Online Retailers’ Abuse of Trade Loophole Endangers Consumers

By Melanie Foley

You do your research to find the safest infant car seat on the market and order it on Amazon. But the product that arrives at your door from China may be a knockoff. You might not even know, and the shipment almost certainly has not been inspected.

Or consider what happens when you order a high-end bicycle from Amazon. It is shipped with hundreds of others on a containership from China to an “unboxing” warehouse in Canada. There, your bike is put into its individual shipping box and sent to you. Why this seemingly useless and certainly wasteful extra step? Unlike the local shop offering the same bike, this maneuver allows Amazon to dodge border taxes and safety inspections.

Increasingly, counterfeiters and some of the world’s largest online retailers like Amazon are exploiting a loophole in U.S. trade law. Since 1938, U.S. residents have been allowed to bring into the country a “de minimis” amount of goods without paying border taxes or being subject to standard customs inspections or documentation.

The idea was for people making purchases while traveling abroad to avoid cumbersome paperwork and for customs officials to be able to focus on large-value commercial shipments. But the explosion of online retail changed the dynamic dramatically. Today, more than one million packages arrive daily via air alone from China for consignment to consumers who made purchases online.

Add to that a dramatic increase in the value of goods allowed to skirt normal inspections and other customs processes. The United States now has one of the highest de minimis levels in the world. European countries allow less than $200. Canada, Japan, Mexico and many other nations allow even less.

The online retailers also petitioned U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to consider the ultimate consumer as the official importer granted the daily $800 waiver, even though the retailers make the sale and bring in massive ocean containers of goods worth well over the $800 per day de minimis value to fulfill orders.

Anything from an Amazon fulfillment center in China could come in this way. But a primary method Amazon uses — and the new cottage industry of “third party logistics” firms that has emerged to teach companies how to take advantage of the system — is to have warehouses just across the border in Mexico or Canada to which they ship containers of products from China and other countries. The importers pay no duties when shipping to the warehouse because the good is deemed a “pass through,” as its final destination is the United States. When an order is received, warehouse staff pick, pack and put individual packages on a truck. The truck’s manifest lists them all as separate imports, so when the truck makes the short hop across the border, it clears customs using the de minimis entry process. No duties are paid or inspections done. Then the packages are dropped off at a U.S. post office or other shipper to be sent to online customers.

Customs officials are overwhelmed with the tsunami of small packages that makes it nearly impossible to effectively screen even for contraband in the form of illegal drugs or counterfeit products, much less to ensure imported products meet U.S. safety standards.

A 2019 intensified spot check operation by CBP found “discrepancies” — including spoiled food, opioids, street drugs, fake passports, gun parts and counterfeits — in 14% of parcels from China and Hong Kong.

The counterfeits are not just fake Gucci handbags. They include automotive parts that don’t meet consumer safety standards, such as airbags, brake pads and seatbelts. Packages have been found with fake prescription drugs lacking the active ingredients, children’s toys laced with lead and cosmetic products containing arsenic and human waste.

CBP reports that of the contraband products seized in 2016, 16% posed “direct and obvious threats to health and safety.”

This loophole is clearly a danger for consumers, but it also further tips the scales against brick-and-mortar stores, which, unlike the online retailers exploiting this loophole, must pay applicable tariffs on imports beyond the $800 per day and are the official importer responsible for ensuring products are legitimate and safe. Plus, the tax-dodging this system enables amounts to a significant revenue loss for the U.S. Treasury.

The Global Trade Watch (GTW) division of Public Citizen is raising this issue with Congress to pressure the Trump administration to fix the loophole. The administration has the authority to fix the problem with fairly straightforward regulatory changes. The question is, will it?

TPP Foreign Policy Arguments Mimic False Claims Made for Past Pacts

New Report Debunks Notion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership as a Bulwark Against China, Catalogues Outcomes of Similar Geopolitical Claims Made About Pacts Since NAFTA 

As President Barack Obama’s Asia trip looms and proponents of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) increasingly pitch the deal as a bulwark against China’s rising influence, a report released today by Public Citizen reveals that nearly identical foreign policy arguments have consistently proven baseless when used to sell trade deals over the past two decades. The report reviews foreign policy claims made to promote the TPP, ranging from the absurd to the counterfactual, to those that repeatedly have been disproved by the actual outcomes of similar claims made for past pacts.

