The provisions of the 35-page TRADE act require a great deal
of analysis to be carried out on existing and future trade agreements, but are
not as clear about what is to be done with the resulting information. The act
calls for the Comptroller General to author a biennial report assessing all
trade agreements, including a section of recommendations on how to renegotiate
and improve any particular agreement. Yet how these recommendations will be
evaluated or carried out is not discussed in the bill, leaving it vulnerable to
corporations or governments (US or otherwise) that prefer to ignore these
suggestions in the interest of profit or convenience.

Furthermore,
the TRADE Act is based on several potentially problematic assumptions. The
first is that the presence of a particular stipulation means its enforcement in
the global community, a falsehood learned from CAFTA’s progressive but
effectively powerless labor and environmental clauses. While the TRADE Act
should be commended for its establishment of a well-defined committee to impose
labor regulations and punish violators of these laws, the implementation of
environmental regulations seems to depend largely on good faith. Another
questionable assumption is that other countries with which the United States
has trade agreements will want to reexamine these contracts just because the US
has finally decided to do so. Many of the United States’ relationships with
bilateral trade agreement partners could be damaged by such a demand.

But these
concerns are not to say that the TRADE Act could not be the answer for those
seeking a better trade solution at home and abroad. The systematic manner in
which the act calls for prior agreements to be examined would be an essential
move toward improving them, as well as an organized way to do so. The TRADE act
also encourages corporations to move away from the prevailing “race to the
bottom” system, in which outsourcing goes to the country with the lowest wages
and the least environmental restrictions, by raising the international bar for
worker compensation and environmentally sustainable practices. And even though
this legislation may never be enacted, it is an important symbol of the growing
frustration with the current trade model and the dire need for change in this,
among many others, area of the economy. 

For more information:
On the TRADE Act- http://www.citizen.org/trade/tradeact/
On NAFTA and CAFTA- http://wola.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=viewp&id=371&Itemid=6
http://www.citizen.org/trade/nafta