Obama Urges Bush to Withhold Korean Trade Pact, Not Force Vote
Friday, May 23, 2008
Printable FormatBloomberg By Mark Drajem
Bloomberg -- Illinois Senator Barack Obama, the leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, told President George W. Bush it would be ``misguided'' to press Congress to vote on a new trade agreement with South Korea.
Obama, who has made criticism of free-trade pacts a staple of his campaign, called the accord between the two nations ``badly flawed.''
``In the interests of cultivating bipartisan cooperation on trade policy, I urge you not to send this agreement forward to the Congress,'' Obama wrote in a letter to Bush released today. Instead of pushing the agreement, the U.S. trade office should use existing laws to challenge ``barriers to U.S. exports,'' Obama said.
The U.S.-South Korea trade accord, the biggest for the U.S. since the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, was signed last June. The Bush administration still hasn't submitted it to Congress. Lawmakers such as Senate Finance Committee Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, say they won't consider it until South Korea drops all its restrictions on U.S. beef, which the Asian nation has said it will do.
``Beef was the last impediment'' before the accord could be sent to Congress for a vote, Undersecretary of Commerce Christopher Padilla said yesterday.
Bush said earlier today that his first priority is getting a similar pact with Colombia approved.
After Bush tried last month to force a vote on that deal, the U.S. House of Representatives took the unprecedented step of stripping out a 90-day deadline to hold the vote, putting off consideration of the accord indefinitely.
`Gravest Threat'
Since then, analysts such as Fred Bergsten, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, have said that the House action undermined the ability of future American leaders to negotiate trade pacts.
The move was the ``gravest threat to the global trading system in decades,'' Bergsten wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
The U.S. is South Korea's second-largest export market behind China, with shipments totaling $45.8 billion in 2007. Imports from the U.S. last year reached $37.2 billion. The trade agreement would eliminate or reduce tariffs on a wide range of goods including automobiles, vegetables and electronics.
Critics such as Ford Motor Co. and the autoworkers union say that Korea keeps unfair regulatory barriers to U.S. auto exports and contend that the accord won't address those concerns. Obama backed those complaints today.
The deal ``would give Korean exports essentially unfettered access to the U.S. market and would eliminate our best opportunity for obtaining genuinely reciprocal market access in one of the world's largest economies,'' Obama wrote.