Past News - Washington Fair Trade Coalition

The Bush Administration has introduced the Colombia FTA into Congress - showing a willingness to push this highly controversial trade vote against the wishes of the Democratic leadership in Congress. Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi has indicated she plans to put the bill on a delayed schedule, suggesting it will not be considered by Congress until after the election. Stay tuned for more news on this issue!

We are very proud of all we accomplished in 2007, our first full year of operations. These accomplishments include:

• Helping to stop "Fast Track", and thereby ending - as of July 1st - President Bush's ability to negotiate more unfair trade deals

• Cultivating bipartisan support for fair trade by getting two Republican Representatives to vote against the Peru Free Trade Agreement

• Forming new alliances, such as our joint work with the agricultural community, particularly the Washington Asparagus Commission, on trade policy

• Rolling-out our educational outreach effort, the Fair Trade Road Show, which brings the key issues of fair versus free trade to audiences in an accessible and engaging manner

• Getting our message out to key media outlets, including opinion pieces published on Fast Track, fair trade, and related topics in several newspapers

• Providing endorsement and support to numerous member events, such as UFCW's "Wake up Wal-Mart" Campaign, the Steelworkers’ "No More Toxic Trade" Campaign, and CISPES' Immigration and Trade work

• Continuous grass-tops lobbying with Members of Congress on current trade issues.

• Adding many new members to our coalition, including Seattle Education Association, the Building Trades Council, IAM Local 751, United Steelworkers, ILWU, and Students for Fair Trade, for a total of 32 today

• Developing a listserv of 300+ individuals in Washington state concerned about trade policy, who receive regular updates and calls to action

Washington State’s Democratic contingent in the U.S. House & Senate unanimously supported another in a long string of flawed NAFTA-style trade deals. While the agreement was highly contentious, every Democrat from the state of Washington voted in favor of it. With political party pressures appearing to trump the need to create fair and effective trade policy, this result is a huge disappointment to many Washington residents.

Washington’s Democrats' support for the US-Peru FTA came in the face of strong opposition to the agreement from labor, environmental and social justice communities throughout the state.

"We are extremely disappointed in the Democratic Representatives in Washington State," says Stephanie Celt, State Coordinator of the Washington Fair Trade Coalition, which represents 29 member organizations that did not support the agreement. "Our Democratic Representatives have shown us that they are not concerned about creating a fair trade agenda for this country. Instead, they rushed into a flawed agreement that many of their constituents opposed, because of pressure from Democratic leadership and multinational corporations, citing the vague promises that all problems in US trade policy have been fixed. They haven't."

The WFTC has proudly joined with the Washington Asparagus Commission to send a letter to Washington Congressmembers detailing why they should oppose the Peru FTA. As with other small commodity producers, Washington's high-quality asparagus farmers are directly threatened by the cut-throat provisions of FTAs such as the Peru FTA. Our joint concerns are that the type of "competition" reflected in these NAFTA-style FTAs is merely a crude race-to-the bottom, and reflects the "high cost of cheap food". Certainly, the recent flood of safety issues related to imported food and other products provides evidence of this problem.

Please take a moment to call or write your member of Congress and tell them that now’s the time to fight for real fair trade policy, not a slightly altered version of a failed model! www.house.gov/writerep/

8/10/07 - Puget Sound Business Journal: Trade Policy Must Balance Business and Social Goals

Officially known as Trade Promotion Authority, it authorized the president to negotiate trade agreements, which Congress could accept or reject "as is"; no changes allowed.

Congress writes all other laws -- for taxes, military spending, immigration, environmental policy, agriculture and space exploration, among other things.

Fast Track applies only to trade agreements. The executive branch writes agreements with substantial help from the business and investor communities. Congress and the public are excluded from the process.

In the past 20 years, we got WTO, NAFTA, CAFTA and many smaller agreements. Although free trade advocates promised shared prosperity and mutual gains, our actual experience has been an astronomical trade deficit, the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs, the steady de-industrialization of our economy, stagnant wage growth, and growing income inequality. Workers in Latin America and other countries similarly failed to enjoy promised rewards.

Free trade advocates promised us "access to markets." In 1995, we thought that meant access to consumers around the world who would buy goods we make in America. More often, it simply meant access to producers in low-cost countries such as Mexico, China and India, who make goods for us to consume.

One of the "free" parts of free trade has been freedom from regulation. Trade agreements shield investors and businesses from regulations designed to protect public health, the environment, worker rights and human rights. Public policy enacted by federal and state governments can bring ruinous trade sanctions. As a result, the interests of businesses and investors are placed above public interest. Public interests are fine, as long as they do not restrict trade in any way.

Our current trade policy isn't actually about "trade," in the strict sense. Instead, it's about global economic integration. Here's trade: We make something and trade it for something else we want. The cliché is, "They do what they do best, we do what we do best, and we trade."

So, what does America make that the rest of the world wants to buy? Under current trade policy, not much. We pay dollars for goods and pile up debt -- to the tune of more than $800 billion annually and growing. That's not trade.

Global economic integration is very different. For example, our 50 states form the integrated U.S. economy. The European Union is economically integrated. When you integrate a high-income region with a low-income region, you get leveling. That's why Europe won't let Russia into the European Union.

Our trade policy creates global economic integration by design. Businesses and investors wrote the language in trade agreements to accomplish exactly that. The public was excluded from every step of the process, and it shows. Fast Track is the final step. It prevents Congress from addressing the leveling issues that skew the benefits to a few and the costs to the rest of us.

With 15 years of experience, we can see that the NAFTA-style "free trade" policy has failed to serve the public interest. The last thing we need now is a fast track to more failed trade policy.

Stan Sorscher is an officer of the Washington Fair Trade Coalition, and is on staff at SPEEA, a labor union representing engineers, scientists and technical workers.

Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Charlie Rangel announced a “breakthrough trade deal” with the Bush Administration on May 10th.

On March 27th, the House Democratic Caucus released a statement on "New Trade Policy for America".

The statement is quite encouraging in that it addresses many of the issues raised by the Washington Fair Trade Coalition and other fair trade supporters. However, we are still waiting to hear the exact details of the policy - as the devil is always in the details in the trade policy domain!

For a copy of the policy statement, click here. We will provide more information on this issue as we receive it.

The Washington Fair Trade Coalition Board held our winter board meeting in January to finalized our campaign priorities for 2007. Right in synch with the larger politics, here are the priorities that emerged from our discussion:

These priorities reflect the clear sense of the board that engaging at the national level this year on fair trade issues will be critical - with a primary emphasis on the Fast Track fight. In addition, the board determined that more general educational efforts were essential to moving fair trade policy forward - i.e., that we needed to help connect the dots for the many people - including some of our own organization's members - that know something's wrong with our trade policy, and that want more concrete arguments and information on the issue.

The 2006 elections sent a clear message that, among other issues, the status quo approach on trade policy and globalization is not acceptable to the public. But unfortunately there is growing evidence that the message was not clearly heard by key leaders in the new majority.

In particular, some powerful committee chairs are now openly flirting with giving Bush renewed Fast Track powers. House Ways and Means chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY) - historically a strong supporter usually of working people and the environment - recently said: “If we don't give [Fast Track to the president] we've got to have good reason for not giving it.” This is a mind-boggling statement!

This means we are going to have to fight in this Congress for things that should be a given. We will need to tell Congress we do not expect them to give Bush another “Fast Track” to a failed trade policy. Nor do we expect Congress to pass any more NAFTA-style trade deals - including those with Peru, Columbia, and Korea.