“The same old foreign policy arguments get trotted out to sell trade agreements after the economic case fails,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “Repeatedly, Congress has approved bad deals based on dire predictions that failure to do so would mean diminished U.S. power,  the takeover of important markets by competitors or foreign instability, only to find that many of those predictions came true in spite of, and sometimes even because of, pacts’ enactment.”

While U.S. concerns about the implications of China’s rising economic power and influence are legitimate, the notion that the establishment – or not – of any specific U.S. trade agreement would control this process is contradicted by the record. Public Citizen’s study examines the outcomes of claims that past trade pacts would counter economic gains by Japan, Europe and China in trade-partner markets; strengthen U.S. foreign policy allies or thwart enemies; and improve U.S. national security.

Among the report’s findings:

• Past free trade agreements (FTAs) failed to counter the rising economic influence of China (or Japan): From 2000 to 2011, U.S. FTAs with eight Latin American countries were sold as bulwarks against foreign economic influence in the hemisphere. The U.S. pacts were implemented and China’s exports to Latin America soared more than 1,280 percent, from $10.5 billion to more than $145 billion, while the U.S. saw only modest export growth. The U.S.-produced share of Latin America’s imported goods fell 36 percent, while China’s share increased 575 percent. Similarly, under the North American Free Trade Agreement’s (NAFTA) first 20 years, the U.S.-produced share of Mexico’s imported goods dropped from almost 70 percent to less than 50 percent, while China’s share rose more than 2,600 percent. Similarly, after hysterical claims that Japan would seize U.S. market share in Latin America by signing its own free trade agreements unless the United States approved NAFTA and other FTAs, such Japanese FTAs were signed anyway.

• The TPP will not “contain” or isolate China: The report cites repeated statements by U.S. officials welcoming China as a prospective TPP member. How can the TPP isolate China if China is welcome to become a member? Administration officials note that China could join only if it agreed to the TPP’s rules, but those rules would give Chinese products duty-free access to the U.S. market and new foreign investor rights and privileges that would enhance China’s relative economic might within the United States. This may explain China’s statements of increased interest in joining the TPP. The TPP will not empower Pacific allies to act as a bulwark against Chinese influence, given that many of those nations see China as a partner. The report cites officials from TPP countries stating that if the TPP were to become a China-containment tool, they would no longer participate in TPP negotiations. 

• The TPP is not a vehicle to impose “our” rules: The proposed TPP rules undercut the false, but conveniently scary, dichotomy used to sell the TPP: that we have a choice between using the pact to impose “our” rules internationally or living with rules set by China. This argument presumes the TPP to represent  “our” rules, but in fact many of the TPP’s terms reflect the narrow special interests of the 600 official U.S. corporate trade advisors that have shaped them. TPP investment rules would promote more U.S. job offshoring and further gut the U.S. manufacturing base that is essential for both our national security and domestic infrastructure. TPP procurement rules would ban Buy American policies that reinvest our tax dollars to create economic growth and jobs at home. TPP service sector rules would raise our energy prices and undermine our energy independence and financial stability. TPP drug and copyright terms would raise health care costs and thwart innovation. The study summarizes a recent U.S. Department of Defense report that concludes that U.S. deindustrialization poses a threat to national security and our nation’s economic wellbeing.

“Some politicians and pundits seem to hope that raising geopolitical issues that the TPP cannot affect will activate Americans’ anxieties about a rising China and distract from the real issue: Would the TPP benefit most Americans?” Wallach said. 

The report also catalogues decades of trade-pact foreign policy claims, revealing that recent administration arguments for the TPP echo, nearly word-for-word, the sales pitches used for past pacts. For example, Vice President Joe Biden recently called the TPP “a symbol of American staying power,” mirroring the 1993 NAFTA pitch by then-U.S. Rep. Dan Glickman (D-Kan.): “NAFTA has become a critical and yes, symbolic test of U.S. leadership.”

