Ron Paul, Walter Jones Write Letter Opposing Obama’s NAFTA-Style Korea Free Trade De

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Deal

http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/12/09/ron-paul-walter-jones-write-letter-opposing-obamas-nafta-style-korea-free-trade-deal/

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Hahahahahaha, can't wait for neo-cons to lose their head again.

Love it!

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Oppose the South Korea Free Trade Agreement

Dear Colleague:

Free trade theorists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo must be rolling in their graves to see pacts like President Obama’s Korea Agreement called “free trade.” Like the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the pact, written by unelected trade bureaucrats, spans 1,000 pages.

It includes endless pages of rules and regulations enforced by foreign tribunals. This act is a sneaky form of international preemption, undermining the critical checks and balances and freedoms established by the U.S. Constitution’s reservation of many rights to the people or state governments.

And, President Obama’s Korea Agreement sets up foreign tribunals to which the United States mst submit for judgment. Foreign investors are allowed to skirt the U.S. court system to directly ue the U.S. government for trade pact violations before UN and World Bank tribunals. Those provisions enable demands by such forms for compensation in U.S. taxpayer funds for violations of the special foreign investor privileges the pact provides. There are nearly 80 Korean firms with more than 200 establishments set up in this country now that would acquire these new rights to raid our Treasury using foreign tribunals.

We urge you to oppose President Obama’s Korea Agreement.

Sincerely

The letter.

[charrob]

bump! Sharing this with democrats should win over many in the labor community to support Dr. Paul. If he runs 3rd party in 2012, these votes would be helpful.

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Jane Hamsher (in comment section) responds to a comment essentially charging RP with being a nationalistic rube for not wanting foreign courts to be able to regulate the laws we pass in the US, thusly:


In response to Scarecrow @ 2
I can hardly believe you’re saying this.

This agreement is going to give Korean corporations the status of nations to sue the US government in international courts for violations of NAFTA laws.

If we want to, say, regulate derivatives, and that’s against this treaty (and it is), corporations who want to assert that they have lost money they would have otherwise made can sue the US in WTO and UN courts.

If they win, US TAXPAYERS have to pay. We’ve already paid $400 million to companies in such cases. Our own courts have no authority over the judgments, and we’ve spent millions more defending those cases we’ve won. There are billions more in judgments pending.

Companies can also bring suit if we try to regulate land use for environmental purposes that causes them to “lose” money. Or if we try to encourage the adoption of green technologies in ways that make their products less profitable.

Who CAN’T bring suit? Labor unions. So the White House is currently withholding its support from the Steelworkers’ 301 petition to these tribunals, challenging the Chinese with NAFTA violations that are decimating the steel industry. Unless the US government brings the case, the Steelworkers don’t have the status to do so.

The reason banks like JP Morgan and Citi think it’s a good idea is because it restricts our ability to regulate them. George Bush worked hard to get that into the agreement in 2007, and Obama is adopting it whole hog in this one. We can’t bring back Glass-Steagel, for instance.

And it also creates a court above US courts, which the banks can control with a lot more ease than they can individual sovereign courts. Whose judgments we agree to submit to. So that it’s even beyond the ability of OUR justice system to get these monster banks under control.

You’re going to have to work for a very long time to convince me this isn’t just about the stupidest thing we could ever contemplate doing, Scarecrow.

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Hamsher and Ron have a pretty solid political relationship. They agree to leave their differences alone, and come together for issues in which they are in agreement.

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Hamsher and Ron have a pretty solid political relationship. They agree to leave their differences alone, and come together for issues in which they are in agreement.

And that's thanks to Hamsher. I have a special respect for lefties like Jane Hamsher and Naomi Wolf who are willing to swim against the tide and fine common ground with their ideological opponents. It lends them credibility and indicates that they are more concerned with principles than us vs them.

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Greenwald is also in that camp.