TPP Is the Most Brazen Corporate Power Grab in American History

While most of you would rather argue about pyramids and email servers there is something more important we should be focusing on. And by focusing I'm not talking about blaming one political party. I've been trying to follow the TPP, apparently it is suppose to be really super fun time awesome for Oregon businesses.

Also I've heard scary declarations that if we don't sign this then China will do their own TPP treaty and the rest of the world will join them against us.

Now that the document has finally been made public maybe we as a nation and not republicans and democrats can have a discussion about if this is a good thing or bad thing.

- Sly

 

“The TPP, along with the WTO [World Trade Organization] and NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], is the most brazen corporate power grab in American history,” Ralph Nader told me when I reached him by phone in Washington, D.C. “It allows corporations to bypass our three branches of government to impose enforceable sanctions by secret tribunals. These tribunals can declare our labor, consumer and environmental protections [to be] unlawful, non-tariff barriers subject to fines for noncompliance. The TPP establishes a transnational, autocratic system of enforceable governance in defiance of our domestic laws.”

The TPP is part of a triad of trade agreements that includes the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). TiSA, by calling for the privatization of all public services, is a mortal threat to the viability of the U.S. Postal Service, public education and other government-run enterprises and utilities; together these operations make up 80 percent of the U.S. economy. The TTIP and TiSA are still in the negotiation phase. They will follow on the heels of the TPP and are likely to go before Congress in 2017.

These three agreements solidify the creeping corporate coup d’état along with the final evisceration of national sovereignty. Citizens will be forced to give up control of their destiny and will be stripped of the ability to protect themselves from corporate predators, safeguard the ecosystem and find redress and justice in our now anemic and often dysfunctional democratic institutions. The agreements—filled with jargon, convoluted technical, trade and financial terms, legalese, fine print and obtuse phrasing—can be summed up in two words: corporate enslavement.

The TPP removes legislative authority from Congress and the White House on a range of issues. Judicial power is often surrendered to three-person trade tribunals in which only corporations are permitted to sue. Workers, environmental and advocacy groups and labor unions are blocked from seeking redress in the proposed tribunals. The rights of corporations become sacrosanct. The rights of citizens are abolished.

The Sierra Club issued a statement after the release of the TPP text saying that the “deal is rife with polluter giveaways that would undermine decades of environmental progress, threaten our climate, and fail to adequately protect wildlife because big polluters helped write the deal.”

If there is no sustained popular uprising to prevent the passage of the TPP in Congress this spring we will be shackled by corporate power. Wages will decline. Working conditions will deteriorate. Unemployment will rise. Our few remaining rights will be revoked. The assault on the ecosystem will be accelerated. Banks and global speculation will be beyond oversight or control. Food safety standards and regulations will be jettisoned. Public services ranging from Medicare and Medicaid to the post office and public education will be abolished or dramatically slashed and taken over by for-profit corporations. Prices for basic commodities, including pharmaceuticals, will skyrocket. Social assistance programs will be drastically scaled back or terminated. And countries that have public health care systems, such as Canada and Australia, that are in the agreement will probably see their public health systems collapse under corporate assault. Corporations will be empowered to hold a wide variety of patents, including over plants and animals, turning basic necessities and the natural world into marketable products. And, just to make sure corporations extract every pound of flesh, any public law interpreted by corporations as impeding projected profit, even a law designed to protect the environment or consumers, will be subject to challenge in an entity called the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) section. The ISDS, bolstered and expanded under the TPP, will see corporations paid massive sums in compensation from offending governments for impeding their “right” to further swell their bank accounts. Corporate profit effectively will replace the common good.

Given the bankruptcy of our political class—including amoral politicians such as Hillary Clinton, who is denouncing the TPP during the presidential campaign but whose unwavering service to corporate capitalism assures her fealty to her corporate backers—the trade agreement has a good chance of becoming law. And because the Obama administration won fast-track authority, a tactic designed by the Nixon administration to subvert democratic debate, President Obama will be able to sign the agreement before it goes to Congress.

The TPP, because of fast track, bypasses the normal legislative process of public discussion and consideration by congressional committees. The House and the Senate, which have to vote on the TPP bill within 90 days of when it is sent to Congress, are prohibited by the fast-track provision from adding floor amendments or holding more than 20 hours of floor debate. Congress cannot raise concerns about the effects of the TPP on the environment. It can only vote yes or no. It is powerless to modify or change one word.

There will be a mass mobilization Nov. 14 through 18 in Washington to begin the push to block the TPP. Rising up to stop the TPP is a far, far better investment of our time and energy than engaging in the empty political theater that passes for a presidential campaign.

