The President has issued a statement on the Trade Deal currently pending "fast track" authority in Congress.
Last fall, I pledged that I would not submit NAFTA to Congress until my administration addressed shortfalls in the areas of environmental protection, worker rights, and import surges. Early this morning we fulfilled that promise. Today I pledge my strongest commitment to a major effort this fall to secure NAFTA's passage.
With the completion of the side accords, we have turned NAFTA into a pathbreaking trade agreement. NAFTA is strongly in the interest of the United States. This agreement helps our workers, our environment, our businesses, and our consumers.
With these agreements on environmental quality and labor standards, the North American Free Trade Agreement has become a fair trade agreement as well.
NAFTA will create thousands of high paying American jobs by unlocking access to Mexico, a growing market of 90 million people that thirst for American products and services. The old rules marked by high trade barriers and preferences for companies manufacturing in Mexico have been pushed aside. In their place NAFTA establishes a level playing field, low tariffs, and a tough mechanism for resolving environmental and labor problems.
NAFTA is part of my broad economic strategy to gear the American economy for a changing world, to channel change for the benefit of working men and women. I look forward to working with the Congress and the American people to make NAFTA a reality.
Noted Economist and self-styled "free trader", Paul Krugman, has
lent his support:
It is as hopeless to try to argue with many of NAFTA's opponents as it would have been to try to convince William Jennings Bryan's followers that free silver was not the answer to farmers' problems....
The truth about NAFTA may be summarized in five propositions:
• NAFTA will have no effect on the number of jobs in the United States;
• NAFTA will not hurt and may help the environment;
• NAFTA will, however, produce only a small gain in overall U.S. real income;
• NAFTA will also probably lead to a slight fall in the real wages of unskilled U.S. workers;
Republicans and Multinational corporations are strongly on board. Many Democrats, however, remain
opposed to the deal:
There is a growing belief in Washington that the trade agreement will just win in Congress, but also some surprise that President Clinton should have made it a make-or-break issue for his presidency. The President's offer will be resented by the unions and other core Democratic supporters.
Most of President Clinton's support comes from Republicans, some 120 of whom (two-thirds of their total) are expected to vote for the accord. To win, he needs to get an additional 100 out of 258 House Democrats and, since the Gore- Perot debate three days ago, he says he has picked up another 27 votes.
Fast forward nineteen years:
NAFTA affected U.S. workers in four principal ways. First, it caused the loss of some 700,000 jobs as production moved to Mexico. Most of these losses came in California, Texas, Michigan, and other states where manufacturing is concentrated. To be sure, there were some job gains along the border in service and retail sectors resulting from increased trucking activity, but these gains are small in relation to the loses, and are in lower paying occupations. The vast majority of workers who lost jobs from NAFTA suffered a permanent loss of income.
Second, NAFTA strengthened the ability of U.S. employers to force workers to accept lower wages and benefits. As soon as NAFTA became law, corporate managers began telling their workers that their companies intended to move to Mexico unless the workers lowered the cost of their labor. In the midst of collective bargaining negotiations with unions, some companies would even start loading machinery into trucks that they said were bound for Mexico. The same threats were used to fight union organizing efforts. The message was: “If you vote in a union, we will move south of the border.” With NAFTA, corporations also could more easily blackmail local governments into giving them tax reductions and other subsidies.
Third, the destructive effect of NAFTA on the Mexican agricultural and small business sectors dislocated several million Mexican workers and their families, and was a major cause in the dramatic increase in undocumented workers flowing into the U.S. labor market. This put further downward pressure on U.S. wages, especially in the already lower paying market for less skilled labor.
Fourth, and ultimately most important, NAFTA was the template for rules of the emerging global economy, in which the benefits would flow to capital and the costs to labor. The U.S. governing class—in alliance with the financial elites of its trading partners—applied NAFTA’s principles to the World Trade Organization, to the policies of the World Bank and IMF, and to the deal under which employers of China’s huge supply of low-wage workers were allowed access to U.S. markets in exchange for allowing American multinational corporations the right to invest there.
