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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Time to Rebuild America, So Why Is 'Buy America'Under NAFTA Attack? |
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by Ed Mayne, AFL-CIO
(No verified email address) |
05 Nov 2001
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Ed Mayne represents West Valley City in the Utah Senate and is president of the local AFL-CIO. |
Major terrorist attacks on U.S. soil have forced new focus on threats to our safety. The recent tragedies in New York and Washington, D.C., have knocked the wind out of an already slowing U.S. economy. Now is the time to rebuild American security and our economy. There is much work to be done both in the streets of New York and right here in Salt Lake City, especially in light of the approaching Olympics. But thanks to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), one of the most useful tools to stimulate the domestic economy, the "Buy America" program, is under attack.
The claim is that NAFTA does not permit the U.S. government to give preference to U.S. goods in its procurement choices. Instead of fixing this odious NAFTA provision, some in Washington are seeking to exploit Congress' focus on urgent national security issues to sneak through an expansion of NAFTA to 31 more nations.
"Buy America" laws are a popular tool used by both federal and state governments to rebuild infrastructure and stimulate the economy. "Buy America" laws are designed to ensure that when taxpayer money is spent on important community improvement projects, our tax dollars are reinvested to stimulate production and job creation right here at home.
Our Federal Highway Administration (FHA) has a "Buy America" law, which requires transportation infrastructure improvement and maintenance projects to buy steel for the project that is made in the U.S.A. The FHA reports that every $1 billion invested nationally in transportation and infrastructure improvements creates 42,000 new jobs in steel, construction and related industries and stimulates $2.6 billion in additional economic activity. That's a chunk of change going right back into our local communities.
The bad news is that just when we need "Buy America" laws the most, they are under attack, you might even call it a NAFTA-attack. In July 2000, ADF Group, a structural design and engineering firm based in Quebec, Canada, used NAFTA to slap a special NAFTA lawsuit against the Federal Highway Administration's "Buy America" law. A year earlier, ADF was granted a contract on a major highway construction project to fix a dangerous junction in northern Virginia. ADF's job was to design and fabricate the steel superstructure for the nine highways which converge at the interchange.
Under the "Buy America" law, ADF was required not only to buy its steel from U.S. firms, but also to do all the work on the steel (fabrication, cutting, welding) here in the states. ADF declared that such "Buy America" rules violated NAFTA, and filed a special NAFTA lawsuit claiming the company should be paid $90 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars to compensate for the NAFTA violation. The case will not be heard before a U.S. judge in a U.S. court, but behind closed doors by a special NAFTA trade tribunal empowered to judge our "Buy America" law.
Meanwhile, in recent weeks the Bush administration has discussed establishing new "Buy America" programs as a way to stimulate the U.S. economy. That's good economic sense, and also would bolster our national security. Thanks to the wave of imports under past trade deals, the United States is now one of only two nations that does not supply 100 percent of its domestic steel needs. Plus NAFTA has cost over half a million jobs in the manufacturing sector alone in recent years.
Yet, under pressure from ADF and similar foreign corporations claiming NAFTA rights, the U.S. government may be forced to abandon even our existing "Buy America" laws just at a time when we need them most. Perversely, while the Cabinet seeks to utilize "Buy America" at this time of economic instability, the trade department and a few congressmen are doing the opposite and instead pushing for bigger NAFTAs and other trade policies that are sure to make the economic situation worse not better.
Just in the last week, there has been a lot of talk in Washington about pushing a new "Fast Track" proposal in Congress. Fast Track is an unusual process through which Congress gives away its constitutional authority to set trade policy. In the five times its ever been used, Fast Track has ensured that trade deals were rushed through Congress without the chance of a good hearing or a fair debate. Fast Track is how we got into NAFTA to begin with. The same special interests who lied to us about NAFTA want another Fast Track to expand NAFTA to 31 more countries in the Western Hemisphere.
Now is the time to take deliberate actions to address terrorism on our soil. It is also the time to be thoughtful about how to jump start our stalled economy. We need the government to make the changes to existing trade deals to safeguard successful policies such as "Buy America." The last thing we need now is to cut out Congress and the public and rush into new trade deals of the NAFTA variety.
Published on Sunday, November 4, 2001 in the Salt Lake Tribune
© Copyright 2001, The Salt Lake Tribune
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