Fast Track, also known as Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), gives the president the authority to negotiate international trade agreements, allowing for the expansion of privileges and protections for big business at the expense of workers, family farms, the environment and democracy at home and around the world. Bush hopes to use Fast Track to expand NAFTA via the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and to push new negotiations at the 2003 World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial.
CORPORATE INTERESTS Fast Track expands NAFTA's Chapter 11 investment provision allowing corporations to sue governments in secret courts for 'compensation' when environmental, health, safety and other public interest regulations cut into corporate profits. U.S. Metalclad Corporation won $16 million in cash compensation from the Mexican government after the local government in San Luis Potosi refused to grant Metalclad permits to open a toxic waste dump located over the town's nearby water source.
PRIVATIZATION & DEREGULATION The same Enron, Arthur Andersen, and Haliburton criminals who have cheated tens of thousands of Americans out of their retirement savings were some of the loudest proponents of Fast Track. They wanted Fast Track in order to pass global investment and services agreements currently being negotiated which would deregulate accounting, insurance, energy and financial services on a global scale!
"RACE TO THE BOTTOM" FOR LABOR & ENVIROMENTAL STANDARDS Language within the bill (the Gramm Provision) ensures that countries will be able to, first, set labor and environmental standards as low as they want, even far below the basic floor of the International Labor Organization's (ILO) core worker's rights or multilateral environmental agreements; and, second, weaken or waive their existing labor and environmental laws with impunity. Even if trade agreements were to include commitments to raise or maintain domestic labor or environmental standards, this language would actually forbid our negotiators from applying any effective enforcement of mechanisms to back up these commitments.
WORKERS & THE ENVIRONMENT With no enforceable protections for the environment or workers' rights, Fast Track allows corporations free reign to skirt U.S. labor and environmental laws as they hop the globe in search of the weakest regulations. Of the millions of workers who have lost their jobs to the race to the bottom, only a narrow margin of are eligible to receive the meager Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) benefits (a government program to assist those negatively affected by international trade). Only workers whose plants have moved to Mexico or Canada are eligible (your plant moved to China? Too bad, says the government!) and broad categories of workers, including truck drivers, service contract workers (for example, hi-tech contract workers), 'downstream producers', and secondary workers are excluded from eligibility altogether. Eligible workers will not be able to afford health care under this deal, which limits the government contribution to a 65% tax credit. The bill also places a new cap on training funds, meaning that states are likely to exhaust TAA training money, leaving many workers without job training opportunities and other benefits.
U.S. TRADE LAWS Provisions designed to protect U.S. trade laws were stripped out of the final version. The Dayton-Craig Amendment would have allowed the Senate to vote separately on changes to U.S. trade laws, but the final bill gutted the amendment and does not allow for this. The same U.S. laws steelworkers recently used to fight unfair trade will be put on the chopping block by U.S. negotiators.
DEMOCRATIC PROCESS The U.S. Constitution gives Congress exclusive authority Ato regulate Commerce with foreign Nations. (Article I-8) Fast Track, however, delegates this congressional authority away to the Executive Branch. Fast Track GIVES AWAY CONGRESS' RIGHT to vote on trade agreements BEFORE they are signed, amend completed trade agreements before they are passed, and limits congressional debate on such agreements to only 20 hours. This bill creates a historic shift in Congress' Constitutional prerogative to regulate not just foreign commerce, but domestic commerce as well.
