From the Dept of Broken Promises: Obama Closes door on NAFTA

What NAFTA Is:

NAFTA and all the other so-called “free trade agreements” are in fact investor rights agreements. They make businesses operated by international investors substantially immune to local laws and regulations on health, safety, wages, hours, labor rights, antipollution, financial and other practices. They establish secretive extrajudicial courts with no appeal where corporations appoint the judges who can decide in favor of them.

Obama, NAFTA, and Canada:

Last spring, while Obama was stumping Ohio and Michigan giving the impression to voters that he indeed opposed NAFTA, because that’s what they wanted to hear, a key member of his campaign, assured Canadian consular officials that such rhetoric was nothing but “political positioning” and not to be taken seriously. , forcing the Obama campaign and the Canadians to issue a series of denials. Obama fans bitterly denounced those who fed the public suspicion that their candidate was a “FREE TRADER”. Later in the campaign, all but declared himself exactly that. But none are so blind, they say, as those who choose not to see.

Apparently its was stories emanating from the Canadian press that caused the White House to confirm this week that NAFTA renegotiations are dead.

Canada’s Obama NAFTA Memo link

“We’re obviously very delighted with this decision from the Americans,” Harper said as he wrapped his up a three-day working visit to Jamaica. “As you know, President Obama has been moving this way really since the primary campaign.”

Again, it’s not the kind of thing Obama would say outright if not pressed, and American journalists are too timid of this or any president to ask inconvenient questions. In his first hundred days, which won’t be over for another week or two. President Obama is on his way to leaving a trail of broken promises and eviscerated hopes for change as high and deep as any of his predecessors. This is just one more.

Harper delighted Obama won’t re-open NAFTA

Apr 20, 2009

WASHINGTON (AP) — Softening President Barack Obama’s campaign-year trade rhetoric, the top U.S. trade official said the administration can strengthen provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement without having to renegotiate the pact.

Speaking in a teleconference with reporters, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said Obama and Mexican President Felipe Calderon “have both said they don’t believe we have to reopen the agreement now” to address labor and environmental side agreements.

Obama himself backed off his election-year call for renegotiation after meeting with Calderon in Mexico last week in advance of the Summit of Americas meeting in Trinidad.

“It would make sense for labor and environmental provisions to be enforceable within that agreement rather than just be viewed as a side agreement,” Obama said at a news conference Thursday. “But I recognize that we are in a very difficult time right now economically on both sides of the border and that those kinds of negotiations are going to need to proceed in a very careful and deliberate way, because we don’t want to discourage trade.”

During the heat of the Democratic presidential primary last year, Obama said he would use the threat of pulling out of NAFTA to open up the agreement to new negotiations over worker protections and environment. The trade agreement is a frequent target of politicians who blame it for lost jobs.

Kirk, the former mayor of Dallas, did not preclude making changes, but he did not venture how.

“What remains to be done is a review of what our actual opportunities are to strengthen NAFTA, and at an appropriate time I will be meeting with my counterparts from Mexico and Canada (to) make some decision on the path forward,” he said.

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