On Monday, President Trump officially withdrew the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in an Executive Order. He also stated that he will attempt to renegotiate the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Many faith, labor, environmental, consumer, health, family farm, civil rights, senior citizen, youth, LGBT, and other organizations have spent years organizing to stop the TPP.
FCNL has opposed the TPP because it would increase global greenhouse gas emissions, through the increased exportation of liquid natural gas, the offshoring of U.S. manufacturing to countries with production that is more carbon intensive, and by allowing corporations that own fossil fuel pipelines and leases for oil and gas drilling on public lands to sue the U.S. in private tribunals if they believe their rights have been violated.
The TPP would harm many aspects of our daily lives, including our environmental standards, food safety, financial regulations, protections for workers and consumers, patent law, energy policy, and even whether local, state, and federal governments can preferentially “buy American.”
The TPP gives corporations new rights to sue the U.S. government before a panel of three corporate lawyers that can award unlimited sums, including for loss of future expected profits, to be paid by American taxpayers when the corporations claim U.S. policies violate the new entitlements the TPP would provide them.
As the new administration sets its trade policy, we hope that trade agreements will:
Protect and provide legally enforceable frameworks affirming the human, labor, health and environmental rights for people, especially poor, marginalized and indigenous peoples and communities;
Advance frameworks balancing the inextricable interdependence between ecological sustainability and long term economic well-being;
Learn from existing trade agreements by reducing, not exacerbating income inequalities within nations, and trade deficit in the United States; and
Remove investor-state provisions which empower international trade tribunals of unelected judges to unilaterally overturn domestic laws and imposed penalties upon nation-states for the benefit of foreign corporations.
We urge the administration to ensure that all trade deals contribute to a more equal, economically just and sustainable world.
