The North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement has, indeed, caused a "great sucking sound" of jobs being outsourced as Ross Perot predicted some years ago. Of course, since then, legislation and tax loopholes have also made it attractive for manufactures to move our good paying jobs overseas, leaving us with a "service economy" (read burger flipping and minimal wage).
It has now become fashionable among our leaders, both corporate and governmental, to proliferate these trade agreements with a dizzying array of acronyms: TTP, TAFTA, CAFTA, and FTAs for Korea, Columba, and Panama. The ideas fostering these offspring are deregulation and globalization of trade--two of the most ignored reasons for our economic decline since the 1990s. But how much are you willing to give up for those cheap clothes, flowers, foodstuffs, and other products produced overseas?
Here are some of the nasty secrets leaking out of the carefully guarded talks according to Public Citizen: the TPP or Trans-Pacific Partnership involves
-- some 600 multinational corporations taking part with no representation from the global citizenry
--international tribunals being proposed to allow corporations to sue governments which stray from their agreed obligations
--enabling "easier" trade by subordinating sovereign laws affecting labor, the environment, worker safety, wages, health, etc. (Have you heard of the "race to the bottom" where multinationals look to place their factories in countries with the least restrictions on them?)
--giving up a great deal of our democratically won rights to make our own laws and giving the process over to the corporate leaders.
The TTP and the TAFTA (Trans-Atlantic FTA) are scheduled to go before Congress soon and President Obama, who has adopted this ideology, is likely to request "fast-track" authority to push them through before the public is aware of what is happening. In doing so he will continue the recent trend of presidents to usurp Congressional power to write laws and set policy.
To learn more visit www.citizen.org and www.exposethettp.org