By Charity Ryerson, USLEAP
The fight to stop the Colombia Free Trade Agreement is
making many of us a little seasick.
There’s going to be a vote, no there’s not, yes there is… to the point
that we’re eyeing the daily ins and outs of the tide with a mixture of suspicion
and nausea. But maybe that’s just me.
The most recent (dare I say it—by the time this is posted
there will something even more recent) scare came a couple of days ago around
the auto industry bailout. Just when we
thought there probably wouldn’t even be a lame duck session (thereby destroying
any chance of approving the FTA under President Bush) because the Bush
administration and the Democrats could not come to a deal on Economic Stimulus
II, the auto industry announced that it was failing. And it needs a bailout before January.
This recent New York Times article
suggested that President-Elect Obama and President Bush had discussed tying the
auto industry bailout to the trade agreement with Colombia. The text of the article was later changed
when reports emerged that the media had been misinformed and that no such
connection was under discussion.
This is good, not just because of the dwindling chances that
the agreement will be passed in its current form, but because of the irony of
linking an auto industry bailout to a free trade agreement. The auto industry was decimated by NAFTA and
autoworkers and midwestern towns are still recovering. The Colombia Free Trade Agreement, while
representing a slightly modified template, carries most of the same provisions
as its nefarious predecessors. And US autoworkers
aside, the Colombian labor movement rejects the agreement in any form. That means that they don’t care how many
changes are made: unless there is a new model entirely, they aren’t buying it.
So thank you Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama for having the good
sense to keep these deals separate. The
poetic injustice of it all would have just been too much.
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