The many unfounded foreign policy claims that repeatedly have been used to push past FTAs and that are being recycled today to pitch the TPP include:

• NAFTA: In 1993, then-U.S. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) advocated for NAFTA, saying it would “contribute to the growth and the maturity of the Mexican economy and thereby alleviate some of the potential for social and political explosions which could set back progress.” But after 20 years of NAFTA, Mexico’s average growth rate ranked 18th out of the 20 Latin America nations. Indeed, NAFTA contributed to significant poverty and instability within Mexico by enabling a flood of subsidized U.S. corn that eliminated the livelihoods of 2.5 million Mexican farmers and agricultural workers. The mass dislocation contributed to a doubling of migration to the United States in NAFTA’s first seven years and fueled the violence of Mexico’s spiraling drug war. NAFTA failed to prevent the “social and political explosions” Kerry feared; if anything, it contributed to them.

• CAFTA: In 2005, then-U.S. Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) argued for the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) by saying: “Hugo Chavez moves Venezuela closer and closer to Castro every day. These regimes tend to work to spread their brutal methods and totalitarian philosophies, trying to infect the rest of Latin America and we simply cannot let them succeed. … By linking [Central America’s] economies with democratic capitalism, CAFTA will help gird these nations against the threats at their door.” Soon after CAFTA took effect, most CAFTA nations established close economic and political ties with Venezuela – the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua all signed pacts with Venezuela to receive subsidized oil soon after CAFTA took effect.

• Colombia FTA: In 2011, then-U.S. Rep. Geoff Davis (R-Ky.) pushed for passage of the Colombia FTA by arguing, “The trade agreement with Colombia will advance our national security interests by providing Colombians with alternatives to the drug trade.” Davis’ argument directly contradicts that of Colombia’s own Minister of Agriculture. Before the FTA was passed, the minister predicted that if the deal took effect, Colombian farmers would be unable to compete with an FTA-enabled influx of subsidized U.S. crops and “would have no more than three options: migration to the cities or other countries (especially the United States or bordering countries), leaving to work in drug cultivation zones, or affiliating with illegal armed groups.” In August 2013, thousands of Colombian farmers, facing falling incomes and displacement, blocked highways, launched a national strike and called for the repeal of the FTA.

“The TPP should be debated on the merits of its actual provisions and their likely outcomes, not on the basis of rehashed foreign policy talking points and national security hyperbole that have proved false in the past and that bear little connection to the actual TPP text,” said Wallach. 

Sherrod Brown Tosses the Panama FTA

Well, not quite. But, man, that FTA text does look pretty heavy, and like it could put a hurtin' on some of the senators in the room that are against fair trade.

But here's a floor speech from fair trade champion Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) on the night the Senate voted on the Panama, Korea and Colombia trade deals. It's about 30 minutes, and a very eloquent description of why these trade deals are no longer primarily about "trade," but about how we regulate our domestic economy. Brown's TRADE Act would go a long way to getting "trade" policy right.

Japan tragedy highlights consequences of corporate offshoring

Our hearts go out to those who have lost loved ones as a result of the earthquake and its aftermath in Japan.

As humanity collectively sifts through the lessons that can learned from this disaster (including with respect to the perils of nuclear power), Information Week is reporting on another fallout with global implications:

The massive 8.9 earthquake that has caused widespread devastation in Japan is expected to cause worldwide shortages and severe price swings in some semiconductors manufactured in the island nation, according to some analysts.

The electronics expected to be most affected by the 8.9 quake that struck Friday include semiconductor wafers used in making microprocessors, NAND flash used for storing music, video, and other content in handheld devices, and DRAM, which is the system memory in PCs. More than 40% of the world's NAND and 15% of the world's DRAM are made in Japan, according to market researcher Objective Analysis.

In other words, there are consequences beyond just job loss to corporations' decision to offshore production to a few locations on the planet. To put it a different way, what is rational for the individual corporation can be irrational from the perspective of society as a whole.

Such a problem was predicted nearly six years ago by my colleague Barry Lynn, the author of the book "End of the Line." In a column for the FT summarizing the book, Barry wrote:

Time and again, human beings have learned to build buffers into complex systems. We design compartments into our ships, circuit breakers into our electrical networks and minimum reserve requirements for our banks. Yet since the cold war era, we have done the exact opposite with our industrial system. Rather than conceive market-friendly methods to distribute risk and dampen shocks, we devoted ourselves to eliminating the bulkheads that have traditionally existed between nations and between companies. To evoke a more raw analogy, in our production system, we bulldozed all the levees flat.

