Free trade bubbles up in final US election debate

[Judi Lynn]

Free trade bubbles up in final US election debate
Source: Deutsche Presse-Agentur

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 05:42:21 GMT
DPA

Washington - US presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain clashed on free trade and its value to a sputtering US economy during their last television debate of the election campaign. Republican nominee McCain said Wednesday that opening up trade would foster millions of jobs in the United States but acknowledged that re-education programmes for US workers losing their jobs would have to be improved. He called for an end to tariffs on sugar cane-based ethanol from Brazil to help the United States diversify its energy sources.

Democratic rival Obama said he was a free-trade supporter but held US workers' interests at heart. He touted a pending deal with South Korea, which would allow struggling US automakers sell more of their goods on the Asian market.

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McCain focused on the Colombian free-trade agreement pending before Congress, calling it a "no-brainer" that would help create jobs in the United States and aid a key Latin American ally in its fight against drug trafficking.

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Obama countered that all trade deals had to include protections for US workers, for the environment and for the "human rights" of labour union members who have been targeted for assassination in Colombia.

More:
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/237269,free-trade-bubbles-up-in-final-us-election-debate.html

[Judi Lynn]

1. The Killings Go On: Targeting Unions in Colombia

October 15, 2008

The Killings Go On
Targeting Unions in Colombia
By CONN HALLINAN

There are lots of places in the world where you need to watch your step. You don’t want to be a Sunni in a Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad (or vice versa). It’s probably not smart to speak Tamal in southern Sri Lanka. You might want to keep being a Muslim under wraps in parts of Mindanao. But most of all you don’t want to be a trade unionist in the U.S.’s one remaining ally in South America, Colombia.

“Colombia is the most dangerous place in the world to be a trade unionist,” says Jeremy Dear, chair of the British trade union organization, Justice For Colombia (JFC), “In fact, more trade unionists have been murdered in Colombia during Uribe’s presidency than in the rest of the world over the same period.”

In April, the Colombian Trade Union Confederation reported that the first part of 2008 saw a 77 percent increase in the murder of trade unionists.

One of the latest victims was Luis Mayusa Prada, a union leader from Saravena. On Aug. 8, two men pumped him full of bullets—17 to be exact. Prada was the third member of his family to be assassinated by right-wing paramilitaries. His sister Carmen Mayusa, a nurse and leader of the National Assn. Of Hospital and Clinic Workers, is on the run from death threats.

Prada, who left behind a wife and five children, was the 27th unionist to be murdered in 2008 and joins 3,000 others who have been assassinated in the past two decades. Only 3 percent of the cases have ever been solved.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/hallinan10152008.html



http://www.counterpunch.org/hallinan10152008.html

[killbotfactory]

2. What's with McCain's expression when Obama mentioned the union assassinations?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOLQ8iFom6E

It's 2 minutes in.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Isn't that absurd seeing a U.S. Senator who's really that bent? What a wreckage of a person he is.

Clearly he's one of the Jesse Helms/Reagan/Bush/death squad lovers school which lives with the assumption if you are even remotely not a fascist it's o.k. to enslave you, or to kill you, and any one who opposes this idea will be killed, as well.

That really streamlines things for them, doesn't it, if they simply have their killers go out and murder everyone who can't take the suffering they already endure, and seek to lessen it through getting food to eat for their children, and clothes, and shelter for them at the end of a hard, hard day. That's the way the right-wing prefers it, and any of their pretension to respect for democracy is pure fiction as any Democrat knows.

That nasty, meaty little McCain face and those pathetic expressions, all rolling around on a face which has never existed outside the tender mercies of the paternalism of the U.S. government, from infancy on up to the present could really make you lose your lunch! Great clip, very interesting.

Here's the great man and his entourage touring Colombia at the taxpayers' expense. Behind McCain are ambassador William Brownfield, who was enormously unpopular in Venezuela for his meddling, and his trusty Igor assistant, Lindsay Graham, and the Benedict Arnold Joe Lieberman, as well as his lovely soul mate whom he has cursed crudely, and graphicly in public, according to records.



So glad to know somehow Obama got the information on how Colombia treats the poor. Thanks for posting this video.