Trans-Pacific Partnership, A Deal with the Devil

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is nearing fruition tomorrow as House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has worked hard to make a deal with Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) by dumping the proposed Medicare cuts to pay for workers displaced by the agreement. Boehner’s word on this is worthless because he plans to attach the Medicare cuts to a separate trade “preferences” bill with African countries that is not considered must-pass legislation. Fast-track authority gives the president the authority to negotiate trade agreements and limit Congress to an up-or-down vote on them, with no amendments or filibusters permitted, that requires only fifty-one votes, not sixty, to pass.

Despite President Obama’s furious push to “fast track” the TPP and Pelosi’s caving in on a worthless agreement, a large number of Democrat House members plan to vote against the fast tracking. Even so, the White House thinks is has 19 Democratic votes with others still in play. Thirty GOP House members are “no” or “leaning no” on the vote, according to The Hill’s Whip List.

 

As the vote grows closer, more has been disclosed about the secretive agreement, and none of it is good. While skipping over the details about how the TPP was negotiated by corporations for the benefit of corporations around the world to lower wages and benefits while erasing regulations through blackmailing countries, the following is more information about the TPP—all of it bad.

The House has made the TPP worse than the Senate version after Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) successfully attached a new negotiating objective late Tuesday night: it specifically instructs the U.S. trade representative to ignore action on climate change while negotiating future trade deals. Specifically, it “ensure[s] that trade agreements do not require changes to US law or obligate the United States with respect to global warming or climate change.”

The TPP may force privatization of so-called “public” institutions such as the post office, public schools, public roads, public libraries, public parks, public pensions, etc. so that corporations can replace these with profit-making enterprises that send the profits to the wealthy few. The U.S. Trade Representative website says TPP will have “groundbreaking new rules designed to ensure fair competition between state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and private companies.” Also:

“We are also pursuing pioneering rules to ensure that private sector businesses and workers are able to compete on fair terms with SOEs, especially when such SOEs receive significant government backing to engage in commercial activity.

“… Commitments ensuring SOEs act in accordance with commercial considerations and compete fairly, without undue advantages from the governments that own them, while allowing governments to provide support to SOEs that provide public services domestically; and Rules that will provide transparency with respect to the nature of government control over and support for SOEs.”

Corporations are also battling to privatize highways and make public schools into corporate profit centers. Private companies have largely taken over the U.S. prisons to the detriment of everyone. Private prisons contain 6 percent of state prisoners and 16 percent of federal prisoners. Corporations are trying to take over water delivery from publicly-owned municipal systems.

A majority of people in the United States seem to understand the danger of the TPP. According to an International Business Times poll, 62 percent oppose the TPP, and 85 percent of moderate and conservative Republicans oppose it. A top concern is that U.S. workers shouldn’t have to compete with imports made under conditions less costly to employers. Those benefiting from TPP are Philip Morris, fossil fuel companies such as Exxon, financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs, military profiteers such as Halliburton, pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer—the list of corporations goes on and on.

The legislators who have voted for TPP or plan to vote for the TPP tell naysayers that this trade agreement is different, that it won’t be like all the others—although they most likely have not read the agreement and have no idea what they’re talking about. With past trade agreements almost identical to the proposed TPP, U.S. workers compete with children coerced to work in foreign factories, trafficked and forced labor, and foreign workers so mistreated that they jump to their deaths from factory buildings. U.S. consumers buy products made in collapsing and/or burning buildings that kill thousands of foreign workers. Labor provisions of trade agreements aren’t enforced, and union activists are murdered, tortured, kidnapped, and threatened. The 14 free trade agreements that the United States signed with 20 countries allow filling of complaints for labor violations, but almost no one has done this filing because no one is told about the provisions. Even for the few complains, serious allegations, such as human trafficking and child labor, remain unsettled for years.

The newest leak of the TPP draft reveals that it would block Congressional reforms for lower drug costs and extend the life of patents through “Evergreening,” slight modification of products for new patents. A comparison of drug costs between Canada and the United States shows the exorbitant prices that people on this side of the border pay. Doctors without Borders declared that the TPP could become “the most harmful trade pact ever for access to medicines” in developing countries.

Even if the TPP fails, the U.S. Trade Representative is negotiating for two other, more dangerous deals. The Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) would bind the two biggest economies in the world, the United States and the European Union, and the largest agreement, the 51-nation Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), combines the U.S. and the European Union with 22 other countries scattered throughout the world. TiSA, negotiated for the past two years, would liberalize global trade covering almost 80 percent of the U.S. economy. (TPP will encompass forty per cent of global economic activity.) Like the TPP, it would restrict how governments manage public laws through a regulatory cap and dismantle state-owned enterprises, turning these services over to the private sector. TiSA measures:

• Limit regulation on service sectors at all levels with “standstill” clauses to freeze regulations in place and prevent future rulemaking for professional licensing and qualifications or technical standards such as staff to patient ratios in hospitals or safety controls on airlines.
• Make any broken trade barrier irreversible through a “ratchet” clause.
• Disallow regulations that are “more burdensome than necessary to ensure the quality of the service.”
• Eliminate restrictions on foreign investments with corporate control.
• Permit corporations a dispute mechanism giving them money equal to “expected future profits” lost through violations of the regulatory cap.
• Allow financial services suppliers’ transfer of individual client data out of a TiSA country for processing, regardless of national privacy laws.

To satisfy the trade agreement supporters who want to open up trade in services among the 51 TiSA nations, an international deal, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), governs these sectors through the World Trade Organization (WTO). TiSA’s goal is to deregulate and privatize services worldwide, even among emerging nations with no input into the agreement. Social, cultural, and even public health goals would be sidelined in favor of a regime that puts corporate profits first. It effectively nullifies the role of democratic governments to operate in the best interest of their constituents.

The love that the GOP, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable, K Street lobbyists, and giant multinational companies have for the TPP should be a red flag for the dangers of the TPP. Bill Moyers wrote:

“[The TPP] favors CEOs over workers, profits over the environment and corporate power over the rule of law. Small wonder that it was drafted in secret or that Obama, McConnell and Boehner are determined there will be no amendments permitted once it is made public.”

Congressional supporters of the TPP are selling the soul of the United States to the devil.