By Tom Barkley, Fox Business
Key U.S. senators on trade issues urged China to lift barriers on beef and other agricultural imports Tuesday, following a government study that found tariffs and other restrictions were impeding up to $5.2 billion a year in sales.
Updates
03/23/11
By Chris Petersen wcfcourier.com
The usual agribusiness interests and multinational corporations are again trying to get Iowa farmers to believe that we are just one trade agreement away from riches. This time they're selling a deal with Korea based on the North American Free Trade Agreement. It's a loser for eastern Iowa.
03/23/11
Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX) has introduced legislation which could open the door to more exports of American farm products to Cuba. Conaway’s bill, H.R. 833, the Agricultural Export Enhancement Act of 2011, would define “payment of cash in advance” for U.S.-Cuban agricultural sales as receipt of payment by the seller prior to the transfer of the product’s title and the release of control of the product to the purchaser. Since 2005, federal regulations enforced by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control require advance payment in cash only, before U.S. ag exports leave an American port for Cuba.
03/22/11
By Todd Tucker, Courier-Journal.Com
With Congress expected to consider a NAFTA-style trade deal with Korea in the coming weeks, distilled spirits companies have been claiming that Kentucky bourbon sales will take off in Korea if the deal is approved. But this claim is misleading, and it papers over the expected job loss from the Korea deal.
03/22/11
Why Move Jobs From Democracies To Thugocracies?
By Dave Johnson, Campaign for America's Future
"Free trade" treaties like NAFTA have wiped out entire regions of our country and left entire segments of our population without good-paying jobs -- or in so many cases with no jobs at all. And they have had similar results with our trade "partners." We can see that now. So why are we even talking about doing more of these treaties?
03/22/11
By Ted Sickinger The Oregonian
March 22--Looking to crack down on illegal dumping by overseas manufacturers, staff members for Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., conducted their own clandestine survey last fall and found a surprising number of Chinese exporters ready and willing to commit fraud to avoid U.S. customs duties on the goods they ship here.
03/21/11
By Ian Fletcher, Huffington Post
With the Republicans and the Obama administration attempting to rush headlong into a new trade agreements with Korea, and possibly also with Panama and Colombia, it is incumbent on Americans to apply a bit of empiricism. How have our past trade agreements worked out? Above all, how's the grand-daddy of them all, NAFTA, doing?
Unfortunately, NAFTA is a veritable case study in failure.
03/21/11
By Marguerite Cawley, Colombia Reports
NGO Human Rights Watch says that moves by U.S. Congress members to ensure that Colombia meets human rights standards before the trade deal is ratified are "critically important," in a statement released Thursday.
03/21/11
By The Anniston Star Editorial Board
The Founding Fathers were committed to establishing domestic industries to compete with foreign interests that might undersell us. They provided the federal government the authority to place tariffs on goods coming into the country.
03/19/11
By Paul Krugman, New York Times
More than three years after we entered the worst economic slump since the 1930s, a strange and disturbing thing has happened to our political discourse: Washington has lost interest in the unemployed.
