Yesterday Obama scored another “w” with the passage of the Korea, Panama and Columbia Free Trade deals — virtually unchanged since Bush tried to push them through before he left office.

In 2008, the Columbia deal was a big campaign issue, with both Obama and Clinton denouncing any agreement until human rights conditions had been addressed. Obama declared he would oppose the Columbia deal “because the violence against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements.”

Since that time, the murder of labor leaders in Colombia has only accelerated, but the value of their lives has apparently declined. Because when the Colombia Free Trade agreement passed yesterday, it was awfully lonely in the “what about the dead labor leaders” room.

While President Obama has spent weeks crisscrossing the country publicly promoting his American Jobs Act, ironically in Washington his administration has been focused on lobbying Congress to approve a package of job-killing free trade deals. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the NAFTA-style South Korea Free Trade deal could cost America roughly 159,000 jobs while Colombia would export another 54,000.

Tonight FDL will be hosting a webinar at 8pm ET on the NAFTA-style trade deals for Panama, Columbia and Korea that congress will vote on this week. Our guests will be actor Danny Glover, Chair of TransAfrica; Congressman Emanuel Cleaver and Professor Joseph Jordan of TransAfrica’s Scholars’ Council. TransAfrica Chief of Staff Joia Nuri will host the chat and serve as moderator. Be sure to sign up.

At trade talks in Chicago, the Obama administration will work with other officials to develop a trade agreement that will incorporate Vietnam, Brunei, Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand, Australia, Chile and Peru. Labor, environmental and human rights groups will gather in the city to warn that the structure, and guiding ideology, of the emerging trade deal could expand a model of free-marketeering that has displaced masses of workers across the globe and granted multinationals unprecedented powers to flout national and international laws.

Fifty years ago today, East German soldiers began overseeing the construction of the Berlin Wall. That wall came down in 1989, but as Der Spiegel reminds us, other walls remain elsewhere in the world.

Even more insidious, though, are the invisible walls we build with money and defend with lawyers, all in an attempt to defend the status quo and nail things down as they are right now.

Sorry, but life is like a river, and you can’t nail it down. Count me among those who yearn for life without such walls.

Todd Tucker with Public Citizen will be liveblogging the House Ways and Means Committee full committee hearing on the pending free trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea, and job creation. You can find more details about the panelists scheduled to testify today at the Committee’s site at this link.

KORUS as a whole will contribute to the increasing financialization of our economy at the expense of our manufacturing base. Yet oddly, by leveraging payback for its various bailouts differently, the Administration has elicited cries of support from both the finance and the manufacturing industry.

Or maybe it’s just that unlike the UAW, the banksters have found a way to roll Obama over and over.

It takes guts to get out in front of this when the White House is trying to strong arm people while they take bows with the Chamber of Commerce and Jamie Dimon. High marks for the Sierra Club for showing leadership and being willing to do so.

A brief look at what’s happening in the news on the morning after Thanksgiving 2010.

A brief look at what’s happening in the news on Thanksgiving morning, 2010.