As a result, we now live in a world where an isolated political or natural disaster on the far side of the globe can disrupt basic systems on which we all depend. Consider what would happen in the event of war on the Korean peninsula, or an uprising in south India, or an avian flu pandemic in industrial Asia.

In the first case, we would immediately lose half the global production of D-ram chips, 65 per cent of Nand flash chips and much more. At a minimum, the result would be massive disruptions in the electronics industry and in all industries that depend on electronics components. In the second case, numerous global companies, including banks, would lose their ability to process information because they have relocated key back-office operations to that region. The third case, meanwhile, presents chilling proof that the production system has evolved in directions no one expected. As a recent article
in Foreign Affairs noted, one cross-border system that would collapse in the event of a pandemic is the one the US relies on for medical respiratory masks.

In each instance, an everyday disaster far away would set off potentially massive disruptions of the industrial systems on which all nations depend... It is time to admit that our grand experiment with radical laissez faire management of industry has failed.

While the global response to the Japan earthquake in the short-term will rightly focus on saving lives and avoiding further deaths, policymakers should also assess why they have allowed corporations to break down reasonable buffers against excessive offshoring of production. A little more redundancy in supply chains is not only collectively rational, but would also have the benefit of creating jobs at home.

One Way that Uribe is Better than Bush

Doug Palmer from Reuters reports:

President George W. Bush is moving to suspend longtime U.S. trade benefits for Bolivia because of that country's failure to cooperate in drug-fighting efforts in the past year, the top U.S. trade official said on Friday.

The move reflects the increasingly strained relations between the United States and Bolivia under the leadership of Bolivian President Evo Morales.

"The Morales administration's recent actions related to narcotics cooperation are not those of a partner and are not consistent with the rules of these programs," U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab said in a statement.

Unfortunately, as CEPR has shown, the Bush administration has all but undermined ANY U.S. government presence in Bolivia by taking sides in the country's internal political debates, and has even politicized institutions like the Peace Corps, which is supposed to be a non-political channel for U.S. kids to do some good around the world. Way to go, W!

Moreover...

"In South America there was unanimous and very strong support for the government. Other countries from the region, left, right and center, don't see the opposition as having a legitimate grievance," said Mark Weisbrot, head of the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Even Colombia's Uribe is backing Evo! What gives, Georgie?

Trade on the Trail: Obama v. Uribe

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) made a speech to the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO yesterday that called for an overhaul of our trade policy. Here's the key quote:

But what I refuse to accept is that we have to sign trade deals like the South Korea Agreement that are bad for American workers. What I oppose - and what I have always opposed - are trade deals that put the interests of multinational corporations ahead of the interests of Americans workers - like NAFTA, and CAFTA, and permanent normal trade relations with China.

And I'll also oppose the Colombia Free Trade Agreement if President Bush insists on sending it to Congress because the violence against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements. So you can trust me when I say that whatever trade deals we negotiate when I'm President will be good for American workers, and that they'll have strong labor and environmental protections that we'll enforce.

Obama touched on two themes that are obvious but rarely spoken in polite political circles: one, there is a severe imbalance in our trade policy against the public interest in favor of corporations; two, that it's a mockery of human dignity to even consider signing a trade deal with a country that is the union murder capital of the world.

The bold statement didn't win him any friends in Colombia's right-wing government, which has attached its hellish political sails to the outgoing Bush administration. According to the AP:

Colombia's president sharply criticized U.S. presidential contender Barack Obama on Wednesday for opposing a trade deal with his country, calling the Democrat out of touch with the realities of the South American nation.

The White House is urging Congress to approve the agreement, which would remove most tariffs on American exports and cement Colombia's preferential trade status with the United States.

But Illinois Sen. Obama said Wednesday he would oppose the deal.

"I deplore the fact that Senator Obama, aspiring to be president of the United States, should be unaware of Colombia's efforts," President Alvaro Uribe said in a statement. "I think it is for political calculations that he is making a statement that does not correspond to Colombia's reality."

