The Senate passed the Peru Free Trade Agreement yesterday 77-18. Those opposed to another harmful NAFTA, CAFTA like trade bill included all the Democratic freshman senators except two.  Jim Webb (D-VA) and Benjamin Cardin (D-MD) joined some of their senior Dem senatorial colleagues in voting for a bad bill. The five senatorial Democratic presidential candidates were in Iowa and did not vote.

What's wrong with the Peru Trade Agreement?  From Jonathan Tasini at Working Life:

The Peru FTA contains a NAFTA/CAFTA-style foreign investor chapter that promotes off-shoring and subjects our domestic environmental, zoning, health and other public interest policies to challenge directly by foreign investors in foreign tribunals. It allows challenges by foreign investors in foreign tribunals of to challenge timber, mining, construction and other concession contracts with the U.S. federal government, and affords foreign investors greater rights than those enjoyed by U.S. investors.

The Peru FTA's procurement rules subject many common federal and state procurement policies to challenge in trade tribunals, continue the NAFTA/CAFTA ban on anti-off-shoring and Buy America policies, and expose U.S. renewable energy, recycled content and other requirements to challenge.

The Peru FTA's agriculture trade rules undermine U.S. producers' ability to earn a fair price for their crops at home and in the global market place. They favor multinational grain trading and food processing companies while farmers on both ends will be hurt. The Peru FTA is projected to increase hunger; illicit drug cultivation; undocumented migration; and continue the race to the bottom for commodity prices, pitting farmer against farmer and country against country to see who can produce food the cheapest, regardless of standards on labor, the environment or food safety.

While the amended text of the Peru FTA removes the most egregious, CAFTA-based, provisions limiting the access to affordable medicines, it still includes NAFTA-style provisions that undermine the right to affordable medicines for poorer countries.

The Peru FTA, like NAFTA and CAFTA, still contains language requiring the United States to accept imported food that does not meet our safety standards.

As Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) says, "I am disappointed that the Congress passed another job-killing trade agreement that will shut down our factories, hurt our communities, and send more unsafe food into our kitchens and consumer products into our children's bedrooms."

Perhaps some Democrats mistakenly assumed labor supported the Peru agreement. That is not true.  As Tasini reminds us, "While some unions have chosen not to actively oppose the Peru FTA, there is not ONE that supports it. Likewise, not one civil rights organization supports this agreement."

As the head of the Teamsters Union said, "It is outrageous that Congress and the Bush administration have approved yet another job-killing trade agreement at a time when American families are seeing their jobs shipped overseas, their food and toys tainted, their wages decline and their houses foreclosed upon....Workers here and in Peru deserve better."

Those Democratic senators, who voted with all the Republicans (only one Republican was opposed) for this harmful agreement, voted against regular American and Peruvian workers; against average American and Peruvian farmers; against the environment and other public interest policies; against every typical American and against Democratic Party principles.  Shameful!