My father used to say, "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." So I have no comment:

President Obama submitted three free trade bills with South Korea, Colombia and Panama to Congress today after a years-long holdup of the deals since the most recent Bush administration. Speaker John Boehner announced immediately that the House will act on them quickly along with Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) for displaced workers.

"Now that all three agreements have been transmitted, they will be a top priority for the House," Boehner said in a statement. "We will quickly begin the required process to consider these bills and intend to vote on them consecutively and in tandem with Senate-passed TAA legislation."

Earlier today, Majority Leader Eric Cantor told reporters "we intend to address this and hopefully put a win on the board for the people of this country."

He said the House would act on the bills next week.

"I am glad President Obama has finally sent Congress the long-awaited free trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea which will help create thousands of new jobs and spur economic growth," Cantor said in a Monday statement. "Moving forward on these agreements will provide manufacturers with the help they need to increase exports and increase production. The more manufacturers produce, the more workers they need and that means job creation."

The agreements would ease trade restrictions between the United States and the three countries. According to the International Trade Commission, the easing of tariffs with South Korea alone would boost exports by up to $10.9 billion. The agreement with Colombia would mean around 75 percent of all U.S. exports to that country would be duty free.

The three pacts have been held up for years over disagreements between Democrats and Republicans over the need to extend Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), a government program that provides job training, income support and health care assistance for workers displaced by free trade agreements. Passage of TAA is a requirement for the White House before they will send to Congress trade bills with South Korea, Columbia and Panama. But Republicans see the program as duplicative, expensive and ineffective.

Public Citizen, however, has a lot to say - none of it good.

You'll remember I wrote about this before, when I first found out Whirlpool took millions in bailout money and then announced they were moving this plant to Mexico.

Now they've closed the plant and soon the town will turn into a ghost town:

“We were considered the refrigerator capital of the world,” said Randall Reynolds, who was a forklift driver.

But that family tradition will soon end because Whirlpool plans to close the plant on Friday and move the operation to Mexico, eliminating 1,100 jobs here. Many in this city in southern Indiana are seething and sad — sad about losing what was long the city’s economic centerpiece and a ticket to the middle class for one generation after another.

“This is all about corporate greed,” said Ms. Ford, who took a job at Whirlpool 19 years ago. “It’s devastating to our family and to everyone in the plant. I wonder where we’ll be two years or four years from now. There aren’t any jobs here. How is this community going to survive?”

At a time when the nation’s economy is struggling to gain momentum, Whirlpool’s decision is an unwelcome step backward. It continues a trend in which the nation has lost nearly six million factory jobs over the past dozen years, representing one in three manufacturing jobs.
Connie Brasel, who earned $18.44 an hour making thermal liners for the refrigerators, sees Whirlpool’s move as a betrayal not just of the workers but also of the United States.

“This country made Whirlpool what it is,” she said. “They didn’t get world-class quality because they had the best managers. They got world-class quality because of the U.S. and because of their workers. And now they want to pack up and move to Mexico. I find it offensive.”

[...] The closing leaves not just Ms. Ford and her son without a job, but also her husband, a worker in the metal-pressing shop.

“My mom and dad told me that when they were young, there were jobs everywhere,” she said. “They said we had Whirlpool, Bristol-Myers, Mead Johnson, Windsor Plastics, Guardian Automotive, Zenith. Now if you want to find a job, there’s nothing around.”

Ask the workers who is to blame, and they say not just Whirlpool, but also President Bill Clinton for having negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement, which eliminated tariffs on trade with the United States’ neighbors. They say the pact has siphoned jobs to Mexico.

They also blame Indiana’s governor, Mitch Daniels, saying he has largely ignored their plight, and President George W. Bush and President Obama, saying they had done little to reverse manufacturing’s decline.

“When people are unemployed for a long period, they would look at any administration, including this one, as being part of the problem and not doing enough,” said Mohammed F. Khayum, the dean of the University of Southern Indiana’s business school. “It can definitely play a role in this November’s elections unless things turn around before then.”

Our country is missing a strong industrial policy, with an administration and Congress that chooses which manufacturers are important to support --and why. As long as economic disasters like this are repeated all over the country, I don't think Democrats are going to be pleasantly surprised this November.

I'm Manila Ryce from The Largest Minority. We have a week together so let's make the most of it.

I don't know about you, but I turn to Bill O'Reilly when I feel the need to brush up on the New Testament . After all, who else knows theology better than a political pundit?

The French are revolting. Sorry, there's no bad punchline there. Steve from COA News treats us to a Real News video about the workers of France rejecting Sarkozy's anti-labor agenda.

Robert Stein has a crystal ball which told him over a year ago that Lou Dobbs would be running for something. It wasn't the border.

And though our "immigration crisis" is a side effect of NAFTA locking Mexico's economy into foreign exploitation, Hillary's only account of the 1993 debate over the trade agreement is that it contained charts and stuff. Would Senator Obama like to weigh in on that? Nope? Um…okay.

Finally, Emily of KABOBfest reminds us that protecting human rights might be just a bit more important than strict adherence to certain laws. The rights of real people supersede imaginary borders? Crazy concept, I know.

Got a link you'd like to submit for the Round-Up? Email me at John (dot) William (dot) Harrison (at) Gmail (dot) com

This is what I've been saying for months...

David Sirota:

A simple question: Why is politics the only arena where those who turned out to be right still get flayed as outcasts, while those who are known to be utterly wrong get rewarded as visionaries? In business, if you make the wrong calls, you lose money and, most often, lose your job. If you make the right call, you make a lot of money, and you usually get promoted. There are exceptions to this axiom, of course - but it generally works this way. In politics, it generally works the opposite way. The people who make the right call on the big issues are punished with elite vitiriol, and those who repeatedly make the wrong calls on such issues are vaulted into the highest echelons of the Establishment.

Nowhere was this more obvious than on the Iraq War. As Jebediah Reed at Radar Magazine has shown in detail, most of the major pundits who led the cheering section for the war have been rewarded with promotions, while those writers who actually accurately predicted the war as a disaster have been cast aside like pieces of garbage.
This has also happened when it comes to "free" trade. Despite the fact that NAFTA and China PNTR have helped destroy American wages and jobs; have increased our trade deficit to crisis proportions; and have been a key weapon in preventing global environmental and human rights standards, the people who predicted such outcomes are still regarded with contempt and berated with false attacks, while the people who championed such awful policies are considered the legitimate voices of reason. Jeff Faux spells this out particularly well today over at TPM Cafe