I am heading out of town for a week or so for Passover, but here's one last post before I go. Our friends from Human Rights Watch have an excellent post over at the Hill:
Congress is right to delay consideration of the US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA). What’s at stake here is a fundamental principle: that free trade should be premised on respect for human rights, especially the rights of the workers producing the goods to be traded.
Colombian workers cannot exercise their rights without fear of being killed. Just in the first three months of this year, 17 Colombian trade unionists have been assassinated—a substantial increase over the 10 killed in the same period last year.
Dan Wolfensberger writes in Roll Call:
Pelosi, however, is the first Speaker in the history of the 34-year-old statute to ask the Rules Committee (with House approval) to suspend the expedited timetable for consideration. The House handily endorsed her gambit Thursday, 224-195.
Just as it is unlikely that Congress will grant Bush his
requested renewal of fast-track negotiating authority so late in his
term, it is even more difficult to imagine a Democratic president even
asking for it... It is also
highly unlikely that the next Congress, which is likely to contain an
even larger Democratic majority in both chambers, will grant whomever
is president such authority. All this poses a new challenge to both
branches of how to reconfigure our trade relations and processes over
the next four to eight years...
The Politico gives the inside scoop on Fast Track death:
Democrats broke more than three decades of precedent by changing trade rules to suspend consideration of the deal. But they also displayed a procedural acumen that was less evident during their first, sometimes bumpy, year in power...
McGovern and other Democrats on the Rules Committee began discussing the possibility of stripping the time requirements from trade rules as early as January, members and aides said.
Those conversations were hypothetical, however, until the White House began to make noise about sending the Colombia agreement to Capitol Hill before Pelosi signed off on it. That prompted McGovern and Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise McIntosh Slaughter (D-N.Y.) to call for a meeting with the speaker.
Slaughter and McGovern oppose the trade deal for different reasons. The Massachusetts Democrat believes Colombia has not gone far enough to rectify its history of violence toward labor leaders.
Slaughter, meanwhile, opposes the measure because she believes it would deal another blow to her upstate New York district, which already suffers from the steady export of jobs.
Both opposed any maneuvering by Bush to force a vote, and both believed that stripping the time requirements was the best way to stop the president in his tracks.
And we got some feedback on a post from earlier this week on Fast Track, and just wanted to point out that Pelosi's action to cancel Fast Track virtually guarantees that the Senate will also not take action.
David Brooks asks the candidates in the New York Times:
Aren’t there windows in the vans they use to drive around the state? Don’t they see that most middle-class voters are service workers in suburban office parks, not 1930s-style proletarians in the steel mills?
Interestingly enough, a new analysis finds that it's not just Blue Collar jobs that are at risk anymore, but more than 286,000 Pennsylvania jobs (that's right, we're just talking about Pennsylvania) are highly susceptible to being offshored in the near future - from mathematicians to architectural drafters to editors and writers. Suburban workers, that's right, we're talking about your jobs!
But Brooks also says that many solutions currently offered by the candidates won't have an economic impact - and he's partially right. Without specifics, what will this set of trade-talking candidates actually do when they get to the White House? That's why groups like ours have been calling on the candidates to make real commitments to overhaul our failed NAFTA-WTO trade policies. You can read their most recent campaign commitments to Pennsylvanians on trade issues at the Citizens Trade Campaign here.
Hello from the Atlanta airport. Regular posting will resume soon. In the meantime, enjoy this quick passenger’s-window view of downtown San José del Guaviare.
The capital of Guaviare department about 200 miles south of Bogotá, San José has about 40,000 people in the town center and 60,000 throughout the Connecticut-sized municipality (county) of the same name. The town has grown rapidly over the past 15 years or so, due to coca, cattle ranching, and massive displacement from more remote areas.
And this is what it looks like from out the window of a pickup truck:
(I’m writing from the Bogotá airport, where I’m on my way back to Washington. Expect some posts over the next few days about my visit earlier this week to San José del Guaviare, the town in southern Colombia where the U.S.-funded aerial fumigation program began 14 years ago.)
The Colombian newsweekly Semana has posted to its website a remarkable and troubling PowerPoint presentation (PDF version here, accompanying an article here) from Colombian Senator Armando Benedetti. Though Sen. Benedetti is a member of the pro-Uribe “La U” political party, he is one of a handful of uribista legislators who have criticized the government’s handling of efforts to demobilize, prosecute and reintegrate former paramilitaries while attending to their victims.
Two and a half years after these efforts - known as the “Justice and Peace process” - began, Sen. Benedetti’s slideshow paints a distressing picture. Here are a few current statistics that should make you very angry:
How much progress has there been under President Uribe in addressing violence against trade unionists and impunity?
Check out our new How Much Progress Has There Been Under Uribe? It accompanies our shorter Fact Sheet: Murders of Trade Unionists and Impunity Under Uribe.
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