Posted on 06/25/2007 11:28:29 AM PDT by Kitten Festival
Foreign Relations: Should the U.S. offer preferential trade privileges to hostile anti-American regimes that view them as cheap handouts? Offering nothing in return, Ecuador thinks so. We are less sure.
Ecuador's sudden charm offensive in Washington as it seeks to renew preferential trade privileges under the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act, or ATPDEA, ought to leave the U.S. queasy.
Here's a leftist regime in Quito that's done nothing but condemn free trade and hurl abuse at the U.S. as it rolls toward Cuban- and Venezuelan-style tyranny.
(Excerpt) Read more at ibdeditorials.com ...
“”It lets Ecuador sell goods to the U.S. duty-free but doesn’t give the same market access to U.S. firms in Ecuador. Correa denounces free trade as “yanqui imperialism” and wants the one-way trade privileges for another five years.””
Smart man. Why not accept the status quo? Bush sold out to the importing interests in America. Bush will do nothing because one, the importing money and, two, “free” trade goes hand in hand with his domestic wage depression policies.
“”And if we don’t? Then Correa vows to sic a wave of illegal immigrants on us, something to add to Ecuador’s 350,000 illegals already here as of 2004, according to a U.S. Navy study.”””
Not so smart. Doesn’t understand “Bush’s brain”. This is not a meaningful threat. Bush will welcome them and the “bigger pie” economy they will create.
This
Why should we trade with them at all? Blackbird.
They use drug interdiction as an excuse. We should leave these countries to their own devices. They will soon fail without our support. If we keep giving them our tax money, without our permission as Americans, they will just use it any way they want. It’s the same in this country. If we keep giving and giving and giving to the poor, they have no reason not to be poor. They just sit there with their hand out and grow accustomed to living on what we give them.
Well, the fact is, inspite of the imbalance, we sell lots of stuff to Ecuador. There are lots of USA jobs dependent on sales exports to Ecuador.
Overlooked in the diatribe is the fact that Ecuador has little we want and almost nothing we need. Giving them an advantage on so few commodities is no big deal.
This is much to do about little except typical anti trade ranting by those who know little about the process.
A pure free trade approach is to: drop our tariffs to zero, not install socialist overlord regimes like NAFTA, not loan foreign countries money, not subsidize U.S. companies to build plants in other countries, ignore their ignorant, loud-mouth politicians, not bail out U.S. companies that are nationalized by them.
When a trade partner puts tariffs on our products, we should use the weighted average of their tariff to become our tariff on them.
Political leaders, like Chavez, that go beyond ignorant blathering should be ignored up to the point they become a credible threat. At that point pre-emptive military operation should be considered and becomes imperative if nuclear weapons are available by them. The influx of millions across our southern border should have triggered a similar military response. But our out-of-touch politicians pretend a treasonous sleep.
Baloney. IBD is a free trade paper. If Ecuador wants free trade, let it open its markets to free trade same as we do. It sounds like you haven’t read the editorial and don’t know the facts of the case. Preferential trade is not the same thing as authentic free trade, such as Colombia and Peru are seeking. Learn the facts.
I think they WANT to turn their country over to FARC, they love those ‘romantic’ Marxist narcoterrorists.
Zackly. They hate us. They ship more illegal aliens per capita than Mexico does. Why should we trade with them?
ping!
“Overlooked in the diatribe is the fact that Ecuador has little we want and almost nothing we need. Giving them an advantage on so few commodities is no big deal.”
Um, Ecuador is a major oil exporter.
Its time to fire back up the School of the Americas to its coldwar capacity. We need to get our assets back in Latin America and start pushing back on these commies.
Ecuador needs free trade, badly. They have been hurt by EU policies that make it almost impossible for Ecuador to export into that market. The US is the one country where they could always get a fair shake, and we’ve been working with them trying to give them an even fairer shake.
Correa is a Chavist, however, so none of that means anything.
Ecuador kicked Occidental Oil out of the country for the crime of trying to attract more investors. Until they resolve that little issue, I can’t see anyone running to invest there, why would you if their most important investor can be stripped of his assets in a day?
Their primary sources of income are oil, under attack by leftists and greens, shrimp, under constant attack by the greens, and bananas, which can not be sold in the EU. By electing leftists into power they have hoisted themselves on their own dogma, so to speak. There is something perverse about a political movement that attacks the only sources of wealth in one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere. If Correa wants to do something more than oversea the further impoverishment of an impoverished state, he has to learn to speak the language of freedom and markets.
Ecuador is a lovely jewel of a country, one of the loveliest places anywhere. But Chavism is a cancer, and they’ve got it, and they brought it on themselves.
I noticed that Vargas LLosa was in Ecuador the last week or so, giving a series of lectures around the country. His subject, liberty.
He’s been catching a bit of flack for it, because he’s been openly speaking against “utopianism” which is seen as an attack on both Chavez and Correa, although he has apparently mentioned neither directly. That, and his recently published “Iraq Diary” which is an open attack on Saddam is seen as inferring a defense of Bush’s take-down of the dictator.
So the leftists and chavists are squealing.
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