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Fast Track is in the House!
A National Legislative Campaign that Builds the Movement
It's not as much fun as donning a protest puppet or performing satirical
street theater and it's not as dangerous or glamorous as risking arrest in
direct action, but grassroots lobbying is an important front in our fight
against the corporate trade agenda (so-called 'free trade'). It is also a lot of
the reason this movement has momentum.
One of our key fights is Fast Track, a mechanism that presidents since Nixon
have used to ram pro-corporate trade agreements through the House and Senate.
Most folks in this movement know about NAFTA and the WTO; but most don't know
about how these unpopular treaties got passed in the first place. Fast Track
requires the Congress to pass these trade scams without amendments or adequate
time to debate, on a quick-n-dirty, up-or-down vote. It is a legislative
laxative that is bad for the Constitution. (The Constitution says treaties must
pass the Senate by a two-thirds majority, which neither NAFTA nor the GATT
could've done.) The Citizens Trade Campaign and its allies and affiliates
defeated Fast Track twice in the 105th Congress ('97 - 98). The new president
wants Fast Track too. The corporate and political elites have their eyes on the
Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and they know that they will need Fast
Track to get it. We have to stop them. We will win this key legislative battle
because we will use the power of the anti-globalization movement to generate
grassroots pressure on the Congress; and we will use the national campaign
against Fast Track to continue to build our movement at the local level.
These are a few of the steps that will provide the margin of victory.
First, we will build a strong focused Fair Trade coalition from the various
components of the anti-globalization movement in our community. Workers and
family farmers, environmental and consumer activists, human rights and faith
based groups, students and direct action anarchists, reformists and
anti-capitalist blocs alike - all will come together in some form or another to
beat Fast Track. Emergency Meetings all around the country will build local Fair
Trade networks and plan grassroots actions to hold the Congress accountable. The
whole of us will be greater than the sum of our partisans.
Second, we will tell the stories that put a human face on the dry
globalization debate. Just a little research, a task shared among our
coalition partners, will reveal the actual effects of corporate globalization in
our own community. What factories have closed and moved production to Mexico,
under NAFTA, or to some other countries where workers can be exploited? Are
there any family farm groups that have first hand experience fighting the giant
agri-bizness concerns? And what locally-based corporations run sweatshops abroad
or pollute globally?
Third, we will personally confront our congress-members when they are
in the District, especially during the congressional recesses. We can organize
district office meetings, protests and rallies all around the country, so that
they all come back to DC talking about how the grassroots ganged up on them back
home. We will schedule 'district office meetings' to introduce
congress-members to our broad coalitions and show them our strong opposition to
corporate globalization. If they are 'target' members -undecided on Fast Track
or otherwise worth the extra effort to make an example of - don't let them go to
a pancake breakfast or town hall meeting without running into Fair Trade
activists. They will understand that a vote for Fast Track will come at a
political price they won't want to pay.
Fourth, we will earn some Free Media, and control the local and
national conversations about trade policy. Every member of our regional
coalitions will get a letter to the editor or op-ed published, reflecting the
diversity of perspectives that animate and inform the so-called "Seattle
coalition." Together, we will organize nationally coordinated press
conferences against Fast Track and the FTAA from Seattle to Miami. The
mainstream media won't be able to ignore us; the independent media will
celebrate the movement. Meanwhile, we will burn up the public airwaves on radio
talk shows, building the buzz about the failures of 'free trade' and Fast Track.
We're going to win this fight. We've done it before, twice when Clinton
was President. Since Seattle, the transnational corporate 'free trade'
lobby is outraged that we have exposed their anti-worker, anti-environment
agenda, so they're going to sink a lot of money in this next Congress to pass
Fast Track.
But we'll be ready - with people power, which there ain't no power like
cause it won't stop (to paraphrase a fave Seattle chant). The growing Fair Trade
coalition - workers, environmentalists, family farmers, consumers, faith-based
and human rights activists - is pulling together at the grassroots level, every
week in every state, to frustrate the corporate fat cats and their political
agenda. The 107th Congress will go down in history as the one in which the rules
got changed once and for all time to put people over profits in the global
economy.
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