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Following years of growing public dissatisfaction with the NAFTA model, the 2006 elections provide the basis for changing our nation’s trade policy in a positive direction. In races across the country, trade was a major factor in electing new members of Congress. Now, after years of having to fight one bad trade deal after another in a Congress in which victory was unlikely at best, we are finally at a point where we can begin to be proactive and start to shape a new model for our nation’s engagement with the global economy.
We need to change both the way that trade negotiations happen and the content of trade agreements. |
Tell Congress we need a new model for trade!
(And Please Join CTC to help fight for a just global economy)
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We need to change the way trade is negotiated because under the current “Fast Track” system Congress – the most representative branch of government – has ceded nearly all of its Constitutional responsibility to regulate commerce with foreign nations to the President. Under Fast Track executive branch negotiators are empowered to choose with which nations to negotiate, to decide agreements’ contents and to sign completed agreements all before Congress has any vote. Only after all important decisions have been made does Congress then get a “yes” or “no” vote on the signed agreement and hundreds of pages of amendments to conform U.S. law to the pact.
We must replace Fast Track with a mechanism that gives Congress a steering wheel and brakes on trade negotiations.
We also need to change the content of the trade deals that this nation enters into. The NAFTA-model trade deals negotiated via the Fast Track process embody a race to the bottom logic that lowers living standards and environmental protection and encourages the export of jobs. They undermine democracy and public health for the benefit of transnational corporate profits. Fast Track's rules require these types of negative outcomes.
We need to replace this model with one that raises living standards, retains good jobs, ensures improved environmental protection, and safeguards the public interest (see New Rules for the Global Economy for a more complete expression of the rules that need to be embodied in our trading relationships).
The current Fast Track authority will expire in mid-2007. This creates a perfect opportunity to begin pressing for both changes. First, we have to ensure that Congress does not renew Fast Track trade negotiating authority. And at the same time, we have to begin the long fight to get an alternative to Fast Track passed and signed. This is a campaign that Citizens Trade Campaign, along with many allies, will undertake beginning in 2007.
Please contact your members of Congress now and tell them that we need a new model for trade.
We will keep you updated about this campaign as it develops. Thanks for your support.
(And please consider
Becoming a member of Citizens Trade Campaign )
