Despite Obama’s rhetoric against unfair free trade policies during his election campaign, the president has fulfilled none of his promises regarding either NAFTA or the tax code, both of which promote unfair trade for American businesses. In the 2008 Congressional Black Caucus Democratic debate Obama said, “It is absolutely critical for us to understand that NAFTA was an enormous problem.”

During the 2007 AFL-CIO Democratic primary, Obama actually vowed to take steps to amend NAFTA “immediately” after being elected.

“I would immediately call the president of Mexico, the president of Canada to try to amend NAFTA because I think that we can get labor agreements in that agreement right now,” Obama said. “And it should reflect the basic principle that our trade agreements should not just be good for Wall Street, it should also be good for Main Street.”

Now, in spite of the orations claiming he opposed the FTA as written and pledged he would change it, Obama has stated that following the November midterm elections he will push Congress to sign the KOR-US FTA.

President Obama breathed new life into the disastrous Korea-US Free Trade Agreement (KOR-US FTA or KORUS) in June of 2010 after criticizing the trade deal prior to taking office.

“[The deal] would give Korean exports essentially unfettered access to the U.S. market and would eliminate our best opportunity for obtaining genuinely reciprocal market access in one of the world’s largest economies,” Obama wrote in May 2008, according to OnTheIssues.

In a conference call amongst Economy In Crisis, fellow fair trade advocates and industry players, Jessica Lettween, the Director of Minnesota’s Fair Trade Coalition, urged that action is necessary now to prevent the passing of the KOR-US FTA. Lettween pointed out that if Obama has pledged to get the FTA to a vote after November, they are certainly working out the details and garnering support already.

Recently, 110 members of the House sent President Obama a letter urging him to renegotiate the FTA. Soon after that, 101 other members (all Republicans) sent a letter to convince the president the FTA was a good deal, which leaves a large number of Congressman apparently on the fence. So just how good or bad a deal is the KOR-US FTA?

The KOR-US FTA is the largest FTA since NAFTA and it will open up the floodgates to the passing of other FTAs currently on hold. If passed, KOR-US will accelerate the offshoring of Midwest jobs, expose the region’s environmental laws to new forms of attack and prohibit the type of banking regulations needed to head off the next financial crisis.

We need to stop the Korea FTA from moving forward now, before it is too late. Together, we can put enough pressure on Congress to ensure this outrageous proposal gets sent back to the drawing board — but we need your help. Keep coming back to Economy In Crisis to read about the devastating effects of the KOR-US FTA, and what you can do to help stop it from passing.

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