The Loma Prietan
July/August 2002
FASTRACK: Make Trade Clean, Green and Fair
by Dan Seligman,
Sierra Club Responsible Trade Program
Across the country, citizens are mobilizing to take trade off the "fast track" and move it onto a "right track" that protects our environment and working families. We need your help.
Over the next few weeks, President Bush will try to push through Congress a harmful "fast track" trade bill. Fast track denies Congress its constitutional power to amend future trade agreements, even if they contain dangerous, anti-environmental provisions.
The Sierra Club is concerned because these future trade deals could contain "corporate lawsuit" provisions like those in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Under NAFTA, foreign corporations gained sweeping power to sue U.S. taxpayers for billions if our environmental laws interfere with corporate profits.
Originally intended to protect the foreign investments of U.S. companies in countries with weak legal systems, NAFTA's investor rules actually allow foreign companies in the United States to challenge our own environmental laws as "barriers to trade."
For example, the Methanex Corpoation in Canada is using NAFTA to attack an important clean water law in California. In 1999, California's governor decided to phase out the toxic gas additive MTBE because the chemical was leaking from gas stations into the drinking water supply. Methanex, which makes a key ingredient in MTBE, sued the US government for $1 billion under NAFTA, citing lost profits and harm to the company's stock price.
The MTBE case is just the latest in a growing string of trade challenges to environmental, health and safety protections. With only two exceptions, trade tribunals have ruled against every environmental and public health law to come before them so far.
If Bush succeeds in expanding NAFTA-style investor rules, a host of environmenal protections in California from smart growth rules to forest safeguards could soon be challenged by foreign companies as "barriers to trade."
Environmentally-harmful versions of fast track have passed both the House and the Senate. But differences between the two bills must be ironed out in a House-Senate conference. Then the House, which passed fast track by a 215 to 214 vote last December, must vote again. If we pick up just one vote and hold onto the votes we have in the House, we can beat fast track this summer.
Last December, Reps. Anna Eshoo, Zoe Lofgren, Mike Honda, and Tom Lantos voted against fast track.They deserve our heartfelt thanks and an urgent appeal to stay the course. Please call these distinguished public servants today. Thank them for opposing Pres. George Bush's anti-environmental fast-track trade bill and urge them to stay the course by voting against fast track one more time.
Dial toll free 877/611-0063 (courtesy of the AFL-CIO) to urge your U.S. Representative to oppose fast track. If you'd like a free action kit on fast track with a terrific video by Bill Moyers, please send an e-mail to dan.seligman@sierraclub.org. We'll send the video out to anyone who promises to show it to at least 20 people. For further info, visit www.sierraclub.org/trad.