational corporations. So who do we put first, real live humans or multi-national corporations?

[jtuck004]

7. Absolutely agree. So people are going to have to learn to compete

with multinational corps, which ought to be interesting, because we have to have those connections with the rest of the world. What I want to see is investment in re-tooling manufacturing, and policies (tax and others) which discourage taking that work out of the country, only to sell back the products. That is terribly short-sighted.

There are some very good things we could learn from others about this, such as the German tool-makers.

I think if any group of people can resurrect themselves, Americans can. But we may have gone too far
down the road, and not be willing to make the required sacrifices before we spin apart. We will see...

[MadHound]

8. We've been competing for the past forty years,

And frankly unless you want our wages to go down to the same level as Chinese workers, without the commiserate drop in the price of goods, we really can't go much lower. Our real world wages have been dropping steadily since 1970, which means while we're making less in terms of real money, we continue having to pay higher prices to purchase things.

And trust me, corporations have retooled a number of times, that is part of the problem as well, since now robots are taking the jobs of thousands and millions, a practice that is now being ported to the service sector (you've seen those self serve check out lines right? Another 2-4 jobs out the window).

The fact of the matter is that if we want to retain our current standard of living, and retain our middle class in this country, we have to stop outsourcing jobs now. Otherwise we're looking at becoming another third world country controlled by the few rich and elite, worked by the many and poor, with no middle class in between.

[jtuck004]

10. Throwing up some self-serve checkout line is not the same as

spending Billions to put 40 polysilicone plants up, such as China is doing. Note that Applied Materials is now building in China, and that's where the market will look for solar panels and computer chips. We could have - still could, but we would rather make excuses and point fingers.

We are not competing, we are whining.

The standard of living is gone. It was built on consumer debt which rose during the Clinton era as a budget surplus increased, and went wild nuts when the mortgage business lost any semblance of reason during Bush's realm. When the markets collapsed and threw 15 million people out of work, the bills couldn't be paid, and housing started on a down trend, which is going to continue through at least 2013, as they foreclose on the 2 million notices that were sent this year.And that's after foreclosing on another 1 million this year.

And if oil goes up because of demand in other countries, it will make it obvious that we have not been doing the right things, because things will get markedly worse.

[xchrom]

9. Recommend

[obxhead]

11. That's the solution for our economy, exporting more jobs.

Excellent Republican idea.

[Greyhound]

12. But wait, this must be wrong! He is going to 'fix' these 'deals',

he said it and his minions have repeated it endlessly, so it must be happening.
:eyes:

Oh, and for the rest of us, "we told you so".