Frequently Asked Questions
About Fast Track
What is Fast Track?
Fast Track is an arrangement by which Congress surrenders its
constitutional authority to regulate foreign commerce and gives that
power to the executive branch. It sets in advance the conditions for
congressional consideration of any trade agreements, thereby limiting
public participation in the formation of trade policies. Fast Track
would allow the Bush Administration not only to negotiate
international trade agreements but also to draft all of the
implementing legislation required to bring U.S. law into accordance
with these agreements. The resulting agreement and implementing
legislation would then be presented to Congress as a package deal for
a simple yes-or-no vote with limited debate and no amendments
allowed. The time allowed for debate is limited to less than 20 hours.
Why does the Bush Administration want Fast Track?
Fast Track would allow the Bush Administration and its corporate
allies to set the terms of international trade with minimum oversight
from Congress. If Congress were more intimately involved in
international trade negotiations, agreements like NAFTA might never
have been passed. "Free trade" agreements in general benefit mostly a
select few transnational corporations while contributing to
environmental destruction and sweatshop-style production. Such
agreements would face more scrutiny and have a harder time becoming
law in a truly open and accountable system.
President Bush and his Trade Representative Robert Zoellick plan to
use Fast Track to expand NAFTA and create the Free Trade Area of the
Americas (FTAA). This agreement would impose the failed NAFTA model of
free trade, deregulation and privatization throughout the Western
Hemisphere. The Bush Administration describes Fast Track as crucial to
their efforts to expand NAFTA and promote free trade worldwide. The
President's 2001 International Trade Legislative Agenda lists enacting
Fast Track as the Administration's top trade legislative priority.
But NAFTA expansion is only the tip of the iceberg. The Bush
Administration also intends to use Fast Track to pursue a new round of
trade talks under the WTO and speed up negotiations on other bilateral
and regional agreements, including free trade agreements with Chile
and Singapore. Fast Track would be the administration's best tool for
passing all of these agreements. Fast Track would allow the Bush
Administration to set the agenda on issues of international trade for
the next 5-8 years.
Why should I be concerned about Fast Track?
Fast Track risks disturbing the delicate balance of power between
Congress and the President on issues of international trade. While the
US Constitution invests in Congress the exclusive authority to
"regulate Commerce with foreign Nations," it bestows upon the
Executive exclusive authority for managing "relations with foreign
sovereigns." This design is one of many checks and balances built into
the US Constitution to avoid one branch of government from having
absolute control of a vital policy area. Fast Track would concentrate
the power to set the terms of international trade in the hands of the
President.
By denying Congress input in the trade negotiating process, Fast Track
denies everyone except the corporate executives a voice on trade
issues and gives corporations a free rein to profit from lower wages
and increased environmental destruction. Already, the use of Fast
Track in the past has led to pro-corporate free trade agreements like
NAFTA that provide extensive protections and windfall profits for
transnational investors while limiting governments' ability to
regulate trade in the public interest.
Fast Track would remove the Bush Administration's trade negotiators
from even the semblance of accountability--either to Congress or to
the US public-- and essentially subordinate even the concept of
democracy itself to the administration's drive toward the ideological
manifest destiny of unfettered markets. Thousands of US laws affecting
a myriad of issues could be rewritten without any hearings from
congressional committees with jurisdiction over them. Neither you nor
your congressional representatives will even be able to see these
trade agreements--let alone join the debate--until it's already too
late.
Negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas are already being
conducted in secret and without the input of consumer, labor and
environmental groups. If Congress grants the President Fast Track
authority, the scope of public debate on issues of international trade
will be reduced even further. Speeding up the timetable for
congressional consideration of trade agreements would place
extraordinary limits on the ability of ordinary citizens to interact
with their elected officials. It would also severely limit the ability
of public interest groups to educate and mobilize people against trade
agreements that are harmful to the public interest.
Concentrating the power to negotiate trade agreements in the hands of
the President also strengthens the hand of transnational
corporations. Over 300 representatives of transnational business
already have a back stage pass to the negotiation process by virtue of
their membership on the US Trade Representative's Industry Sector
Advisory Committees. With Fast Track in place, transnational
businesses will be able to directly influence the implementation
process without having to worry about any counter-influence from
public interest groups. Fast track would allow business interests
ample opportunity to sneak additional sweetheart deals for themselves
into the text of trade agreements and all related legislation. It
would then forbid Congress from weeding these provisions out in the
amendment process.
Where did Fast Track come from?
Fast Track's structural design dates back to a day when trade
negotiations were about tariffs and quotas only. Fast Track, which was
only used five times since its 1974 establishment, has now been
outgrown by the huge scope of what is covered in today's international
commercial negotiations--a host of regulations including
environmental, food, worker safety and local banking and tax
standards.
When Fast Track was first established, the issues under consideration
in international commercial agreements were narrowly limited to
traditional trade matters. Most US trade agreements were bilateral
deals between industrialized countries dealing with specific
industrial or agricultural sectors--a far cry from the complex,
multilateral agreements (like NAFTA, the WTO and the FTAA) that the
Clinton administration used it for and the Bush White House intends to
use it for.
