On April 28, New York City joined a growing chorus of American cities voicing opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) by passing a City Council resolution declaring the city a “TPP-Free Zone,” and urging Congress to oppose recently introduced “fast-track” legislation that would allow the deal to be rammed through Congress without amendments or adequate floor debate.
The resolution comes just days after New York Mayor Bill de Blasio called the TPP a “raw deal” in an interview with the New York Daily News. He went on to say that, as a result of the TPP, “we would lose jobs for American workers, [and] that corporations would gain power at the expense of local governments,” while the “stronger labor and environmental standards would be very hard to enforce.”
New York City is just the latest in a long list of American cities that have expressed their opposition to fast-tracking the TPP. The previous week, on April 21, the Pittsburgh City Council passed a similar resolution, opposing fast track and urging the President and Congress to conduct “a fully transparent and inclusive legislative process for consideration of the TPP.” Anti-TPP or anti-fast-track resolutions have also been passed in San Francisco, Calif.; Los Angeles, Calif.; Seattle, Wash.; St. Paul, Minn.; Madison, Wisc.; Berkeley, Calif.; Tompkins County, New York; Fort Bragg, Calif.; Mahoning County, Ohio; Bellingham, Wash., Richmond, Calif.; Hollywood, Calif.; Oak Park Township, Illinois; Dane County, Wisc.; Guadalupe, Ariz.; and Columbus, Ohio.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership could have disastrous effects on the environment, including increased fracking, increased dependence on dirty fossil fuels, and the empowerment of corporations to challenge climate and clean energy policies in private trade courts. In addition, it has been negotiated in secret – as Senators Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown noted in a recent letter to President Obama. Fast-track legislation recently introduced in the U.S. House and Senate would limit Congressional oversight over trade deals, letting the executive branch send already-signed deals to Congress for limited floor debate, no amendments, and a simple up-or-down vote. Just this week, more than 2,000 organizations in the United States sent a letter to Congress expressing strong opposition to the new bill.
Rather than secrecy and corporate giveaways, a new, 21st-century model of trade requires full transparency and accountability to ensure that trade deals protect the environment and deliver benefits for the majority of Americans, not just multinational corporations.