Stop CAFTA

It appears that the vote on whether to expand NAFTA to Oman will be taking place Wednesday or Thursday of this week (July 19-20), and the administration is pushing Republican leadership to prepare for a vote on the Peru trade agreement next week! This is a crucial moment in the fight for social justice, fair trade and (yes) the future of the world.

Like NAFTA and CAFTA the Oman and Peru agreements give big multinational corporations more power to challenge labor and environmental laws. After barely passing the NAFTA expansion to Central America last year last year (by just one vote!), the Bush administration is trying to expand these rules into the Middle East and to the Amazon basin.

The deals are good for Halliburton and Walmart (who have been lobbying for them), but bad for the rest of us. As a result, a huge coalition of groups, including Public Citizen, the Sierra Club, and the AFL-CIO have organized to stop it.

The Oman Free Trade Agreement will lead to more human rights violations, and more instability in the Middle East – not what we need there right now.

The Peru Free Trade Agreement will be terrible for the environment, because it will make it more difficult to strengthen environmental rules in the Amazon Basin – and we desperately need to protect the Amazon.

We’ve managed to push Democratic leadership to be more united on trade than it was during CAFTA, which is another good sign leading into November elections and the fight over the parameters of trade negotiations (“Fast Track”) in 2007. This is going to be another close one.

Our impact on the Oman FTA vote will be crucial. The House Republican leadership has long hoped this would be a quick vote that would allow them to move forward with expanding NAFTA further into Latin America and elsewhere in the world.

They didn’t count on us.

Thanks to your hard work every Democrat on the House Ways & Means Committee (which oversees international trade) voted against the OFTA, the first trade agreement for which that has happened. The controversies over sweatshops, forced labor, human trafficking and the seriously flawed “foreign policy” reasoning used to justify this deal have caught the administration off guard.

The number of members of Congress who are committed to vote against OFTA grows by the day. But we need your help in pressuring the last undecided Representatives to vote the right way.

Please call your Representative today: The Capitol Switchboard number is 202-224-3121.

Here are some sample speaking points:

-I’m calling right now because I am concerned that the Bush administration is pushing to expand the worst parts of NAFTA into the Middle East and the Amazon basin.

-Congress will likely vote within the next two weeks on awful NAFTA-style trade deals with the countries of Oman and Peru. Like NAFTA and CAFTA these agreements would give big multinational corporations more power to challenge labor and environmental laws.

-The Oman Free Trade Agreement will lead to more human rights violations, and more instability in the Middle East – not what we need there right now.

-The Peru Free Trade Agreement will be terrible for the environment, because it will make it more difficult to strengthen environmental rules in the Amazon Basin – and we desperately need to protect the Amazon.

-I would like to urge Representative __________________ to vote against the U.S.-Oman and U.S.-Peru Free Trade Agreements.

-I appreciate your attention to this important issue.