Get TPP Off the Fast Track
Monday, January 13, 2014 at 05:50PM Twenty years after the North American Free Trade Agreement, working Americans are still reeling from job loss, pay cuts and a deepening environmental crisis. We are tired of leftover promises from 2008 and say it is time for a new deal on trade, only to face Korea, Colombia and now the Trans-Pacific Partnership -- a new bottom for everything we care about. The trade deficit with Korea has increased nearly 40 percent. Since NAFTA was passed, economic inequality has only grown in Mexico, as well as immigration to the U.S. mostly from desperation and undocumented, as NAFTA has destroyed subsistence agriculture. And when new employment did develop in the maquiladoras it has again been poverty-level wages.
Despite promises to the contrary, nothing is better about this "fast track" than the last one. Nothing. The labor section is a total hoax, committing to follow international standards when national standards conform.
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