Ten years ago, thousands of labor, environmental and community activists descended onto the streets of Seattle to voice their dissent about the WTO and the negative effect that the current concept of trade agreements have on working families.

A series of town halls, speakers and a People's Summit will be held the last weekend in November to remember the WTO 10th Anniversary and bring focus to the issues still at hand. America In Solidarity is excited to let everyone know about the exciting events planned and hopes everyone finds the time to participate. Among the featured speakers scheduled to attend these events will be Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman, AFL-CIO Policy Director Thea Lee, British Columbia Federation of Labour President Jim Sinclair, and many others.

The office of the U.S. Trade Representative has said it wants to move forward this year with the Panama Free Trade Agreement -- a trade deal negotiated by the Bush administration that repeats most of the same major problems found in NAFTA and CAFTA. Bush's Panama FTA represents business-as-usual on trade, and is not the type of change that voters were promised.

Here are a few good reasons why the Panama FTA should be opposed:

• Panama's Tax Haven Status: Panama's economy thrives on banking secrecy, and its "comparative advantage" rests on the ease with which U.S. companies can create subsidiaries there to evade U.S. taxes. A Government Accountability Office study identified Panama as one of eight countries -- and the only current or prospective FTA partner -- that was listed on all of the major tax-haven watchdog lists. Panama has long been a key target of the OECD and other tax transparency entities for its resistance to international norms in combating tax evasion and money laundering. Given the role that banking secrecy played in the global financial meltdown, a trade agreement with Panama should be conditioned on much greater regulation and transparency within its financial sector.
• Threats to U.S. Sovereignty: The investment chapters in the Panama FTA allow foreign corporations to challenge food safety rules, responsible land use decisions, environmental protection initiatives, banking regulations and other public interest policies as "barriers to trade" through closed trade tribunals that circumvent the U.S. judicial system. Under NAFTA alone, more than 40 complaints, seeking $28 billion in damages have already been filed against existing public policies. The Panama FTA's procurement provisions further undermine U.S. "Buy American" and "Buy Local" purchasing preferences, and threaten procurement policies with environmental and social goals.
• Inadequate Labor and Environmental Standards: The Panama FTA includes the modestly-improved labor and environmental standards of the Peru FTA, rather than the virtually non-existent standards of NAFTA and CAFTA. Nonethless, the experience of the Peru FTA demonstrates that these standards are still far from adequate to protect working people or the environment. The Peru FTA was implemented in early 2009 without Peru improving its labor law to meet International Labor Organization standards as supposedly required, and after Peru rolled back environmental protections that existed prior to the FTA's signing. Stronger labor and environmental standards must be added to the Panama FTA's core text in order to avoid these clear failures.
• Increased Poverty Abroad: Like NAFTA and CAFTA before it, the Panama FTA is expected to increase rural poverty by forcing small Panamanian farmers out of business in competition with subsidized food imports from U.S. transnationals. For this reason, the FTA is expected to increase hunger, drug cultivation and undocumented migration. In addition, Bush's FTA includes NAFTA-style provisions that undermine Panama's right to obtainaffordable medications for its impoverished citizens.

One of the closest races in the country involve Republican incumbent Dave Reichert and Democratic challenger Darcy Burner in Washington State's 8th Congressional District. Recent polls have put the race in a dead heat and every vote will count. So what is their stance on trade issues? Our friends at the Washington Fair Trade Council put together this handy comparison.

Reichert                                                                                             Burner

Citizens Trade Council recently sent out an email with a few questions to ask Congressional candidates about trade. If you cross paths with one in the next month, ask them the following (and send us their answers):

1. The Bush administration is pushing a Free Trade Agreement with Colombia, which has a horrific human rights record, the highest union murder rate in the world, and a government linked to rightwing paramilitaries. Will you commit to vote against the Colombia FTA?

2. NAFTA has cost the U.S. 3 million manufacturing jobs. Its provisions have increased immigration, fueled environmental damage, granted new rights to foreign investors and limited our ability to ensure the safety of imported toys and food. Will you commit to renegotiate NAFTA and remove such provisions?

3. Fast Track was used to seize constitutional trade authority from Congress. It was used to jam through damaging deals like NAFTA. Will you implement a new negotiating model that gives more authority to Congress to choose and negotiate future trade deals?

4. Nearly 100 Congress members have signed the Trade Reform Accountability Development and Employment (TRADE) Act, which aims to review and renegotiate existing trade agreements according to fair standards. Will you cosponsor the TRADE Act?

America In Solidarity has been asking for many years for members of Congress to support "Fair Trade" not just "Free Trade." Too often, trade agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA limit worker's and environmental rights and merely just result in corporate subsidies while undermining local markets and economies. The end result has been that large corporations suffer, while workers (often on both sides of the border) lose jobs as the race to the bottom decimates communities. 

Call your members of Congress while they are home for Presidents’ Day recess and ask them to oppose this move by taking a public position against the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement

Our collective energy has stopped the FTA for a year. This is a victory that could be dashed by the powerful all-out campaign launched by the Administrations of U.S. President George Bush and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. With six official U.S. Congressional delegations already sent to Colombia to experience carefully staged tours highlighting the efforts supposedly undertaken to end the systematic assassination of Colombia labor leaders, five more are scheduled.

You and your kids can join schoolchildren across the US who are reversing the Halloween tradition by handing Fair Trade chocolate back to adults while Trick-or-Treating door-to-door. The candy will be accompanied by information about social justice issues in the chocolate industry, and how Fair Trade chocolate provides a solution to these concerns.

America In Solidarity is encouraging its volunteers to join us or call Stephanie Celt at Washington Fair Trade Coalition (206-227-3079) to do this in your own neighborhood.

While chocolate is sweet for us, it can be heartbreaking for the hundreds of thousands of child laborers that pick the cocoa that goes into some of our favorite treats. In 2001, the U.S. State Department, the International Labor Organization and others reported child slavery on many cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast, source of 43% of the worlds cocoa. Subsequent research by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture revealed some 284,000 children between the ages of 9 and 12 working in hazardous conditions on West African cocoa farms. Of these children, it was reported that some 12,000 child cocoa workers that had participated in the study were likely to have arrived in their situation as a result of child trafficking.

In 2001, this unacceptable practice caught the attention of the media and the government, and the American public began to voice their abhorrence of the use of child slave labor in the production of one of their most beloved treats: chocolate. In response, the US chocolate industry agreed (via the Harken-Engel Protocol) to voluntarily take steps to end child slavery on cocoa farms by July of 2005.

By Jeff Richardson

This Saturday in his Weekly Radio Address, President Bush encouraged all Americans to support his plans to expand the neoliberal policies of NAFTA, CAFTA, and GATT to more nations, including South Korea, Peru, Colombia, and Panama. 

As you must surely know by now, we here at America in Solidarity have opposed America's entry into the recently proposed trade agreements.  As far as working people are concerned, free trade does nothing to improve our quality of life, and has led to the rapid destabilization of economies all around the world.  Factories close down in Michigan and open up in China.  Corn prices drop to record lows in Mexico. causing bankrupted farmers to move to the US to find work.  This nightmare scenario has played out again and again, ever since Bill Clinton signed NAFTA into law.  If we want to have any means of saving our nation from these insane trade agreements, we have to stand up to the President and his corporate toadies in the Congress.  The time has come for all working people to make their disgust for this practice once and for all.  [Toll-free number for Congress: 202-225-3121]