“The TPP creates a web of corporate laws that will dominate the global economy,” attorney Kevin Zeese of the group Popular Resistance, which has mounted a long fight against the trade agreement, told me from Baltimore by telephone. “It is a global corporate coup d’état. Corporations will become more powerful than countries. Corporations will force democratic systems to serve their interests. Civil courts around the world will be replaced with corporate courts or so-called trade tribunals. This is a massive expansion that builds on the worst of NAFTA rather than what Barack Obama promised, which was to get rid of the worst aspects of NAFTA.”

The agreement is the product of six years of work by global capitalists from banks, insurance companies, Goldman Sachs, Monsanto and other corporations.

“It was written by them [the corporations], it is for them and it will serve them,” Zeese said of the TPP. “It will hurt domestic businesses and small businesses. The buy-American provisions will disappear. Local communities will not be allowed to build buy-local campaigns. The thrust of the agreement is the privatization and commodification of everything. The agreement has built within it a deep antipathy to state-supported or state-owned enterprises. It gives away what is left of our democracy to the World Trade Organization.”

The economist David Rosnick, in a report on the TPP by the Center for Economic and Policy Research(CEPR), estimated that under the trade agreement only the top 10 percent of U.S. workers would see their wages increase. Rosnick wrote that the real wages of middle-income U.S. workers (from the 35th percentile to the 80th percentile) would decline under the TPP. NAFTA, contributing to a decline in manufacturing jobs (now only 9 percent of the economy), has forced workers into lower-paying service jobs and resulted in a decline in real wages of between 12 and 17 percent. The TPP would only accelerate this process, Rosnick concluded.

“This is a continuation of the global race to the bottom,” Dr. Margaret Flowers, also from Popular Resistance and a candidate for the U.S. Senate, said from Baltimore in a telephone conversation with me. “Corporations are free to move to countries that have the lowest labor standards. This drives down high labor standards here. It means a decimation of industries and unions. It means an accelerated race to the bottom, which we must rise up to stop.”

“In Malaysia one-third of tech workers are essentially slaves,” Zeese said. “In Vietnam the minimum wage is 35 cents an hour. Once these countries are part of the trade agreement U.S. workers are put in a very difficult position.”

Fifty-one percent of working Americans now make less than $30,000 a year, a new study by the Social Security Administration reported. Forty percent are making less than $20,000 a year. The federal government considers a family of four living on an income of less than $24,250 to be in poverty.

“Half of American workers earn essentially the poverty level,” Zeese said. “This agreement only accelerates this trend. I don’t see how American workers are going to cope.”

The assault on the American workforce by NAFTA—which was established under the Clinton administration in 1994 and which at the time promised creation of 200,000 net jobs a year in the United States—has been devastating. NAFTA has led to a $181 billion trade deficit with Mexico and Canada and the loss of at least 1 million U.S. jobs, according to a report by Public Citizen. The flooding of the Mexican market with cheap corn by U.S. agro-businesses drove down the price of Mexican corn and saw 1 million to 3 million poor Mexican farmers go bankrupt and lose their small farms. Many of them crossed the border into the United States in a desperate effort to find work.

“Obama has misled the public throughout this process,” Dr. Flowers said. “He claimed that environmental groups were supportive of the agreement because it provided environmental protections, and this has now been proven false. He told us that it would create 650,000 jobs, and this has now been proven false. He calls this a 21st century trade agreement, but it actually rolls back progress made in Bush-era trade agreements. The most recent model of a 21st century trade agreement is the Korean free trade agreement. That was supposed to create 140,000 U.S. jobs. But what we saw within a couple years was a loss of about 70,000 jobs and a larger trade deficit with Korea. This agreement [the TPP] is sold to us with the same deceits that were used to sell us NAFTA and other trade agreements.”

The agreement, in essence, becomes global law. Any agreements over carbon emissions by countries made through the United Nations are effectively rendered null and void by the TPP.

“Trade agreements are binding,” Flowers said. “They supersede any of the nonbinding agreements made by the United Nations Climate Change Conference that might come out of Paris.”

There is more than enough evidence from past trade agreements to indicate where the TPP—often called “NAFTA on steroids”—will lead. It is part of the inexorable march by corporations to wrest from us the ability to use government to defend the public and to build social and political organizations that promote the common good. Our corporate masters seek to turn the natural world and human beings into malleable commodities that will be used and exploited until exhaustion or collapse. Trade agreements are the tools being used to achieve this subjugation. The only response left is open, sustained and defiant popular revolt.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter

http://www.alternet.org/economy/chris-hedges-tpp-most-brazen-corporate-power-grab-american-history

 

Wyden is really big on this, says it will help the Oregon wine industry.

 

That actually is far from true - witness that sales of mediocre wine are far from zero.

Distribution matters. Someone in [some foreign place] might well be inclined to try a bottle of Oregon Pinot Noir, but if the nearest store that sells it is in Los Angeles, then he's going to buy something else instead.

barfo

 

What do you know about wine? All you drink is Obama Kool Aid.

