The horrid Colombia "Free" Trade Agreement, in a nutshell
President Bush signed the Colombia Free Trade Agreement yesterday and sent it to Congress for consideration, over the objections of practically anyone with a conscience:
President Bush’s decision to send the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA) to Congress over the strong objections of the leadership of both the House and the Senate "shows an outrageous disregard for basic human and workers' rights," AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says.
Sweeney had this to say:
Workers in Colombia are terrorized every day for standing up for their economic freedom, and union supporters are routinely murdered.
CAFTA is just the latest in a long line of bad deals for American workers:
The agreement is another in a series of bad trade pacts negotiated by the Bush White House, deals that have contributed to a U.S. trade deficit of $712 billion in 2007, massive job loss and shrinking paychecks. Such trade deals have contributed to the loss of 3 million good manufacturing jobs in the United States alone since 2001.
The lobbyists are working overtime to get this horrid agreement enacted into law. Their corrupting influence in the White House, on Capitol Hill, and in the Clinton campaign threatens middle-class and working-class Americans; as Jonathan Tasini said at HuffPo:
The people shilling for so-called "free trade" are people whose jobs have never been threatened by deals whose central driving force is the search for the lowest wage possible.
That's it, in a nutshell. NAFTA was bad, but CAFTA is even worse.