Press Release!

[MDOLAN <mdolan@citizen.org>]

  Archer "Wins" But Fast Track Loses
  
  Statement By Lori Wallach Director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch on 
  the Mark-Up of Archer's Radical Fast Track Proposal
  
  The Archer bill is a fast track to the Stone Age strictly forbidding 
  environmental, labor, and food safety measures in trade agreements.
  
  For the first time in U.S. history presidents would be affirmatively limited 
  in even negotiating labor, food safety or environmental issues in trade 
  talks and forbidden from including most such provisions under fast track 
  legislation.  These new restrictions would continue for eight years.
  
  The Archer proposal is a radical roll-back from the fast track President's 
  Bush and Reagan each used once. (Fast track has only even been used 5 
  times.)  The Archer proposal would even require deletion of President Bush's 
  modest NAFTA environmental provisions, such as NAFTA Art. 104 which gave 
  partial protection to three environmental treaties in case of conflict under 
  NAFTA. This proposal also would forbid the provisions funding and approving 
  NAFTA's side pacts contained in the 1993 NAFTA implementing bill.
   
  If this fast track proposal is ever adopted as U.S law, the Republicans will 
  have succeeded in their crusade to eliminate environmental and labor 
  measures from U.S. trade policy.  Regardless of how the Clinton 
  Administration may try to spin this proposal, the fact that Chairman Archer 
  supports it makes clear that environmental and labor measures are newly and 
  strictly constrained. It is pathetic  that President Clinton has not opposed 
  this retrograde Republican fast track backwards.
  
  The Archer proposal tightens the Roth-Finance fast track restrictions on 
  labor, environment, human rights, religious freedom or other issues. Of 
  course the Roth-Finance fast track was more restrictive than the Clinton 
  proposal, which itself was more restrictive than the Reagan-Bush fast track.
   The more radical the bill becomes, the less likely it will win the 
  Democratic support necessary to pass.
  
  We stand with the consensus of consumer, family farm, religious, labor and 
  environmental groups  in urging Congress to vote against it.  The opposition 
  to fast track has grown considerably over the last few weeks to include 
  environmental organizations like the National Wildlife Federation and 
  Audubon whose support for NAFTA was critical to its passage in 1993.
  
  
  
  ****************************************************************************
   /s/ Mike Dolan, Field Director, Global Trade Watch, Public Citizen
  
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