Eideard

President Obama has made expanding exports a centerpiece of his plan for accelerating the economic recovery, but in recent weeks, his trade agenda has nearly ground to a halt amid partisan feuding.

Although the White House renegotiated a pivotal free-trade agreement with South Korea in December, scoring rare bipartisan praise, House Republican leaders have refused to allow the deal to move forward. They want the administration to make progress first on similar accords with Colombia and Panama that face stiff opposition from labor unions and liberal Democrats.

Wonder what products from those countries are favored by Republicans?

To add to the pressure on the administration, House Republicans in February blocked a big expansion of trade adjustment assistance — which provides cash, training, relocation, job search and other benefits to workers displaced by globalization — from being renewed. Many of the 220,000 workers who took part in the program last year could have their benefits reduced as a result.

Another program, which gives duty-free preferences to 4,800 products from poor countries that are allies of the United States, expired in December after a Republican senator, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, blocked a vote to extend it….

“In 30 years I have not seen trade policy in such disarray as it is now,” said Howard F. Rosen, a trade expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a research organization here.

The standoffs have come to overshadow what trade proponents had seen as a major accomplishment: the completion in December of a free-trade agreement with South Korea, the largest such deal since the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in 1994…

The Andean preferences, which began in 1991, have lapsed just as the United States was trying to get Colombia to strengthen labor protections as part of the negotiations to revise the 2006 agreement.

A third program, the Generalized System of Preference, also has expired, but for parochial reasons, not partisan ones. Mr. Sessions, the Alabama senator, blocked the program from being renewed past its Dec. 31 expiration unless changes were made to protect Exxel Outdoors, a sleeping-bag manufacturer with a plant in Haleyville, Ala., from competition in Bangladesh.

As usual, Republican ideology is as suspect as any other agitprop they offer whilst electioneering. Unless pork is protected, unless businesses in the Republican family get special treatment, free trade means as little as civil rights.

In its strongest move since the sinking of a South Korean warship, the Obama administration has said that the United States would retain control of all military forces in the South during any conflict with North Korea, which has been widely blamed for the attack on the ship in March that killed 46 sailors…

The decision is somewhat symbolic; the United States was not slated to give up wartime control of South Korean troops until 2012, and the new agreement extends the deadline to 2015. But the agreement allowed Washington and Seoul to take some action after months of struggling for ways to punish the North — and attempt to deter it from further violence — without provoking the country’s erratic leader, Kim Jong-il, to launch new attacks…

Where’s the beef?

In addition, Mr. Obama vowed to seek Congressional ratification for a long-stalled free-trade agreement with South Korea — a possibly risky political move that could please businesses but upset unions and their allies in Congress.

In an apparent attempt to satisfy those groups, the administration said that in exchange for pushing the trade deal forward, Mr. Obama would ask the South to drop restrictions on auto and beef imports; the restrictions have been particularly unpopular with unions…

Senator Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said he would support ratification as long as “the unscientific barriers Korea has erected against American beef” were removed.

Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, the top Republican on the Ways and Means Committee, said he welcomed the decision. “I hope that this process will provide us an opportunity to address market access for autos and beef and increase the value of the trading relationship,” he said.

When either one of these creeps lets some concern for healthcare, unemployment, jobs and education slip past their political radar, pigs will be flying and lobbyists will be out of a job.

Want to save a buck and reduce the deficit – Mr. and Mrs. Tea Party? Bring The Troops Home!