Update: On Friday, June 12th, the House voted for the Fast Track bill, or Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) (219-211); however, they voted against Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) legislation that is needed to advance Fast Track. Keep up the pressure!



The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a trade deal currently under negotiation among 12 nations—Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, United States, and Vietnam. If ratified by these governments, TPP would be the largest trade deal in history -- representing 792 million people and accounting for 40 percent of the world economy1 -- yet it's being written and negotiated in secret.



That’s right—none of the details of this sweeping trade agreement are available to the public. The only text that has been made public so far has been through leaked documents. Members of Congress have extremely limited access to the negotiation texts. But Corporate representatives have access to, and in some instances have written the negotiation documents through USTR advisory committees, where they “significantly outnumber representatives of organized labor, environmental advocates and academic experts”.2



What's been leaked about it so far reveals that the TPP would offshore millions of American jobs, expose the U.S. to imports of unsafe food, and empower corporations to attack hard-fought U.S. environmental and health safeguards.



For example, the TPP would require the U.S to allow food imports if the exporting country claims that their safety regime is "equivalent" to our own, even if it violates the key principles of our food safety laws. So, fish from Vietnam and other TPP countries using antibiotics and other drugs banned in the U.S. would be allowed under equivalency rules in the agreement. These rules would effectively outsource domestic food inspection to other countries. Further, any U.S. food safety rules on pesticides, labeling or additives that is higher than international standards could be subject to challenge as "illegal trade barriers."



Instead of using trade agreements to elevate economic, health, and environmental standards across borders, the TPP creates a race to the bottom.



What’s worse, Congress is currently considering granting “fast track” approval of the TPP. “Fast track” enables trade agreements to become law by removing a democratic step of lawmaking by stripping Congress of its authority to debate or amend the content of a trade deal. Congress gets a vote, but only after the negotiations have been completed.



Tell Congress to Vote “No” on Fast Track for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and demand the text of the TPP be made public!