Fast Track was first used during the 1979 GATT Tokyo Round
Agreement. The implementing legislation for the Tokyo Round was a thin
document of under 50 pages; few U.S. laws were modified. The only
non-tariff issues even discussed in the Tokyo Round were customs
classifications, a non-binding, non-enforceable product standards
code, fine tuning of existing anti-dumping rules, and some limited
government procurement policies.
The second use of fast track was the U.S-Israel Free Trade Agreement
of 1985. The pact's entire implementing bill was less than four pages
long and pertains only to lowering tariffs and rules on government
procurement between the two countries. It was only with Fast Track's
third use, for the 1988 US- Canada Free Trade Agreement, that the
issues under discussion in "trade" talks begin to expand into new
areas. The US-Canada Agreement made changes to domestic agriculture,
banking, investment, food inspection, and other policies. This was the
first implementing bill for a trade agreement to span more than 100
pages.
The 1993 NAFTA and 1994 GATT Uruguay Round exploded the boundaries of
what was included in "trade" pacts. NAFTA, GATT-WTO and their
implementing bills rewrote huge swaths of US laws. These pacts
required the reshaping of domestic laws on service industries and
investments, not just terms for trade in goods. Each of these
agreements' implementation legislation contained more than 1,000 pages
of changes to a vast array of US laws. Each also had a court system
with economic penalties, but not the due process guarantees of
domestic law.
Regardless of whether Congress's delegation of its trade authority was
wise in the past, it is clearly no longer appropriate for the broad
areas of domestic policy and law affected by today's international
commercial agreements.
What are the Alternatives?
We need to re-establish checks and balances in US trade-policy
making. We need to put the brakes of accountability on the trade
negotiators now freelancing new deals without congressional or public
input. We need to take back trade policy making by establishing a new,
democratic system of making these important choices. We need to get
the United States off the Fast Track and back on the right track.
A new "right track" to trade policymaking would be based on the
following principles:
- Enforceable Labor and Environmental Provisions Must be Included
in the Core Text of any Future Agreements
Trade negotiating authority must require the inclusion of enforceable
workers' rights and environmental standards in the core of all new
trade agreements. New trade agreements must ensure that all workers
can freely exercise their fundamental rights and require governments
to respect and promote the core labor standards laid out by the
International Labor Organization in its 1998 Declaration on
Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work.
It is not sufficient simply to list workers' rights and environmental
protections among the negotiating objectives. Already, workers' rights
have been among our negotiating objectives for more than 25 years,
with very little progress being made.
- Workers' Rights and the Environment Must Be Afforded the Same
Protections as Transnational Investors
Workers' rights and environmental standards must be covered by the
same dispute resolution and enforcement provisions as the rest of the
agreement. Monetary fines modeled on the NAFTA labor side agreement or
the Canada-Chile agreement are inadequate and have proven an
ineffective means of enforcement. When violations against labor and
environmental standards result merely in monetary penalties,
corporations can write off fines as part of the normal cost of doing
business, as simply an expense to be figured into any budgeting. NAFTA
provides fines for labor and environmental infractions that do little
more than shuffle money from one government fund to another. Such
fines have proved to be ineffective. We need a system of trade
sanctions that allows poor countries the same opportunity to file
sanctions as richer countries. We must implement a real enforcement
mechanism to give labor and environmental interests the same
protection that corporate copyrights already enjoy.
- Trade Rules Must Not Undercut Public Health Safety and
Environmental Laws
Trade agreements must not undermine public services or public health,
nor allow individual investors to challenge state laws in
secret. Trade authority must establish responsibilities for
investors--not just rights--and must not require privatization and
deregulation as a condition of market access. An alternative "right
track" trade negotiating authority would require negotiators to
develop trade rules that cannot undercut public health, safety and
environmental laws.
- Congress' Normal Legislative Role Must Be Preserved and Public
Participation Strengthened
A right track to trade negotiating authority must preserve Congress'
constitutionally mandated role in trade legislation and encourage
stronger public participation and democratic oversight in trade
policymaking. Congress must ensure that ordinary citizens have access
to negotiating texts on a timely basis, and that negotiators are
accountable to both Congress and the public as to whether mandatory
negotiating targets are being met. Bodies such as the Industry Sector
Advisory Committees must be opened up to include public interest
representatives, and all impacted constituencies must be involved in
designing our nation's trade policies.
What can I do to help?
The Bush Administration is determined to obtain Fast Track negotiating
authority to facilitate the FTAA talks. The corporate lobby is gearing
for battle as well--it has targeted 167 congressional districts across
the country and has set aside money for advertising campaigns, glossy
lobbying publications and hefty campaign contributions. But the
movement for global justice is growing all over the world, uniting
workers, environmentalists, farmers, consumers, small businesses,
people of different faiths, students, and activists, both within
countries and across borders. This Fair Trade movement is demanding
that human rights must take precedence over corporate rights. Having
already forever shifted the debate around trade and investment issues,
we now face an historic opportunity to democratize the decision-making
on trade issues.
This page was constructed using resources from Public Citizen's Global
Trade Watch.
