50 Reasons We Cannot Afford the TPP
April 10, 2015
How would your state be impacted by the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – a controversial “free trade” agreement (FTA) being negotiated behind closed doors with 11 Pacific Rim countries?
Click here for a state-by-state guide to the specific outcomes of the status quo “trade” model that the TPP would expand. Get the latest government data on how many jobs have been lost in your state to unfair trade, how much inequality has risen, how many family farms have disappeared, and how large your state’s trade deficit with FTA countries has grown.
The TPP would extend the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) model that has contributed to massive U.S. trade deficits and job loss, downward pressure on middle class wages, unprecedented levels of inequality, lagging exports, new floods of agricultural imports, and the loss of family farms.
These impacts have been felt across all 50 U.S. states. Here is a sampling of the outcomes:
- North Carolina: North Carolina has lost more than 369,000 manufacturing jobs – nearly half – since NAFTA and NAFTA expansion pacts have taken effect. More than 212,000 specific North Carolina jobs have been certified under just one narrow Department of Labor program as lost to offshoring or imports since NAFTA.
- Delaware: Delaware’s total goods exports to all U.S. FTA partners have actually fallen 27 percent while its exports to non-FTA nations have grown 34 percent in the last five years.
- California: In the last five years, California’s $403 million NAFTA agricultural trade surplus became a $187 million trade deficit – a more than $590 million drop. In contrast, California’s agricultural trade surplus with the rest of the world increased by $3 billion, or 79 percent, during the same time period. The disparity owes to the fact that California’s exports of agricultural products to NAFTA partners Mexico and Canada grew just 27 percent, or $693 million, in the last five years, while its agricultural exports to the rest of the world grew 70 percent, or $4.3 billion. Meanwhile, California’s agricultural imports from NAFTA partners during this period surged $1.3 billion – more than the increase in agricultural imports from all other countries combined.
- Michigan: Michigan’s trade deficit with all U.S. FTA partners is nearly five times larger than its deficit with the rest of the world. Michigan’s FTA deficit has grown more than three times as much as its non-FTA deficit in the last five years. Today, Michigan’s trade deficit with FTA partners comprises 83 percent of the state’s total trade deficit.
- Louisiana: Before the Korea FTA – the U.S. template for the TPP – the United States had balanced trade with Korea in the top 10 products that Louisiana exports to Korea – including everything from metal to agricultural products. Under two years of the FTA, that balance became a $9 billion annual trade deficit.
- New York: The TPP and the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA) would empower 3,067 foreign corporations doing business in New York to bypass domestic courts, go before extrajudicial tribunals, and challenge New York and U.S. health, environmental and other public interest policies that they claim undermine new foreign investor rights not available to domestic firms under U.S. law.
- Texas: U.S. farmers were promised that the Korea FTA would boost U.S. agricultural exports to Korea. But U.S. exports to Korea fell in eight of Texas’ top 10 agricultural export products, from cotton to wheat to meat in the first two years of the Korea FTA. Meanwhile, U.S. exports to Korea of beef, pork and poultry – all top agricultural exports for Texas – declined 18, 15, and 42 percent, respectively (measuring by volume).
- Nevada: The richest 10 percent of Nevadans are now capturing more than half of all income in the state – a degree of inequality not seen in the 100 years for which records exist. Study after study has produced an academic consensus that status quo trade has contributed to today’s unprecedented rise in income inequality.
- Minnesota: Small-scale U.S. family farms have been hardest hit by rising agricultural imports and declining agricultural trade balances under FTAs. Since NAFTA took effect, 15,500 of Minnesota’s smaller-scale farms (24 percent) have disappeared.
Can you open a entry for TTIP?. In Europe, lots of people don't like it for the same reasons.
Posted by: Angel Guevara | April 13, 2015 at 03:39 AM