By David Sirota

Breaking news out of Washington today, five days after a handful of senior Democrats and the Bush administration announced a secret deal to push a package of free trade pacts just months after Democrats successfully used opposition to lobbyist-written trade deals to win the 2006 election.

According to sources on Capitol Hill today, after the Los Angeles Times confirmed that Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) earlier this week agreed to demands by rank-and-file congressional Democrats to debate the secret trade deal at this Tuesday’s Democratic Caucus meeting, Emanuel abruptly took trade off the agenda prior to the meeting, preventing the meeting on trade from taking place. Additionally, Emanuel, one of the chief architects of NAFTA as a top Clinton administration staffer, refused to agree to set a date to discuss the secret trade deal. Meanwhile, White House and GOP participants in the deal are now signaling that the deal’s much-touted labor and environmental provisions are designed to be kept out of the core text of trade agreements and thus potentially rendered utterly unenforceable. To date, the specific legislative language of the secret deal has been kept concealed from the public.

On May 10th, six Democrats followed Democratic Caucus rules and filed a formal letter to Emanuel requesting a caucus meeting. That request, according to the Hill Newspaper, was “rebuffed” and hours after the letter was sent, Democratic leaders appeared at a press conference to announce the secret trade deal with the Bush administration. The legislative language of the deal has still not been released either to reporters or to rank-and-file lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

Meanwhile, industry newsletter Inside U.S. Trade this afternoon reports that House Ways and Means Ranking Member Jim McCrery (R-LA) “said it is his preference and that of U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab that the new obligations for free trade agreements announced last week not lead to a reopening of the Peru free trade agreement.” This follow’s McCrery’s claim yesterday that the secret deal can be completed “in a way that does not require Peru’s political system to revisit the deal all over again.”

In laymans terms, the enforceability of the promised labor and environmental provisions hinge on the Peru and Panama free trade agreements being reopened so that their texts can be modified. As NAFTA has shown, so-called “side agreements” that are not written into the text of the actual trade texts have proven entirely unenforceable because they are not part of the core agreement. If the Peru and Panama deals are not, in fact, going to be reopened and renegotiated, then the highly touted promises of adding enforceable labor and environmental provisions to the core texts of trade agreements appear to be in question.

McCrery and Schwab’s move may explain why the Bush-connected head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has told reporters he has received “assurances that the labor provisions [in the deal] cannot be read to require compliance.” It may also explain why the dealmakers have yet to release the legislative language of the trade deal texts in question. If they are planning to not actually change the texts of the deals and pass them as is, there may not actually be any new language, meaning there would likely not be any substantive change to U.S. trade policy, despite the flood of press releases.

Freshmen House Democrats, many of whom have signed letters demanding to the Democratic leadership respect the 2006 Election mandate against lobbyist-written trade policy, are scheduled to attend a regular breakfast with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Wednesday morning. Sources say it is probable that the trade issue could be put front and center at that breakfast by the group of lawmakers. http://www.workingassetsblog.com/2007/05/breaking_emanuel_blocks_dem_de.html

Looking at the socioeconomic decline in many cities ,towns and neighborhoods across the country over the last 15- 20 years , the impact of our trade policies leaves little doubt that the American people are not the winners in theses deals .

A new pending trade deal between Democrats and Bush purports to add new labor and environmental standards but we’ve seen this game before: a NAFTA/WTO -style agreement will typically contain hundreds of pages of rules that:

· promote the off-shoring of jobs

· undermine our food safety, even for pets

· jack up medicines prices,

· gut our labor and environmental procurement rules

· grow our $800 billion dollar trade deficit

· contain weak or easily circumvented safeguards for workers and domestic businesses with no means of enforcement

· enable the continuation of White House “wink and nod” non-enforcement of fair trade compliance provisions

· reduce or eliminate means of input ,monitoring and/or remedy by American citizens , Congress or Labor organizations

In short, bad trade deals mean large multinationals get deals not accessible by smaller companies, so the smaller firms either go out of business or outsource jobs to cheap foreign labor like the big boys, either way we loose jobs at home and force more illegal labor across our borders.

Take Action: Here is an easy link with a draft letter some are using as a model to express their concerns to their Congressional Representatives .

Feedback is always appreciated .

Greg Fuller