Future U.S. trade agreements must avoid — not repeat — the mistake Congress made by granting the president "fast track" authority to ram the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through the House 20 years ago, with no debate or amendments allowed. We have been dealing with the consequences of that decision ever since.
The NAFTA agreement among the United States, Canada and Mexico has cost American jobs, widened the income gap between rich and poor, and undermined U.S. health, safety and environmental regulations to the sole benefit of multinational corporations whose only interest is to flood our markets with cheap goods produced by underpaid foreign workers.
Yet former Congressmen Tim Penny and Mark Kennedy ("Trade Talks — NAFTA as a Guide," Feb. 19) are advocating fast-track authority for a new Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement with Canada, Mexico, Japan and eight other East Asian nations. And they are touting NAFTA as the poster child for this and future trade pacts.
There are two really big things wrong with this picture.
First, the TPP is being negotiated in secret, and secrecy is no friend to good public policy. We only know what we know about TPP from leaks out of closed-door sessions no member of Congress or the news media are permitted to attend.
Who is participating along with the U.S. negotiating team? Some 600 official corporate "trade advisers" — including big multinationals like DuPont, Caterpillar and Halliburton. It doesn't take a genius to imagine the winners when TPP's closed doors finally open.
Second, if NAFTA is truly the model for these secret TPP negotiations, the results can only be another string of costly broken promises and destructive, job-killing policies.
Consider just these three huge, dashed NAFTA promises — evidenced with exhaustive research by Public Citizen, the Economic Policy Institute, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and other independent researchers.