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Speaking of Congress, they may be getting themselves in a position to actually pass those three long-stalled trade agreements.
Yesterday the Senate passed a bill “to extend the Generalized System of Preferences, and for other purposes.” This is actually a bill that came over from the House, and the Senate version includes Trade Adjustment Assistance, a program that Ted Kennedy actually inaugurated, which provides funding support for workers displaced because of trade.
The Senate vote Thursday extends some benefits that were added to the TAA program as part of the stimulus act but which expired last February. The 2009 additions included more money for retraining and increased unemployment support and health insurance subsidies. They also extended eligibility to public sector and service industry workers and farmers, and to workers affected by trade with countries that don’t have free trade agreements with the United States, such as China and India.
The White House linked passage of TAA to its submission of the free trade agreements. And for a long time, Republicans said they would not support such a deal. But Speaker Boehner announced he would act on this new version of the legislation, which sets up the so called “free” trade bills for passage.
“The bill that passed the Senate today is the result of months of hard work by Chairman Camp and Chairman Baucus. We await the President’s submission of the three trade agreements sitting on his desk so the House can consider them in tandem with the Senate-passed GSP/TAA legislation. If the President submits these agreements promptly, I’m confident that all four bills can be signed into law by mid-October.”
That looks to be the road we’re going down. Labor supports TAA but opposes the free trade deals. However, plenty of Senate Democrats are ready to vote for the trade deals, which are with Colombia, Panama and South Korea. The impasse over TAA stalled this out for a while, but with Republicans giving in on that, the legislative process is likely to go as smoothly as Boehner assumes.
The only thing that can hold this up is if the House does a bait-and-switch, passing the trade deals and then blocking the GSP/TAA legislation. We know that Boehner doesn’t have the best control of his caucus, and that legislation might get tarred with some brush of “socialism” for workers (heaven forbid). Then you’d have to rely on the White House vetoing trade deals they negotiated in order to force passage of TAA. That’s been their position all along.
My suspicion is that everyone will play nice and these trade deals will pass. And far from Administration rhetoric, that will mean some loss of jobs to these other countries, which have either a record of murdering trade unionists (Colombia), a history of being used as a tax shelter (Panama) or a relationship with the oppressive North Korean government, where some of these trade dollars would flow (South Korea).
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LOL. so they are putting money aside for US workers laid off because of passing trade agreements. yet these trade agreements are good for us.
insanity and beyond!
not only are we not creating jobs we are enacting policies that will cost jobs
the new improved obama is much like the old shitty obama
But re-electing him will improve him even more!/s
I was counting on the Republicans to kill these job-killing monstrosities. That never works out well.
I was, too. It really says something when we are looking to the Republicans to kill the free trade deals and, going back to the debt limit crisis, Obama’s offers to cut Medicare and SS. It’s like Alice Through the Lookinglass.
Every single incumbent deserves to be voted out JUST FOR THIS CRAP alone.
Free trade……bye-bye more middle class jobs. Figures that would be something the DEMS and GOPers can agree on.
Mainstream politics is just not getting results. Have we fully considered why this is so?
OT I’ve been wondering why all the fear related to public debt is topic for conversation and much angst, but the toxic assets being held by the big banks have all but disappeared from analysis?
Does anybody have a grip on the amount of toxic securities held by German Banks, relative to the size of their holdings of Greek bonds?
Why is it that the banks are only acknowledging the fear/danger of bad loans to governments and not the disputed worth of their ‘investments’?
Is it because there may be a way of convincing crooked pols to prop up the worth of public debt, but there is no real prayer of making those toxic MBSs worth more than they really are?
Bank of International Settlements said Germany’s exposure to Greek government and corporate debt was $33 Billion as of the end of March, so tell me, is their investment in ‘toxic’ MBSs larger or smaller than that, and what about the rest of the Big European banks?
Do we actually have incontrovertible proof that Milton Friedman died, or did he just move his operations to the White House? It certainly shouldn’t cost much to retrain US workers for their new “jobs” in the fast food industry or as Wal-Mart employees.
“Jobs are Number One” Obama prepares to cut jobs via “free trade”
And Gov Perry is shown to have produced jobs but only 19% since 2007 went to Americans – the rest went to immigrants, 50% of which were illegal, and 1/3 of which had some college.
So it pays to go to college – if you are not an American.
Naturalized immigrants aren’t Americans?
You know who is against Free Trade Agreements? Ron Paul. weird.
The real Obama jobs plan is to outsource the last smattering of US jobs, and the US gets the Georgia Works for free plan.
Then the US will be more competitive with China cause we’ll be trained in jobs that pay 7 bucks an hour.
They’re all in favor of it.
Germany is strong in manufacturing, has single payer health care, SS, and people make a good wage. Sort of like we used to, except for the single payer health care. The difference is the German government didn’t screw their own people over with bad trade deals. This nonsense about US labor making too much money to be competitive with global markets is more corporate propaganda that everyone swallows, hook, line and sinker.