[Dryerase] Alarm!--Fast Track passed by Bush

[Alarm!Wires]

Bush Signs Fast Track Legislation
 From the Alarm! Newspaper

On Tuesday, President Bush signed Fast Track trade legislation that 
granted him sweeping powers to negotiate international trade 
agreements.  The House narrowly approved the legislation in a mid-night 
session a week earlier.  The bill then easily passed the Senate.

Fast Track—also called Trade Promotion Authority—allows trade agreements 
to be negotiated by the White House, then presented to Congress for a 
yea or nay vote, without amendments or alterations.  This legislation 
allows the President to sign trade deals that can overturn local, state 
and national laws that protect workers, consumers, social services and 
the environment.

The White House had lobbied hard for fast-track authority—last enjoyed 
by a president in 1994—in order to negotiate planned trade deals with 
Chile, Singapore and other countries, as well as to give it more freedom 
in the World Trade Organization’s Doha agenda talks.  The authority will 
allow the White House to extend the North American Free Trade Agreement 
(NAFTA) across the Western Hemisphere.  NAFTA already allows foreign 
corporations to sue the US government whenever they feel that US federal 
or state environmental laws affect their profits.

There was significant opposition to the passage of the bill.  “The usual 
corporate special interests will repeat the tired chant about how Fast 
Track will be good for us, yet the trade pacts generated under the Fast 
Track model have resulted in a huge, economy-slowing, job-killing US 
trade deficit, wages that have not caught up to the 1970s, more unsafe 
and uninspected imported food and an array of environmental and other 
important public interest laws being attacked and weakened,” said Lori 
Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.
 
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