President Obama is off to Colombia, a country he disdained mightily during his time as president, now to collect a $600,000 honorarium for a single speech to a marketing group called EXMA. It's weird stuff, given that Obama was so contemptuous of Colombia over the first five years of his presidency.  He denied the country a free trade pact while communist hellholes such as Nicaragua, and economic rivals such as Peru, got them easily.  Colombia's trade minister at the time, Luis Plata, told me the arrangement like this was basically the same as sanctions.  He did eventually sign on to free trade with Colombia, dropping the miasma of nonsense from U.S. unions that union organizers were being killed.  When I went to Colombia myself in 2008, I learned from the Colombian union organizers themselves that workers were being killed, all right...because they favored free trade, and the AFL-CIO was hypocritically...(Read Full Post)