Another Free Trade disaster, and Obama owns it.
The latest email from Public Citizen...........
March 15, 2014
Friend,
Today is the second anniversary of the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement (FTA) taking effect.
The data are in: U.S. exports to Korea dropped 11 percent and our deficit with Korea ballooned 47 percent. That equates to more than 40,000 additional American jobs lost.
This, after the Obama administration promised it would expand our exports and create American jobs.
Despite the stunning evidence, now the Obama administration is making the same bogus claims that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will create more exports and jobs. The thing is, the Obama administration literally used the Korea FTA as its starting text for the TPP!
This is insanity — doing the same thing again and again, and expecting a different outcome.
Write your representative and tell him or her that America can’t take more of the same old “free trade” deals.
President Barack Obama wants your representative to give him Fast Track trade authority so that he can railroad the TPP through Congress with limited debate and no amendments. But under the Korea FTA — Obama’s only major trade deal, and the deal on which the TPP is modeled — U.S. exports dropped dramatically, imports soared and the U.S. lost more jobs to a trade agreement.
We don’t want another so-called free trade agreement that ships our jobs overseas, dumping wages and benefits overboard along the way.
Urge your representative to say “no” to the Camp-Baucus Fast Track bill and all efforts to Fast Track the TPP and other trade agreements that replicate this damaging model.
The White House and the corporate lobby are selling the TPP as a new and improved version of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). But the Korea FTA was also sold as a shiny new version of NAFTA — all fixed up to avoid the job loss and other NAFTA damage.
But now, just two years later, the data show that the Korea deal is not new or improved — it’s the same-old American-job-killing deal that corporations love.
Like the so-called trade pacts before it, the TPP threatens our representatives’ ability to set domestic policies, such as those ensuring food safety, promoting buy local policies, enabling access to safe and affordable medicines, safeguarding Internet freedom and more. And it includes the incentives also included in NAFTA to offshore American jobs to lower-wage countries.
Make sure your representative knows what you think about the Korea FTA failure, and urge him or her to reject any form of Fast Track.
We need a new process that ensures a meaningful role for Congress and the American public in trade agreement policy.
Thank you for all that you do.
In solidarity,
Melanie Foley
Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch
= new reply since forum marked as read
policies of the previous administration. Why do you hate the president? 
Jobs On The Way: U.S.-Korea Trade Agreement Takes Effect Today
President Barack Obama signs the “United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act,” in the Oval Office, Oct. 21, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
As of March 15, 2012, the U.S.-Korea trade agreement – the most commercially significant U.S. trade agreement in nearly two decades -- is now in effect. The opportunities this agreement offers to American manufacturers, service providers, farmers, ranchers, and workers are key components of President Obama’s National Export Initiative, which aims to double American exports by the end of 2014 and support additional American jobs.
"This is insanity — doing the same thing again and again, and expecting a different outcome. "
Who says they are expecting a different outcome? 
The country with the lowest wages wins, and we (the USA) lose. It's all about cheap labor. Period. We won't work for nothing, so this is the shell game The Corporation came up with to bring us to our knees. Then when they are given tax brakes for bringing the jobs back, they will be awarded also with a people who are so desperate they will work for next-to-nothing.
It's a gimmick, all the way around. And our Presidents, since GHWB, aren't able to catch on to the game. They just sit there watching the nut shells move around the table at the speed of light, saying "That's the neatest game! Would you do that again, Mr Corporate Man?"
We need a President who won't buy what The Corporation is selling. One who won't play the game. One who can't be bought. Who can't be intimidated.
That right there is the trick to winning this Corporate game: The commitment to find the man who can't be bought and vote him into the Presidency.
while since the agreement with Korea, our trade deficit with Korea has increased 47%,
our overall trade deficit in the same time period has dropped.
And therefore, we should proceed with TPP in order to spread the effect of the Korea trade deal to all trans-Pacific "partners" thereby stopping that dropping trade deficit in its tracks and increasing our trade deficit across the board?
Makes sense to me. If you're trying to help corporations to export jobs in their never ending race to the wage bottom.
The problem, as I see it, is this. Corporations are stupid. The CEOs see lower wages on a spread sheet, and think the rest of us are too stupid to add up the bottom line, which is why they think they are superior to the rest of us.
They fail miserably, however, at everything that doesn't fit on a spread sheet.
So it's not until they are in the place where they expect a lower cost of doing business and learn about the "hidden" costs that they realize how good they had it back here.
My real life example is at the shittier of my part time jobs in customer service for a bankster-support company. They moved paper storage to Pakistan because their spreadsheet told them it would lower their costs. It wasn't until there was a demonstration down the street from their facility that they learned that:
Pakistan and its neighbor India are mortal enemies.
Pakistan and its neighbor India are both nuclear-armed.
Pakistan might experience demonstrations.
Their dedicated, loyal and cheap Pakistani employees didn't think twice about walking out on their crap-pay jobs in the middle of the day to join a demonstration -- which turned into a riot -- down the block.
The majority of their Pakistani employees couldn't be bothered (or were unable) to returned from the riot.
I'm dead serious. When the VP of our division explained this to us, it was clearly news to him and he assumed we uneducated country-bumpkins were totally oblivious to that which, to any halfway educated person, would be obvious.
So after uprooting their paper storage and moving it to Pakistan, putting lots of people out of work and hurting communities, they had to turn around and bring it all back here again. Of course, that means they lost some money, but don't think that just because management made the stupid choice that the resulting loss was coming out of their wallets.
They did the same thing moving their facilities to Maine. They're halfway through the 10-year lease and struggling desperately. During the worst of the downturn they have maintained their 40% turnover rate, because they don't know anything about Maine or the people they expected to have under their thumbs. 
Same thing with Mexico. Corporations were all to happy to move their facilities to Mexico to bust the unions and get dirt-cheap employees. Now that they've learned the hidden costs of doing business there, suddenly things don't seem so bad here after all. Too bad so many lives were ruined by their greed, stupidity and ignorance.