Okay, I realize that the news that was trying to be reported here was the Uribe and Obama spat. But to describe the monstrous (what is it about Barack that makes people use that word?!) 600-plus page FTA does far more (and far more harm) that the innocuous-sounding summary "would remove most tariffs on American exports and cement Colombia's preferential trade status with the United States."

For folks covering the campaign, this short blurbs are a great opportunity to move past the horse race and dig a touch deeper on the issue. Here's just a few thoughts for things to insert:

1. If FTAs are just about tariff reduction, why are they hundreds of pages, while only a few pages deal with tariff reduction? What accounts for the opposition of such a wide swath of Americans and environmental and consumer groups who don't work on tariffs? Could it be the corporate privileges which allow foreign investors to claim taxpayer-funded compensation for having to comply with the same public interest laws which domestic firms must comply?
2. What's up with this narrative - paid for by the super-expensive Uribe lobbying outfits - that the Colombia FTA would help our foreign policy initiatives? If voters across Latin America are electing candidates that reject our failed trade model, how is our Latin America policy helped by shoving NAFTA-style trade policy on the one outlier government in the region, and one that doesn't seem to mind playing favorites in our domestic electoral processes? Doesn't sound like much of a foreign policy to me.

Another issue to probe is what role the candidates envision for U.S. multinationals in the global economy. I had the great misfortune to read the cases brought by the estates of murdered Coca-Cola workers against the company. Among the highlights: In 2001, the International Labor Rights Fund and United Steelworkers of America brought a civil case for equitable relief and damages against Coca-Cola and its Colombian bottlers on behalf of the estate of a murdered Coca-Cola plant worker (Isidro Segundo Gil) and of five other plant workers who were tortured, kidnapped and/or otherwise injured. According to the plaintiff’s complaint:

“The claims in this case arise from Defendants’ wrongful actions in connection with their production, bottling and distribution of Coke products in Colombia. With respect to their business operations in Colombia, the Defendants hired, contracted with or otherwise directed paramilitary security forces that utilized extreme violence and murdered, tortured, unlawfully detained or otherwise silenced trade union leaders of the Union representing workers at Defendants’ facilities. The individual Plaintiffs have been subjected to serious human rights abuses, including murder, extrajudicial killing, kidnapping, unlawful detention, and torture in violation of the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA), 28 U.S.C. §1350, the Torture Victims Protection Act (TVPA), international human rights law, and the common tort law of the state of Florida. Further, Defendants, their alter egos and/or their agents engaged in a conspiracy to cause physical and mental harm to Plaintiffs in violation of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), 18 U.S.C. § 1961 et seq.”

In 2003, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida dismissed this case on jurisdictional grounds. In 2006, a similar case that is still pending was brought against Coca-Cola and its Colombian bottlers on behalf of the wife and estate of another murdered Coca-Cola worker.  The number of unionized workers at Coca-Cola's Colombia plants dropped precipitously after these fear campaigns. As a result, we've seen heightened congressional scrutiny, corporate shareholder protests and university Coke boycotts.

This is the same Coke, ahem, pushing the Colombia FTA. How is doling out legislative victories to corporations that have provoked such animosity abroad helping the long-term interests of Americans? What do the candidates have to say about these crucial issues?

(Disclosure: Global Trade Watch has no preference among the candidates.)

All these change agents, and I still can't break a 20

The growing usage of the phrase "change agent" has to be the oddest and most incongruous adaptation of radical thought into recent American political discourse. For many folks on the left, some variation of the phrase "change agent" has denoted the working class, the multitude, oppressed nationalities, etc. Overnight, everyone from Mitt Romney to Hillary Clinton assumes the mantle previously given to very large, very strategically placed groups of people.

Whatev. Here at Global Trade Watch, as we are apt to disclose, we have no preference among the self-designated change agents. What we are concerned about is how the struggle for a break from the neo-liberal policies of the past is informing or being informed by the horse race now moving on to South Carolina, Nevada, Michigan and beyond.

The good news is that many of the candidates, including last night's victor Hillary Clinton, are coming up with specific ways that they would change trade policy, as the Iowa Fair Trade Campaign documented in the letters it received from the candidates.

