NEW TRADE ACT HAS BROAD BI-PARTISAN SUPPORT
© Copyright 2008 Colleen Ballard Hayes
The Trade Reform, Accountability, Development and Employment (TRADE) Act of 2008, co-sponsored by fair trade "champions" Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Representative Mike Michaud (D Maine), was introduced June 4, 2008 in Congress. With more than 50 House and Senate original co-sponsors, this landmark legislation launches "…a fair way forward to a new American trade agenda," reports Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch.
"Fifteen years of the NAFTA/WTO model has led to massive job loss, downward pressure on wages and the loss of nearly 300,000 family farms," reports Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. "It's given broad, expansive new rights to foreign corporations to challenge our environmental and public health standards and flooded the U.S. with unsafe imported food and products. And it has devastated developing nations, where millions of family farmers have been forced off their land, and where poverty, despair and desperation-driven mass migrations have grown." Good jobs, safe food and promotion of basic human rights, healthy communities and environmental protection are the objectives of the Trade Act, laid out in detail as to how U.S. trade policy can achieve these goals. In concrete, specific terms, this legislation spells out a "…progressive vision" for future good trade agreements and "…criteria to renegotiate existing failed pacts such as NAFTA and the WTO."
The TRADE Act stipulates "…what must and must not be in all trade pacts," Global Trade Watch explains.
The new legislation requires:
1. Strongly enforced labor, human rights, environmental, health and national security standards to ensure corporations can only benefit from trade pacts if they adhere to rules ensuring "trade works for all of us", says GTW..
2. Such standards "…will also create incentives to improve conditions in poor countries. What must never again be included are extreme foreign investor protections that promote offshoring and expose our domestic public interest laws to attack, or requirements to privatize or deregulate essential services such as health care, education or social security."
3. "The TRADE Act also requires a review and renegotiation of harmful existing trade pacts such as NAFTA, CAFTA and the WTO. Additionally, the TRADE Act lays out a new system to replace Fast Track* for negotiating and approving trade agreements so Congress and the public have the leverage necessary to ensure future agreements meet the new criteria provided in the legislation."
If you want to return our country to its former greatness, please take action today: ask your representative and senators to cosponsor the TRADE Act and to replace the NAFTA/WTO Model! http://action.citizen.org/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=24836
For further information on the new TRADE Act, visit http://www.citizen.org/trade/tradeact/ This site offers a link to the original legislation, summarized below:
H.R.6180, which has been referred to the Committee on Rules and the Committee on Ways and Means, has 65 co-sponsors, in addition to Rep. Michael H. Michaud (ME).
S.3083, which was referred to the Senate Committee on Finance, has six co-sponsors, in addition to Senator Sherrod Brown (OH).
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Footnotes:
*Fast-Track Authority
"Fast-track authority is an unusual procedure, with Congress ceding much of its original constitutional trade oversight to the president under a procedure with mandatory deadlines, no amendments allowed, and limited debate," wrote Senator Byron Dorgan (S.D.) in his book, Take This Job and Ship It. "It's proved to be a horrible idea."
"The slow, deliberate pace and consideration of democratic trade agreements of old is a much better altermatove to the wham, bam, thank you, ma'am trade agreements since NAFTA that have gutted manufacturing jobs and have us up to our nostrils drowning in trade deficits and historic national debt."
In the same book, Dorgan wrote: "I admire the fact that early on, Perot (Ross Perot) knew that the 1991 "fast-track" legislation was a bad idea because it 'gave President Bush the authority to negotiate NAFTA in complete secrecy and without the participation of either Congress or the U.S. public.' Perot noted that since 1960, the Senate had approved or ratified 25 treaties and agreements of various types without 'fast-track' auithority.
"Funny, isn't it, that fifteen years ago Ross Perot was just a curious man warning about implausible scenarios. Now, when you consider the accuracy of his predictions, you have to give him an enormous amount of credit. But one thing was obvious even then. Ross Perot loved his country. He was and is a patriot."
