Georgia’s elected leaders in Washington should reject Fast Track trade promotion authority. It’s bad for Georgians and bad for the United States.
I don’t think anyone can argue that America’s trade policies have been doing what we want. One major deal alone — the North American Free Trade Agreement — has cost communities tens of thousands of closed factories and more than 1 million lost jobs. Here in Georgia, at least 137,000 jobs have been lost as a result of the NAFTA agreement .
Fast track allows federal negotiators to negotiate an entire trade deal — the one on the table is called the Trans-Pacific Partnership involving 40 percent of the world economy — and then bring it to Congress for only an up-or-down vote. There can be no amendments. None at all.
We are not against trade deals, but we’re dead-set against bad trade deals.
For more than 20 years, America has looked at international trade through a very narrow corporate lens. Frankly, our trade deals have actually been entitlement deals. They made it easier for global corporations to move manufacturing plants offshore and ship cheap stuff back home. The logical conclusion was trade deficits and falling wages and that’s what we got.
We live, shop, work and play in a globalized economy. That’s the way the world is. Yet that doesn’t mean Georgia’s people are destined to suffer. Our trade agreements should advance American interests and at the same time contribute to the overall development of the world’s economy and rising living standards. Georgia can’t afford another bad deal that lowers wages and outsources jobs.
One basic problem is that much of the trade debate is about whether Americans should even have the right to debate trade policy or just accept what we are handed by unaccountable elites. That’s how Fast Track works. And that’s wrong.
Every single line in our trade deals should be openly discussed and subject to public oversight and the full legislative process. There should be no question about that. Fast Track is undemocratic. It’s a rotten process.
When it comes to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, nobody has seen the full draft text. That’s a problem in itself. What we have seen is bad.
For instance, the draft offers corporations a secret tribunal called Investor-State Dispute Settlement. That’s a fancy term for an ugly process that allows corporations to challenge laws they don’t like. And get this: the judges are hand-picked corporate lawyers. This isn’t make-believe. In other trade deals, this dispute settlement has been used to challenge democratic laws, like environmental rules and health warnings on cigarette packaging.
Corporate investors shouldn’t get special rights from our trade deals. Regular people sure don’t.
We get the opposite. In the best-case scenario, our jobs go and we’re left looking at empty parking lots and idle factories. At worst, it’s nightmarish.
Our trade pact with Colombia was supposed to improve life for regular folks there. You can probably guess how that worked. Despite a detailed plan to protect workers’ rights, 105 union members have been murdered in three years. No one has even been arrested. These are men and women just like you and me who were killed for trying to exercise their rights under the law and to speak in a collective voice.
These killings are a human rights catastrophe and they are driving down wages and workplace standards in Colombia — and in every country that trades with Colombia.
Regular people get a raw deal, and corporations get a secret tribunal.
These bad ideas have life only because they remain mostly unknown, hidden in the dark. That’s why Congress should reject fast track.
About the Author
