Don't Break My Heart with the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement!

Today, a small delegation of activists from the Vermont Workers' Center and Students for Peace & Global Justice at UVM braved a snowstorm to deliver a Valentine's Day message to Vermont's Congressional Delegation: "Don't Break My Heart with the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement!" The action was in solidarity with the week of action organized by Korean-Americans Against War and Neoliberalism. The US Trade Representative's office is in a 7th and possibly final round of negotiations with South Korea this week in order to create the largest free trade agreement since NAFTA (more information on the proposed agreement).

We first tried to visit Senator Patrick Leahy's office, but his staff were apparently more deterred by the blizzard than we were, so we decorated the outside of the office door for them, and slipped the rest of the 100+ Valentine's cards we had brought for the Senator under the door.



Then we visited the office of Congressman Peter Welch, whose staff cheerfully accepted the Valentine's cards and told us that the Congressman has been asking a lot of questions about the US-Korea free trade agreement and issued several major statements supporting fair trade in the past few weeks.



Finally, we were cordially received at the office of Senator Bernie Sanders, a long-time ally of working people, where his local chief-of-staff assured us that Bernie would lead the fight against this and any other unfair trade agreements in the Senate, and that he felt good about taking on that fight in the Senate as several strong fair-trade advocates had been elected in November.