 

I personally do not have a position on TPP because I don't understand it well enough (yet?). I agree with Sly, however, that it is important and that we should care.

However, it strikes me that Sly's linked article is not exactly an even-handed discussion, and that there might be another side to the story.

barfo

 

I completely agree with that. What's odd is I went to Drudgereport and there is nothing about it, for or against. Even google news is oddly quite in the top news section. Only reddit seems to be talking about it.

 

The White House released the text of its new trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, last week, and like any good citizen, I tried my best to read it. But the 12-country agreement is more than 2,700 pages long, plus annexes, and a lot of it sounds like this: "The parties shall at all times endeavor to agree on the interpretation and application of this agreement, and shall make every attempt through cooperation and consultations to arrive at a mutually satisfactory resolution."

And that's one of the lucid bits. Those members of Congress who say they've read the whole thing? They're fibbing.

There are three ways a befuddled citizen can figure out what to think about a complex deal like the TPP.



The first is tribal: Listen for signals from the politicians you support and assume they've made the right decisions. But that's not so easy when it comes to the TPP because the agreement divides both parties.

It's no surprise that President Obama is strongly in favor of a deal he and his aides just finished negotiating. "It's an agreement that puts American workers first and will help middle-class families get ahead," he said. "It includes the strongest commitments on labor and the environment of any trade agreement in history." The Democratic presidential candidates don't agree. Bernie Sanders says the TPP is "even worse" than he expected. Hillary Rodham Clinton opposes it too, and hopes you'll forget that she once called it "the gold standard" of trade deals.

Among Republicans, "establishment" candidates Jeb Bush and John Kasich support the agreement, as do Ben Carson and Marco Rubio. But Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have said they are opposed.

A second approach is to listen to what interested parties say and choose sides based on where your sympathies lie.

Manufacturing workers and their unions think another free-trade deal will inevitably hurt them. The last half-century of globalization has coincided with a massive loss of blue-collar jobs; not all of the erosion was due to trade, but to labor, the TPP looks like more of the same. "A bad deal for American workers," AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said.

Environmentalists are condemning the deal too, mostly because it doesn't crack down on climate change. But this is, after all, a trade deal; talks on global warming are already underway.

Big business is mostly in favor of the deal, although not universally so. Tobacco companies are unhappy that it deprives them of the right to sue countries that restrict trade by limiting cigarette sales. Pharmaceutical companies complain that they aren't getting enough protection for their patents. (Doctors Without Borders thinks they are getting too much.)

Those members of Congress who say they've read the whole thing? They're fibbing. -
Hollywood, Silicon Valley and agribusiness mostly like the deal, which protects entertainment copyrights, eases the flow of data across borders and opens doors for U.S. exports of meat and rice to Asia. California would reap benefits that the Rust Belt won't see.

Now for the final, labor-intensive approach: Listen to smart people who don't have a vested interest but are trying to analyze the deal in a comprehensive way.

For a start, I consulted with Joseph A. Massey, a former U.S. trade negotiator with China and Japan who has served as an advisor to Republicans and Democrats.

Massey made three points.

First, he said, the TPP's impact has probably been oversold. "It has benefits for U.S. export industries, but I think they're modest," he said. "It's clearly good for the entertainment and tech sectors. But it's not revolutionary."

Second, he said, the biggest threat to jobs in the United States isn't free-trade agreements; it's domestic policy. "We've neglected our own manufacturing sector," he said. "Germany is a party to trade agreements too, but they've done a much better job at maintaining a skilled blue-collar workforce. We need more incentives for companies to invest here, employ American workers and invest in their training."

Third, he noted, the TPP isn't only about trade. It's also about economic reform, higher labor standards and environmental protection in developing countries such as Vietnam and Malaysia. And it's a way to knit countries on the Pacific Rim into a trading system that the United States helped design instead of one run by Asia's growing power, China.

Obama hasn't been subtle about pushing that geopolitical argument. "If we don't pass this agreement — if America doesn't write those rules — then countries like China will," he said last week.

To foreign policy strategists, that's a compelling pitch. To American workers, it's not.

So are we better off with or without the TPP? If Congress ratifies it, that won't turbocharge the U.S. economy. If Congress blocks the deal, that won't stop globalization. And like any trade agreement, it creates winners and losers.

One political lesson is clear: The bipartisan consensus that enabled Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to pass trade agreements has broken down, mostly because, to many Americans, their costs have been clearer than their benefits.

To win Congress' approval of the deal — an important part of Obama's second-term agenda and his legacy — the president still has a lot of persuading to do.

doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1108-mcmanus-tpp-deal-20151108-column.html

 

I'm not sure why you're bringing that up but personally I'm in favor of putting a giant straw into Canada to drink their milkshake.

 

I think you might be confusing TPP with Keystone XL? One is a trade agreement, one is a pipeline.

barfo