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EU-South Korea free trade agreement heralds new dawn for Western practices

Wait - are we talking about the same treaty?? KFTA would grant foreign firms operating in the United States with extraordinary “foreign investor” rights and the power to sidestep our court system to enforce these new entitlements. KFTA’s “investor-state” compliance system empowers Korean corporations to directly challenge U.S. laws before foreign tribunals established at the U.N. and World Bank to demand our tax dollars for any domestic policy Seoul claims could undermine their special foreign investor KFTA privileges. The non-partisan National Conference of State Legislatures issued a statement warning that unless the controversial investor-state language in the proposed Korea Free trade deal is removed “to protect state sovereignty and federalism, we fear that it may be more dangerous to include [the] flawed investor-state language in the U.S.-Korea FTA than to forego the provision all together.” The Korea Free Trade Agreement is actually a heavily MANAGED trade deal, and weighs in at over a thousand pages of fine print. Multi-national corporate elites get favors, exceptions, and precedence, while hard-pressed middle-to-small sized U.S. Industries (such as manufacturers of cotton products and car parts) shoulder obligations and restrictions. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that KFTA would increase the U.S. trade deficit with Korea by $13.9 billion over the next seven years. Rising Korean imports would displace approximately 888,000 U.S. jobs over this time period, with the KFTA directly responsible for about 159,000 net job losses. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader, entrepreneur Donald Trump, The Sierra Club, and Congressman Ron Paul are all part of a diverse coalition opposed to the treaty. Let's hear their arguments before there's a rush to judgment.

7-Mar-2011

3:38 pm