A Trade Deal We Can Support!

[Omaha Steve]

Action Alert - June 5, 2008

he Trade Reform, Accountability, Development and Employment (TRADE) Act, cosponsored by fair trade champions Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Rep. Mike Michaud (D-Maine), was introduced Wednesday with over 50 House and Senate original cosponsors! This landmark legislation sets forth in concrete, detailed terms a progressive vision for good trade agreements in the future and criteria to renegotiate existing failed pacts like NAFTA and the WTO.

Please write your representative and senators and urge them to cosponsor the TRADE Act today.

Fifteen years of the NAFTA/WTO model has led to massive job loss, downward pressure on wages and the loss of nearly 300,000 family farms. It's given broad, expansive new rights to foreign corporations to challenge our environmental and public health standards and flooded the U.S. with unsafe imported food and products. And it has devastated developing nations, where millions of family farmers have been forced off their land, and where poverty, despair and desperation-driven mass migrations have grown.

The TRADE Act lays out in detail a new path forward for U.S. trade policy to achieve societal goals such as good jobs, safe food and promotion of basic human rights, healthy communities and environmental protection.

Please urge your representative and senators and to cosponsor this progressive new trade legislation! http://action.citizen.org/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=24836

Specifically, the TRADE Act lays out what must and must not be in all U.S. trade pacts. What must be included are strongly enforced labor, human rights, environmental, health and national security standards so that corporations can only gain the benefits of trade pacts if they follow the rules needed to ensure trade works for all of us. This will also create incentives to improve conditions in poor countries. What must never again be included are extreme foreign investor protections that promote offshoring and expose our domestic public interest laws to attack, or requirements to privatize or deregulate essential services such as health care, education or social security.

The TRADE Act also requires a review and renegotiation of harmful existing trade pacts, such as NAFTA, CAFTA and the WTO. Additionally, the TRADE Act lays out a new system to replace Fast Track for negotiating and approving trade agreements so Congress and the public have the leverage necessary to ensure future agreements meet the new criteria provided in the legislation.

The TRADE Act is legislation about which progressive trade activists can finally say yes, yes yes!

Please take action today and ask your representative to sign onto the TRADE Act and to replace the NAFTA/WTO model once and for all. http://action.citizen.org/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=24836

Thanks for all that you do,

Global Trade Watch

P.S. For more information on the TRADE Act, visit our website: http://www.citizen.org/trade/tradeact/



Exciting news: Key labor, environmental, consumer, family farm and faith groups have endorsed landmark legislation that launches a fair way forward to a new American trade agenda. Write your representative today and urge them to cosponsor the TRADE Act.

[HereSince1628]

1. I can write till the cows come home, I'll write at least once, but Jimmy Sensenbrenner won't care.

Sensenbrenner is committed to parity for the American worker. Well, ya know, parity when compared to a slave worker in the Marianas.