A group comprised of some of the largest and most powerful business interests in the country are pressuring the White House to pass a trio of free trade agreements negotiated under the previous administration, despite the obvious flaws with each individual agreement.

Calling themselves the Emergency Committee for American Trade, the group sent a letter to the president urging him to pass free trade agreements with South Korea, Columbia and Panama quickly.

The group even suggests that efforts to improve the agreements should be abandoned in favor of passing them in a hasty manner.

“Your Administration has indicated that it wants to make progress on specific issues —certain market-access issues with respect to Korea, labor-violence issues with Colombia and tax issues with Panama. We urge that any such work be accomplished quickly and take into account the fact that progress on each of these issues has already been made,” the letter reads.

The group is made up almost entirely of the heads of companies that benefit enormously from America’s trade policies that allow multinational corporations to ship American jobs overseas, skirt their domestic tax obligations and generally ignore any and all environmental concerns. The presidents of Caterpillar, Wal Mart, Coca Cola, IBM, Microsoft and Intel all signed the letter, among others.

Microsoft has long been criticized for its willingness to outsource work and hire controversial H-1B visa holders.

Microsoft has lobbied the federal government on numerous occasions to loosen restrictions on H-1B visas and raise the nationwide cap on the number of them that can be awarded annually.

In 2008, Microsoft was the top U.S.-based recipient of H-1B visas, according to a list compiled by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS).

Caterpillar has eliminated roughly 20,000 high-wage union jobs since the 1990s in an effort to cut down on costs. A 2001 report by the Nashville Business Journal found that 60 percent of the company’s workforce was outside the United States. In all likelihood that number has increased in the nine years since.

More recently, the company has opposed the American Jobs and Closing Loopholes Act of 2010, which would raise $14.5 billion over the next decade by cracking down on six tax schemes multinational corporations use to skirt their U.S. tax obligations, including claiming foreign tax credits for income they have not actually paid taxes on.

Earlier this year, Wal Mart was forced to pull children’s jewelry off its shelves when it was discovered certain pieces made in China contained dangerously high levels of cadmium. The majority of products on the company’s shelves are foreign-made.

Coca-Cola had taken advantage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and other trade pacts by moving factories to Mexico and low-wage nations in South America. According to Bloomberg News, IBM was able to reduce its tax rate by nine percent last year through the tax loopholes on overseas profits.

Using past trade agreements as a model, the Economic Policy Institute projects that trade agreements with South Korea and Columbia would be very costly to the American economy. According to the study, the nation would lose 214,000 jobs by 2015, mostly well-paying manufacturing jobs. The trade deficit would rise by $16.8 billion, the study projects.

Democrats have steadfastly opposed the South Korea deal on the grounds that Seoul officials have not sufficiently opened their automotive market up to American exports. In 2007, the U.S. sold 7,000 American vehicles in South Korea, or less than one percent of the entire market. South Korean automakers, on the other hand, sold 615,000 vehicles in the U.S. that same year, according to Pat Choate’s book Saving Capitalism.

The Columbia deal is opposed by much of the Democratic caucus because of alleged violence taking place in the South American nation against trade unionists. According to reports, 470 Columbian unionists have allegedly been assassinated since 2002.

Another recent report by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund found that the U.S. Treasury Department loses approximately $100 billion each and every year due to American businesses utilizing tax havens. A good portion of that money likely winds up in Panama, where 350,000 foreign subsidiaries are located in the country to take advantage of the nation’s lax tax laws.

“American workers are relying on the Obama administration to make sure our country doesn’t enter into another NAFTA-style trade deal,” Teamster Union President James Hoffa wrote last year. “That includes the Bush administration’s leftover Panama and Colombia pacts, which are now being pushed by the same special interests that promoted NAFTA, CAFTA and the WTO.”

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