CFTA

I am pissed. Pissed.  Pissed.  Pissed.

 

I say that acknowledging to my children that I have always said that the use of profanity and vulgarity in writing is the mark of the semiliterate person.  I tried and tried to come up with an alternative.  I searched the various thesauruses and the best I came up with was “angry” or “annoyed.”

 

With all apologies to Ben, Becky and Laura, F-that.  I am really pissed.

 

(Please note that I have also previously contended that the use of font size changes, italics, bolding and emoticons :-) are also the mark of an ill equipped writer.  Thus, dear reader, my total disregard for Perlman’s  Strunk and Wright Robert’s Rules of Order (how’s that for a combo sandwich) is indication of the fact that my anger has exceeded the temperature at which the vapor pressure of the liquid is equal to the pressure exerted on the liquid by the surrounding environmental pressure or, as the average cretin calls it, my boiling point.)

 

So what caused my systolic and diastolic readings to venture into the land of Dosciento Mas? 

 

It all started with a simple phone call.

 

Not just any phone call, but a message on my answering machine when I came home from work.  And not just any message, but a PRE-RECORDED message (crap…did it again).  There is nothing I hate more than a prerecorded phone call.  You know the type. The ones when you answer the phone there is a pause, often eliciting you to say hello two or three more times, and then the prerecorded dribble starts and you hang up the phone.

 

(Please note that of course, there are things I hate more than prerecorded messages like war, injustice, and that fact that a box seat to a Cubs game costs $80, but afford me this exaggeration to convey the level of my furor.)

 

Think about a prerecorded message.  Worse than junk mail or spam.  I can hit delete without ever reading the spam and likewise, I can throw away junk mail without ever unsealing the envelope.  But the use of a prerecorded phone message means that I must get up to answer the phone and listen until the moment that I determine it to be some psycho malcontent wasting my time, making me exert effort, dare interrupting Deal or No Deal just when Lydia is opening case number 18, which I know is the million dollar case and will result in some entry level white collar slightly overweight collector of Hannah Montana memorabilia to have her dreams of a life that Robin Leach would one day talk about crushed in one click of the pseudo Zero Halliburton briefcase.

 

But I digress.

 

This PRERECORDED message was from an organization telling me that if I was upset by the fact that the dollar has lost 50% of its value, gasoline prices were going through the roof, and that American jobs were being sourced overseas I should blame President Bush and my congressman, Mark Kirk and NAFTA and if I do not want more of this, call them and tell them not to pass CFTA

 

After I stifled a smile over the concept that NAFTA and CFTA (Columbian Free Trade Act) are responsible for sourcing jobs “overseas” my anger started to climb like Tenzing Norgay.

 

Our Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi has used her power to stop a vote on CFTA.  If that alone doesn’t make you throw a wobbler than I don’t know what would.  Not voting is the ultimate passive aggressive, non-confrontational, undemocratic act.  If CFTA was so bad why not allow the House to vote it down?

 

Why not?  Because it would either place on public display the level of the nay-voters’ stupidity or extent of their willingness to sacrifice the public good to hand Bush a defeat.

 

Yes, I said public good. 

 

The direct purpose of passing CFTA is to level the field of trade between the US and Columbia IN OUR FAVOR! (here I go again)

 

90% of the Columbia imports already enter the US duty-free. So the main point of the agreement would be to eliminate the tariffs on US exports to Columbia.  One estimate says that the US farm sector alone would reap an additional $690 million per year if the treaty was ratified.  In addition, it would be a very important sign of support to Alvaro Uribe, Columbia’s President who wants nothing more than Columbia to be a market oriented, democratic country integrated into an international system friendly to freedom. Comparing this vision to Hugo Chavez’s is like comparing the same between the Gran Telescopio Canarias and Jose Feliciano.

 

Even the Washington Post, hardly a supporter of the Right or President Bush, in an editorial supporting ratification of CAFTA stated,  

“There are two important countries at the north of South America. One, Colombia, has a democratic government that, with strong support from the Clinton and Bush administrations, has bravely sought to defeat brutal militias of the left and right and to safeguard human rights. The other, Venezuela, has a repressive government that has undermined media freedoms, forcibly nationalized industries, rallied opposition to the United States and, recent evidence suggests, supported terrorist groups inside Colombia. That U.S. unions, human rights groups and now Democrats would focus their criticism and advocacy on the former, to the benefit of the latter, shows how far they have departed from their own declared principles.”

So to state some facts on CFTA:

1. It provides duty- and quota-free access to both countries' textile markets, provided the products meet the agreement's rules of origin provisions.
2. It provides expanded access for U.S. providers to Colombia's services markets, such as in the financial sector.
3. It provides greater protection in Colombia for intellectual property rights of such U.S. products as computer software, music and videos, and more protection for U.S. patents and trademarks.
4. It provides more public access to Colombian government information about customs requirements.
5. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates the trade agreements with Colombia and South Korea could boost U.S. exports by more than $25 billion.

So it helps our people, it helps their people, and it supports a country’s leader who is making real improvement in the measureables that are important to all freedom loving people and empowers that same leader to fight his maniacal neighbor to the North.  And yet it languishes in legislative limbo until Ms. Pelosi decides that the people’s Constitutional right to have their representative vote on the treaty is more important than her leading her Democratic sheep to the equivalent of a lemmings mass suicide. 

 

So I urge you to contact your representative to Congress and tell him/her that this treaty should come to an immediate vote. And while you’re at it, ask about some law prohibiting prerecorded phone calls. I really hate them.

Comments

[Frank S. Robinson]

The position of Dems on the Colombia Free Trade Agreement is really sickening. The REASON for the position is that UNIONS are against all free trade (for wrong reasons, of course). They KNOW that THIS free trade agreement cannot be critiqued on any fair and reasonable basis. Yet they oppose it on the basis that they simply have to oppose all free trade agreements.