The President has issued a statement on the Trade Deal currently pending "fast track" authority in Congress.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a negotiation with 11 countries in the Asia Pacific, including Canada and Mexico. Through the Trans-Pacific Partnership we are renegotiating NAFTA and instituting stronger, fully enforceable labor and environmental standards. These high standards will not only bring hundreds of millions of people under enforceable labor standards and protect endangered wildlife in one of the fastest growing regions of the world—they will also help level the playing field for workers and businesses here at home by ensuring our trade partners are playing by the rules.
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The more we sell abroad, the more jobs we support here at home:
In fact, U.S. exports supported 11.7 million American jobs in 2014, an increase of 1.8 million since 2009.
Those jobs tend to pay better wages than non-export related jobs: In fact, businesses that sell their products abroad pay up to 18% more than businesses that don’t.
Ninety-five percent of the world’s potential consumers live outside our borders:
To ensure our economy keeps pace with China and the rest of the world, we have to ensure our entrepreneurs have access to the fastest growing markets so they can expand here at home.
High-standard trade helps level the playing field for American workers:
Enforceable protections for our workers and environment in trade agreements like TPP will help our workers compete and win.
Nobel Winning Economist and self-styled "free trader", Paul Krugman, is curiously on the sidelines:
It’s far from clear that the T.P.P. is a good idea. It’s even less clear that it’s something on which President Obama should be spending political capital. I am in general a free trader, but I’ll be undismayed and even a bit relieved if the T.P.P. just fades away.
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So what I wonder is why the president is pushing the T.P.P. at all. The economic case is weak, at best, and his own party doesn’t like it. Why waste time and political capital on this project?
My guess is that we’re looking at a combination of Beltway conventional wisdom — Very Serious People always support entitlement cuts and trade deals — and officials caught in a 1990s time warp, still living in the days when New Democrats tried to prove that they weren’t old-style liberals by going all in for globalization. Whatever the motivations, however, the push for T.P.P. seems almost weirdly out of touch with both economic and political reality.
Republicans and Multinational corporations are strongly on board. Many Democrats, however, are
opposed to the deal:
The top Republican lawmaker on trade has called for US President Barack Obama to work even harder to build support among Democrats for a crucial trade bill on the eve of what are expected to be divisive votes in Congress.
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It faces stiff opposition from many Democrats who are coming under intense pressure from labour unions to resist Mr Obama’s trade agenda. But Republicans, who control both houses of Congress, insist they need Democratic support to offset defections by some Tea Party Republicans opposed to giving the president anything at all.
Fast Forward Ten Years:
The TPP would expand the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) "trade" pact model that has spurred massive U.S. trade deficits and job loss, downward pressure on wages, unprecedented levels of inequality and new floods of agricultural imports. The TPP not only replicates, but expands NAFTA's special protections for firms that offshore U.S. jobs. And U.S. TPP negotiators literally used the 2011 Korea FTA – under which exports have fallen and trade deficits have surged – as the template for the TPP.
In one fell swoop, this secretive deal could:
offshore American jobs and increase income inequality,
jack up the cost of medicines,
sneak in SOPA-like threats to Internet freedom,
and empower corporations to attack our environmental and health safeguards.
expose the U.S. to unsafe food and products,
roll back Wall Street reforms,
ban Buy American policies needed to create green jobs,
Although it is called a "free trade" agreement, the TPP is not mainly about trade. Of TPP's 29 draft chapters, only five deal with traditional trade issues. One chapter would provide incentives to offshore jobs to low-wage countries. Many would impose limits on government policies that we rely on in our daily lives for safe food, a clean environment, and more. Our domestic federal, state and local policies would be required to comply with TPP rules.
The TPP would even elevate individual foreign firms to equal status with sovereign nations, empowering them to privately enforce new rights and privileges, provided by the pact, by dragging governments to foreign tribunals to challenge public interest policies that they claim frustrate their expectations. The tribunals would be authorized to order taxpayer compensation to the foreign corporations for the "expected future profits" they surmise would be inhibited by the challenged policies.