Dec. 17 marked 22 years since President George H. W. Bush signed the North American Free Trade Agreement. In those 21 years, NAFTA has moved more than a million American jobs offshore, propagated a race to the bottom in American wages and empowered foreign corporations to sue our government in foreign tribunals to demand compensation from us taxpayers for enacting basic health, environmental and food safety standards.
U.S. public opposition from Democrats, the GOP and Independents to a massive NAFTA expansion, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, has grown with awareness of this expansive reach and prospective threats. The TPP would expand all of the NAFTA provisions that promote job off-shoring, higher medicine prices, and floods of unsafe imported food from more countries, including Vietnam with its 58 cents an hour wages.
Fast Track is the extreme Nixon-era legislative procedure that would transfer congressional authority over trade to the president, allowing him to sign the TPP before Congress approves it and force an up-or-down vote in Congress within 90 days with all amendments banned and limited debate.
A forced, undemocratic, all-or-nothing vote as promised under Fast Track is likely the only way the TPP could pass through Congress, given that it threatens to further push down our wages and threatens affordable medicine prices, food safety, environmental protections, Internet privacy and more.
Congressional Democrats and Republicans alike oppose Fast Track and are irate about the actual terms of the TPP.
Given these dim prospects for Fast Track passage, trade negotiators should stop wasting time and money on a deal that’s never going to happen.
Robert Kenny and Julia Glover
Clinton
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