Media Contacts:
John Cavanagh, johnc@ips-dc.org, 202 297 4823
Domenica Ghanem, domenica@ips-dc.org, 202 787 5205
In an executive order yesterday, Donald Trump scrapped the Trans Pacific Partnership under the guise of bringing jobs back on American soil and promised to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.
This is the response of Institute for Policy Studies Director John Cavanagh, who has been analyzing U.S. trade policies since the 1994 launch of NAFTA:
“IPS has worked for many years with the broad array of labor, environmental, consumer, and other civil society groups in many countries that are primarily responsible for the death of the TPP agreement. The pact was designed in the interest of large corporations – circumventing labor and environmental standards, offshoring jobs, and granting excessive investor rights that would let tribunals sue governments against the public interest.
But we cannot allow the trade policies that replace it to put the interests of multinational corporations first, as the renegotiation of NAFTA under a Trump administration teeming with corporate interests is positioned to do. Trump has promised that the NAFTA renegotiation will create jobs in the United States, but if corporate elites are allowed to dictate the renegotiation, Trump’s false economic populism will result in Americans facing job loss, wage stagnation, and eroding working conditions, especially for low-income workers and workers of color.
We need an internationalist approach to trade that lifts up labor rights, environmental standards, and human rights for people in all of the nations involved in the agreement, and provides good jobs for workers in the U.S. Trump wants to allow corporations to pit American workers against other working communities in a global race to the bottom. IPS will fight with broad civil society networks for a trade policy that lifts up all working families and the environment.
We support the recent trinational declaration that brings together Canada, Mexico, and the United States to make a transparent, internationalist approach to trade a reality.”
For more information:
John Cavanagh, johnc@ips-dc.org, 202 297 4823
http://www.citizenstrade.org