The White House appears to be calculating that by getting the UAW to support the NAFTA-style trade agreement with South Korea (KORUS), it can avoid any discussion of the jobs that will be outsourced as a result of the agreement. Their big accomplishment, then, has been changing the original 2007 agreement enough to get the UAW–and Ford–to buy in.

FDL has learned that the UAW, which was bailed out by American taxpayers two short years ago, will endorse the South Korean Free Trade Agreement and act as the liberal “postage stamp” for the deal. UAW President Bob King decided to endorse it despite strong opposition from his staff. This is a terrible, terrible deal for America, at a time when unemployment is soaring and the White House has zero plans for creating jobs — unless you’re in the international bank looting business. Everyone involved should be deeply, deeply ashamed of their participation in this, and we will do everything in our power to organize against its passage.

So, South Korea would have to wait a bit to flood the US market with cars, but there’s no word on whether they would have to allow in more than a trickle of US-made cars into their market (the numbers from last year: 6,000 US vehicles to South Korea, 500,000 South Korean-made vehicles to the US). And what about beef producers, who also balked at blocked Korean markets?

The President wanted to ink this pact at the G-20 in Seoul, but they couldn’t reach agreement. It looks like those hurdles have been surmounted.

American foreign policy makers have a few countries that are routinely regarded as evil no matter what the evidence. A few examples include: Iran, North Korea, Mexico, Nigeria, Chad, Somalia, Syria, etc.

There’s no limit to what a foreign policy maker will hypothesize on the airwaves, and this has been especially true in the case of North Korea attacking South Korea. In discussions about how the U.S. should respond, neoconservatives have appeared on television to cheerlead the idea of a nuclear response.

An article in Wednesday’s New York Times noted how residents of Seoul are taking Tuesday’s artillery shelling of a South Korean island by North Korea in stride, viewing that event as “largely contained and unthreatening.” How different that is from the panic-driven banning of toner shipments to the US after the failed attempt to bring down airplanes with toner-bombs. Using the toner-bombs as buildup, TSA now is forced to “justify” its eight month delay in its over-response to the failed Mighty Underpants Eagle bomb. Oh, and returning to the Korean situation, the Times notes that the Korean attitude is “We don’t want war.” That’s not quite the position of prominent right-wing nutjob Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds, whose response to the shelling was “I say nuke ‘em. And not with just a few bombs.” The calm resolve of our Founding Fathers has given way to panic driven by hate and fear, producing a nation of xenophobic cowards. Enemies of the US need not even be successful in killing a single person to be able to drive us into hate-filled screeds and billions of dollars in useless “security” measures.

Overnight, North Korea fired artillery shells at Yeonpyeong, an inhabited South Korean island, prompting a response from South Korea and the scrambling of fighter jets. At least four soldiers were wounded in the attack, and according to the BBC two marines died.

President Obama was supposed to waltz into Seoul ready to mark an agreement with South Korea on a trade pact, with enough changes to win over key constituencies. But while this was widely expected, it didn’t happen, with the South Koreans balking at some of the proposed changes. If you look at where the Democrats lost big last week – the Rust Belt – it would be political suicide to pass the type of agreement that the core constituencies in that region detest. And it would only harm, not help, the agenda of creating more exports and more American jobs.

The US and South Korea are working on a revised free trade agreement that would differ somewhat from the original terms negotiated by George W. Bush’s Administration. It appears that President Obama would want to announce this reworked deal at the G-20 summit in Seoul this week. The plan would be to submit the free trade pact to Congress next year, when Republicans control the House.

In addition to education, another area where you can see the President and the Republicans in Congress agreeing is on the issue of trade. One of the first international figures Obama talked to on Election Day was the President of South Korea, and he assured him that the US was working on passing a free trade agreement between the two countries.

Obama and a few Republicans may agree, but I’d be hard-pressed to find any Democrats to join them, including the Blue Dogs. For all his obvious faults, Heath Shuler is a fair trader. So was the majority of the 111th House of Representatives, as evidenced by the vote on the Chinese currency bill, which had the support of 99 Republicans, most of whom remain in the House. A new report from Public Citizen shows that 205 Democratic and Republican candidates used fair trade and anti-outsourcing messaging in their election campaigns. Only 37 candidates campaigned as pro-NAFTA free traders, and half of them lost.

“That Democrats and GOP alike ran against the trade policy status quo highlights the intensity of public ire about our job exporting trade policy – a phenomenon also seen in national polls. It also reveals the trouble that the White House and GOP leaders will face if they try to pass the leftover Bush trade pacts with Korea, Colombia and Panama, to say nothing of the threat such a move would cause to President Obama’s reelection in 2012,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “Freshmen GOP congressmen being asked by their leadership to support trade agreements most Americans consider job-killers undoubtedly will have the foreseeable 2012 Democratic attack ads in mind.”

Trade hasn’t been a subject that has received much ink during the Obama Administration. They haven’t sought to overhaul NAFTA or CAFTA, nor have they signed any new major trade deals. And in some cases, they have raised tariffs on certain imports, bolstering domestic manufacturing. The White House says they’d like to double exports as [...]