Replacing NAFTA With a Deal That Delivers Broad Benefits
By Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch
1. Eliminate NAFTA terms that promote the outsourcing of Americans jobs.
- Eliminate Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) and the foreign investor protections it enforces that make it less risky and cheaper to outsource jobs and empower corporations to attack environmental and health laws and get unlimited payouts of our tax dollars.
- Eliminate NAFTA procurement rules limiting Buy American, labor and environmental preferences so the government buys U.S.-made, pro-worker and pro-environment goods – reinvesting our tax dollars to create jobs here rather than outsourcing them to buy cars, construction materials, office supplies and other goods made elsewhere.
2. Cut NAFTA’s corporate power boosting ISDS regime that grants corporations rights to attack our laws and demand unlimited taxpayer compensation.
- NAFTA’s ISDS regime and the foreign investor protections it enforces must be eliminated. These terms empower multinational corporations to sue the U.S. government before a panel of three corporate lawyers. The lawyers can award the firms unlimited sums to be paid by America’s taxpayers, including for the loss of expected future profits, over claims that a U.S. law or safety regulation violates their NAFTA rights. The lawyers’ decisions cannot be appealed.
- More than $392 million in compensation has already been paid out to corporations using NAFTA’s ISDS regime after attacks on energy, water and timber policies, toxics bans, health and safety measures, and more. Of the 13 claims (for more than $36 billion) now pending under NAFTA, nearly all relate to environmental, energy, financial, public health, land use and transportation policies – not traditional trade issues.