How Has The "Model" Free Trade Agreement with Korea Worked Out?

Free trade agreements, like neoliberal economic policy, are faith-based policies that are promoted by both the business interests that benefit from them and economic policy-makers captured by the ideology of mainstream economic thought, in spite of the overwhelming evidence for their negative consequences (for the larger economy and the working population).

Obama has been working overtime in support of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) but as reported by Lori Wallach of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, there is now more damning evidence for the utter misinformation (lie?) about these trade agreements.

“Today’s alarming fourth-year trade data on President Obama’s U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement (FTA) arrived just as the Obama administration has started its hard sell to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). And that is a real problem for the White House.

The Korea deal served as the U.S. template for the TPP, with significant TPP text literally cut and pasted from the Korea agreement. And the Obama administration sold the Korea deal with the same “more exports, more jobs” promises now being employed to sell TPP.

And since then, our trade deficit with Korea more than doubled as imports surged and exports declined. The increase in the U.S. trade deficit with Korea equates to the loss of more than 106,000 American jobs in the first four years of the Korea FTA, counting both exports and imports, according to the trade-jobs ratio that the Obama administration used to promise at least 70,000 job gains from the deal.”

Read more here.