One of the major issues that a new president will likely have to deal with is an economic recession, and they will have to come up with ways to deal with the problem. Corporations have worked hard to ensure that constraints are put on the ability of people to democratically determine how they get themselves out of a recession. Thus, while many of the candidates banter on about international labor and environmental rights that are largely unenforceable in current trade policies, relatively short shrift has been given to the ability to break from NAFTA-WTO style policies during times of national crisis.

In last year's debate over the Peru FTA (and the 2006 debate over the Oman FTA), some attention was given to trying to come up with policies that would safeguard the ability of the U.S. government to block without FTA challenge any takeover of U.S. ports by foreign entities. The "great leap forward" given by our fearless leaders in Congress (they're like 535 little change agents!) was to insert a clause into the "revised" Peru FTA that read:

"Nothing in this Agreement shall be construed: ... to preclude a Party from applying measures that it considers necessary for the fulfillment of its obligations with respect to the maintenance or restoration of international peace or security, or the protection of its own essential security interests."

Some are claiming that this allows "full non-challengeable authority" for the U.S. to do whatever it wants if it invokes this so-called "national security" exception.

Unfortunately, the history of these clauses are a little murkier, as this law review article shows. Take the case of Argentina. In 2001-02, the country of my childhood went through an economic recession on par with the Great Depression. The government took a series of measures that it deemed necessary to insulate it's citizens from the worst aspects of the recession - a regulatory move that has made it the target of countless challenges from multinational corporations. These corporations, including Enron, have used NAFTA-like provisions in so-called bilateral investment treaties (BITs) to go after the country in foreign courts and demand billions in Argentine taxpayer dollars. Their gripe? Argentina making use of these so called "non-precluded measures" during a time of national emergency.

As the aforementioned article by William Burke-White and Andreas von Staden argues, even though the U.S. and other countries have tried to move closer to a clearly "self-judging" standard on these "non-precluded measures", the case history shows a lack of agreement among the corporate trade elite about this discretion.

When Enron sued Argentina, for instance, the corporate trade tribunalists ruled that Argentina could not decide for itself what measures it could take during an economic recession (and avoid challenge and compensation claims). But in a very similar case brought by LG and E, the tribunal ruled the exact opposite way. (See pages 106 and 4 respectively). Both these cases were brought under the U.S.-Argentina BIT, which is like the investor-state regime inserted into NAFTA-style trade agreements.

Anyone still think we're immune from what our corporations have gotten written into pacts that we're party to? Anyone who still thinks it's a good idea to offer up sovereignty to such a fickle, unelected grouplet of trade specialists? Anyone who still buys the idea that you can offer up whole swaths of the U.S. economy and regulatory structure to FTA dictates, and then hope and pray that clever exceptions will stand up when the corporate class wants to teach democratically elected leaders a lesson? (As Sirota points out, they're already in the ginger phase one of that lesson here in the U.S.)

Bush to circumvent Congress on Colombia FTA?

Just before the break, Inside U.S. Trade reported that the Bush administration is internally debating whether to submit the Colombia FTA to Congress without the consent of the Democratic leadership. Rep. Wally Herger (R-Calif.), who is a likely candidate to be the GOP's top rep on Ways and Means once Rep. Jim McCrery (R-La.) retires this year, said the prospect "is continually being debated at the White House.”

However, Herger added that submitting the FTA to Congress in such a manner is a “last option.” It is “obviously our first choice” to make the case for the FTA and generate adequate Democratic support for the agreement to have the leadership back the submission of the implementing bill, he said.

Under fast-track rules, Congress is obligated to consider fast-track trade bills in a fixed time frame once they are formally submitted, regardless of the leadership’s position on the bills. However, no administration has yet presented a fast-track trade bill without close consultation with the leadership.

Separately, Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), one of the "CAFTA 15" Dems who voted for the NAFTA expansion to Central America said he will try to get some labor groups to take a “neutral” position on the Colombia FTA. And...

[Rep. Sander] Levin said that if the Administration tries to send the final implementing legislation for the Colombia FTA to Congress without a green light from House Democratic leadership, it would be “very negative” and counterproductive.

Martin Vaughan in Congress Daily had more on this possibility.

lobbyists and administration officials have discussed the option of just sending the Colombia deal up and forcing Democrats to vote on it, if congressional leaders won't take it up willingly. But Democratic aides and opponents of the deal said House leaders might also hold a secret trump card, an "emergency brake" that could short-circuit the fast-track process.

