Presdident Bush plans to use the authority to negotiate the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) treaty. Already a number of Central and South American nations are lining up for FTAA, eager to join in on the advantages they perceive from a hemispheric free trade zone modeled after the 1999 North American Free Trade Agreement that economically united Canada, the United States, and Mexico.

Labor and environmetnal critics of the measure worry that another free trade agreement would merely extend the vulnerability of workers and ecologies established under NAFTA.

The Senate will consider the Fast Track legislation approved by the House following the spring recess. The delay, say activists at the 8th Day Center for Justice, gives opponents of fast track authority time now to contact their legislators and lobby against the measure or to demand the addition of stronger labor and environmental protections in any FTAA treaty.

For information on how to contact your Congressperson (e-mail, phone), visit http://www.congress.org/ and enter your zip code. Then click “info” under their photo.

For your Senators, visit http://www.senate.gov/senators/senator_by_state.cfm

For more info on the FTAA, visit the 8th Day’s Bulletin or Public Citizen. For more action strategies to push against "Fast Track," please visit http://www.citizen.org/trade/fasttrack/action/.

Sample Letter to UNDECIDED Members of Congress on Fast Track

I am writing in opposition to the President's plan to expand the North American FreeTrade Agreement (NAFTA) throughout the hemisphere under the rubric of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). In particular, I urge you to vote against "Fast Track" trade negotiating authority, now called "Trade Promotion Authority" by the Bush administration.

Both President Bush and his trade representative, Robert Zoellick, have said that they need to secure Fast Track authority from you in order to expand NAFTA. I want to suggest a couple of reasons why you should deny the Administration this request. First, we elected you to make trade policy. As you know, Article I, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution invests the Congress with the exclusive authority to "regulate Commerce with foreign Nations."

While Fast Track may have made some sense when President Nixon invented it, back when most U.S. trade agreements were bilateral deals between industrialized countries dealing with specific industrial or agricultural sectors, it is an inappropriate mechanism with which to craft the complex, multilateral agreements (like NAFTA, the WTO and the FTAA) that the Clinton administration used it for and with which the Bush White House intends to expand the flawed and failed NAFTA model.

This leads to my second point. When you're heading in the wrong direction, a "fast track' is the last thing you need. Not only has NAFTA failed to live up to the advance billing of its corporate boosters, it has created new problems unforeseen during the policy debates of 1992 and 93. Economists estimate that half a million U.S. jobs have been lost due to NAFTA; over 300,000 workers have been certified under one narrow program -- NAFTA adjustment assistance, administered by the Department of Labor -- as having lost their jobs directly due to NAFTA.

Similarly, the promises to clean up the environment along the U.S.-Mexican border, especially in the maquiladora region of northern Mexico, have gone unfulfilled for over seven years now. Meanwhile, the increased border trade has opened U.S. markets to unsafe food, U.S. cities to increased drug traffic and U.S. highways to unsafe trucks. Further, NAFTA's investment chapter has spawned litigation that has undermined environment and health regulations in all three NAFTA countries; a current example is the Methanex case in which the California phase-out of the gas additive MTBE has exposed the U.S. to nearly a billion dollars of liability to the Canadian corporation that manufactures it.

Fast Track is an outdated model by which to craft trade policy. Given the broad range of domestic issues like food safety that now are affected through "trade" talks, Congress and the public needs a new way to decide U.S. international commercial policy that is appropriate to the reality of 21st Century globalization. Fast Track was only ever used 5 times and since then hundreds of trade deals have proved it is not necessary. What is needed is a new mechanism to ensure that future trade agreements contain terms beneficial to most Americans. I look forward to your response.

Sincerely, [Your name and address]

Sample Letter for Members of Congress who SUPPORT Fast Track

Dear Representative ________________________,

As your constituent I want to take a moment to express my disappointment in your support for granting President Bush Fast Track trade negotiating authority. For too long, trade agreements like NAFTA and the World Trade Organization have only benefitted the large corporations. This has led to a race-to-the-bottom where good jobs have been eliminated and moved to sweatshops abroad, and where our environment and food-safety have been jeopardized in the name of corporate profits.

Rather than fig-leaves and empty rhetoric about "toolboxs" with no teeth to them, we need strong and enforceable rules in trade and investment agreements that protect our workers, our environment and our family farmers.

Representative ______________, you should have the vision to see that this kind of trade policy is hurting our families and the environment, and I urge you to reverse your position on this matter which is very important to voters like myself.

Sincerely, [your name and address]