Ford comes out swinging against the FTA with nationally run ad

[source]

I myself haven't see it yet (and I'm trying to track it down), but Ford Motor Company put an ad in twenty papers across the US aimed at turning the public against the ROK-US free trade agreement (aka KORUS FTA) which now stands a much better chance of passing now that the Democrats in Congress took a "shellacking."

Here is NPR's description of the ad:

We were struck by an advertisement we saw today in The Washington Post. The full-page ad shows a sea of red cars and one lone blue car, along with this text: For every 52 cars Korea ships here, the U.S. can only export one there.

Ford paid for the ad, and it appears today in more than 20 newspapers. So we wondered what it's all about. It turns out it relates to the Korean Free Trade Agreement.

And being NPR, they tried to determine the ad's veracity by talking with Marcus Noland:

NORRIS: Now, speaking of the concerns of the auto industry, is this ad or is the contention made in this ad actually correct? Is Ford or are other American auto companies at a disadvantage because of this free trade agreement?

Mr. NOLAND: No, actually not. Historically, the Korean market has been inhospitable to foreign producers. There's no question about that. Though considerable liberalization has occurred in recent years and, indeed, I was just in Korea last week, and I was surprised by how many non-Korean cars I saw on the road.

The other thing is is that GM, the largest American car manufacturer, actually owns a Korean car company, Daewoo. So it doesn't ship cars from the United States to Korea. It simply manufactures them and sells them in Korea. So when Ford points to its inability to literally export cars from here to Korea, this is really more of a Ford issue than an American automobile sector issue.

I'll try to hit the library and track down the dead-tree edition of the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Los Angeles Times. More on this when I'm not in class.

UPDATE:
At The Marmot's Hole, Wangkon has put up a pretty good piece on this (with a lot more links) with an interesting comments section. He didn't give me a hat tip, though, even though mine was up hours before his, sitting right there in the TMH Blog Feed.

UPDATE 2:
Would South Koreans buy a Ford F150?