In the event that the White House sent the agreement up, House Speaker Pelosi could write a rule that would make a vote on the agreement subject to the call of the chair. Even though the trade negotiating authority has tools to prevent an agreement from being bottled up in committee, the speaker could, through such a rule change, delay a House floor vote indefinitely. But Democratic aides downplayed that scenario, saying it is unlikely that the Bush administration would risk being repudiated on the Colombia deal by sending it up without the acceptance of Democratic congressional leaders.

If Pelosi wanted, she could face down Bush if he tried to pull this stunt. Normally Fast Track requires a House vote on final passage a maximum of 60 days after the president introduces implementing legislation, with the Senate having 30 additional days to vote. This feature of Fast Track thus forces final action at the latest 90 days after implementing legislation is dropped. However, the 2002 Trade Promotion Authority 2105(c) makes clear that this requirement, as well as Fast Track’s ban on amendments and 20-hour limit on debate,

"are enacted by the Congress—

(1) as an exercise of the rulemaking power of the House of Representatives and the Senate, respectively, and as such are deemed a part of the rules of each House, respectively, and such procedures supersede other rules only to the extent that they are inconsistent with such other rules; and

(2) with the full recognition of the constitutional right of either House to change the rules (so far as relating to the procedures of that House) at any time, in the same manner, and to the same extent as any other rule of that House."

A Congressional Research Service memo makes this even clearer:

Although this [Fast Track] statute is permanent law, it has been enacted as an exercise of the rulemaking power of either House and can be changed by either House, with respect to its own procedure, at any time, in the same manner and to the same extent as any other rule of that House.

So, will Bush attempt to use Fast Track to slip the Colombia FTA past Congress? If he does, will the Dem leadership block the move by changing the rule on Fast Track? Or will the Dems fold their opposition on this NAFTA expansion before the show-down happens? Corporations are celebrating Democrats' caving in on Peru as creating momentum for Colombia FTA, after all. Stay tuned.

Trade on the Trail, Part Cinco

This week was a big one for trade on the trail.

"Clinton Pledges to Revisit Trade Deals" says the Financial Times:

"I think it is time that we assess trade agreements every five years to make sure they’re meeting their goals or to make adjustments if they are not,” she said in a speech in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which stages the first caucus vote in the presidential nomination process next January. “And we should start by doing that with Nafta.”

"We have to change our economic course just as we have to change course in Iraq and change course when it comes to healthcare,” she said.

In addition to the five-year trade reviews, Mrs Clinton said she would appoint a federal trade enforcement officer who would monitor compliance with trade agreements.

She also pledged to expand the trade assistance adjustment programme, which retrains manufacturing workers who lose their jobs when employers relocate to other countries.

She would extend the TAA to redundant service sector workers, whose jobs have mostly been “offshored” to India, and to workers whose employers have relocated to countries that have no trade agreements with the US, such as China.

Women's Wear Daily does a good job of laying out all of the candidates' positions. Here are some highlights:

Fred Thompson: "I was one of the strictest advocates of imposing restrictions on the Chinese for their behavior of exporting dangerous materials to countries and tying some of our trade policies to what they did in that regard...They still have not done enough...but in terms of turning our backs on free trade, that's not the direction to go."

Rudy Giulliani: "We can't say that because these agreements weren't perfect, because they have problems, we're going to turn our backs on free trade...We're a country that depends on exports and we're also an entrepreneurial country."

Hillary Clinton: "The Bush administration has filed roughly the same number of enforcement actions under our trade agreements that were filed during one year of the Clinton administration...That is unacceptable. When I'm president, we're going to start enforcing them again and we're not going to enter into them unless we think they're going to be good for American workers."

Barack Obama: "We wholly agree with the labor movement that labor and environmental provisions have to be included in the core of labor agreements. Business has said historically that it couldn't be done until now," the [Obama] aide said, referring to an agreement Democratic leaders reached with the Bush administration to include stronger labor and environmental provisions in four pending trade agreements.

Mitt Romney: "has pressed Congress to act immediately on two pending trade deals with Colombia and Peru, a campaign spokesman said."

(Disclosure: Global Trade Watch has no preference among the candidates.)