‘Fast track’ will cost US jobs

By Don Kusler

Tribune News Service

Some things improve with age; others just get worse over time.

Promoting unfair trade has always been a bad idea, but in the past year-and-a-half, it’s become clearer just how bad. Even so, Congress is about to consider a plan that would grease the way for more destructive trade deals. There’s more reason than ever to say no.

The plan is called “trade promotion authority” but is better known and better described as “fast track”: it speeds bad trade deals into effect by preventing Congress from improving them.

Fast track is not necessary. The U.S. has struck plenty of international pacts while still allowing Congress to fulfill its Constitutional duty to regulate trade.

But now multinational corporations and their friends in Washington want to push through the biggest, most dangerous deals of all time. They don’t want Congress to risk any potential profits by trying to make the deals better for workers, consumers, the environment or our civil liberties.

First up if fast track passes is the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It would economically link a dozen countries with vastly different standards on worker rights, consumer safety and environmental protection.

A report released last month found that at least four of the TPP countries do not comply with international labor standards — that their workers are subject to continuing abuses on the job that their governments permit and sometimes promote. Rather than end such abuses, trade deals like the TPP tend to lower standards to allow them elsewhere.

Life-saving medicines

Documents leaked last year from the TPP secret negotiations — only huge corporations have any access to the ongoing talks — reveal that proposed patent rules could make life-saving medicines harder to get for cancer patients and others.

Also revealed by the leaks were provisions that would give transnational corporations special rights to use private tribunals that circumvent our judicial system to attack our laws, regulations and even court decisions as “indirect expropriations” — a practice that would put future environmental protections and a host of other public interest policies in serious jeopardy and could cost taxpayers billions.

If this disastrous Pacific-spanning trade deal succeeds, soon after will come one that reaches east: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which would spread the same threats to public health, the environment and democracy itself even further.

In addition to revealing more of what’s wrong with the bad deals that fast track will make possible, the past 18 months have also seen a change in the Congressional politics of trade.

Members of Congress should not simply turn over their Constitutional rights or their duty to serve their constituents’ best interests.

International trade done right can benefit not only big businesses, but workers, consumers, economies and societies at large.

For it to do that, however, deals have to reflect the needs and values of whole nations, not just a few privileged, transnational interests. Deals like that can only be created in an open, democratic process.

Fast track would shut down that process. That’s why now more than ever, fast track needs to be stopped dead in its tracks.

Don Kusler is executive director of Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal advocacy organization.