“It is time for American trade negotiators to stop operating in the shadows and come clean with details of an agreement that would almost certainly throw more American workers out of jobs and shift more manufacturing to low-wage countries overseas,” Sanders said
In Brussels recently, the European Commission published documents setting out EU proposals for a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership that it is negotiating with the United States. The commission also posted an online guide to the document.
Sanders cited the Europeans’ openness in renewing his call for U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman to at least turn over to the senator the full text of a proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement that has been negotiated in secret with input from corporations which stand to profit on the deal.
Earlier, senator Sanders wrote a letter to Froman asking for the document that Congress could soon be asked to approve.
“It is incomprehensible to me that the leaders of major corporate interests who stand to gain enormous financial benefits from this agreement are actively involved in the writing of the TPP while, at the same time, the elected officials of this country, representing the American people, have little or no knowledge as to what is in it,” Sanders said in his letter. “In my view, this is simply unacceptable.”
On New Year's Day, 2014, Canada, Mexico and the US celebrated the 20th anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The Agreement created a common market for goods, services and investment capital with Canada and Mexico. And it opened the door through which American workers were shoved, unprepared, into a brutal global competition for jobs that has cut their living standards and is destroying their future.
NAFTA's birth was bi-partisan -- conceived by Ronald Reagan, negotiated by George Bush I, and pushed through the US Congress by Bill Clinton in alliance with Congressional Republicans and corporate lobbyists.
Clinton and his collaborators promised that the deal would bring "good-paying American jobs," a rising trade surplus with Mexico, and a dramatic reduction in illegal immigration. Instead, NAFTA directly cost the U.S. a net loss of 700,000 jobs. The surplus with Mexico turned into a chronic deficit. And the economic dislocation in Mexico increased the the flow of undocumented workers into the U.S.
As to the cost of living, they have only been going up.
Nevertheless, Clinton and his Republican successor, George Bush II, then used the NAFTA template to design the World Trade Organization, more than a dozen bilateral trade treaties, and the deal that opened the American market to China -- which alone has cost the U.S. another net 2.7 million jobs. The result has been 20 years of relentless outsourcing of jobs and technology.
By any measure, NAFTA and its sequels has been a major contributor to the rising inequality of incomes and wealth and yet there are two more such trade deals being negotiated: the Trans-Pacific Partnership with eleven Pacific Rim countries and a free trade agreement with the EU.
Consequently, Europeans better be aware : even though the EU Commission has released it's online guide as to the present ongoing negotiations at the Trade and Investment Partnership meettings, which is a step in the right direction, EU Negotiators must also be aware that they are not only negotiating with US government officials, but also, indirectly, with ruthless American multi-national corporations.
Unfortunately these corporations, which are mainly motivated in making profits, and avoiding paying taxes whenever possible, basically can't care less about increasing employment opportunities for Europeans or Americans as history has shown us with NAFTA.
Axs it stands today, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Project is a one way street to more corporate involvement and control in government and the daily lives of citizens in Europe and the US.
EU-Digest
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