What you don't know about the Trans Pacific Partnership could hurt you -- and the planet

TPP might sound like a bathroom accessory. Instead, it stands for Trans Pacific Partnership, which is a major trade pact being negotiated in secret by the U.S. and many other Pacific Rim countries.

Imagine you are the CEO of a multinational corporation. Your salary is immense. You have a corporate jet at your disposal. This is handy because your company has offices all over the world, and you have mansions in Beverly Hills, the Hamptons and Provence as well as apartments in Seattle, Manhattan, London and Tokyo. Christmas is coming, and you are ready to summon one of your secretaries and dictate a letter to Santa. Your wish list would likely include continued enhancement of the party favors handed out by NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) namely, job-off-shoring incentives, requirements that we import food which does not meet our safety or environmental protection standards and new rights for corporations to get taxpayer compensation before foreign tribunals over laws they do not like. You support the Trans Pacific Partnership and similar trade agreements. Of course you do for these will help bring about the billionaires’ paradise of your dreams.

You also support “fast track,” an extreme procedure that gives Congress' authority over trade to the President. Fast track dates from the President Nixon era; it stifles debate and bans amendments and filibuster. The procedure has only been used 16 times in the history of this country, but it was used to push through NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. President Obama wants to revive fast track because TPP will probably not pass unless it is allowed to bypass normal congressional review.

“….[T]here’s a very dangerous window, where, for sure, [Kentucky Republican Sen. Mitch] McConnell, [Ohio Republican Rep.] Boehner and Obama are going to want to play footsie on fast track,” observes Lori Wallach of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch during an interview on “Democracy Now!” However, "… there are plenty of conservative tea party members of Congress who, number one, think this violates the Constitution.” Moreover, delegating more authority to the man they have been attacking as the “imperial president” would be a bitter pill to swallow. Still, we need to let our congressional representatives know that we oppose a revival of fast track.

Along with the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA) and the Trade Services Agreement (TISA), the TPP will be written into agreements of the World Trade Organization (WTO), just as NAFTA has been. “If these agreements move forward,” writes Ilana Solomon, director of the Sierra Club's Responsible Trade Program. “They lock in a new set of rules that will further hinder our ability to solve the climate crisis.”

Mid-term elections add new urgency to trade issues

The 2014 mid-terms elections makes this issue an especially urgent one. Republicans now have a majority of seats in the Senate, and they have the biggest majority in the House in more than 60 years. The day after the election, President Obama spoke with House Speaker Boehner and congratulated McConnell on becoming the new Senate Majority Leader. The two parties have lots to fight about, but McConnell said he shared common ground with the President on international trade. “Most of his party is unenthusiastic about international trade. We think it’s good for America.” McConnell said he thought the President was “interested in moving forward.” If so, this is definitely not good news for environmentalists, for workers, for consumers, for small business, for small farmers, for you or for me.

The TPP “is really a delivery mechanism for a lot of things McConnell and the Republicans like,” Lori Wallach points out. She lists some examples:
--The TPP could limit Internet freedom through the Stop Online Piracy Act.
--It could roll back financial regulation on big banks.
--It would increase the duration of patents for big Pharma, giving them mega profits and raising our medicine prices.
--It would give “special privileges and rights for foreign corporations to skirt around our courts and sue the U.S. government to raid our treasury over any environmental, consumer health law that they think undermines their expected future profits.”
--It would have rules, à la NAFTA, that make it easier to off-shore jobs and relocate to low-wage countries.
--It would ban Buy America, Buy Local laws.

What’s not to like for Senator McConnell, who, according to Wallach, has voted for off-shoring jobs in 20 out of 20 trade votes.

How the TPP got its start

Started by George W. Bush and picked up by Obama, the TPP has been negotiated in secret by the U.S. and 11 Pacific Rim countries. It has been negotiated with the assistance of 600 corporate advisors (mostly lobbyists from multinational corporations), but not with the participation of our elected representatives.

Why is the TPP often called “NAFTA on steroids”? The TPP involves more countries, and it will strengthen the rules that “empower corporations to sue governments in the secrecy of private trade tribunals, over laws and policies that corporations allege reduce their profits, including protections from dirty fossil fuels,” says Solomon. “Such rules have allowed corporations including Chevron and Exxon Mobil to launch nearly 600 challenges against almost 100 governments.” She adds that nearly 60 percent of so-called investor-state cases are decided in favor of the investor…”Taxpayers get to pay the bill or settle, often weakening environmental protection policies in the bargain."

NAFTA itself took effect in 1994 amid promises it would create thousands of jobs, that U.S. farmers would export their way to riches, that Mexico’s standard of living would rise, and so on. It was magical thinking, but many environmental groups fell for it. They even formed The Environmental Coalition for NAFTA.  This pro-NAFTA organization included The Environmental Defense Fund, Conservation International, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Natonal Audubon Society, the World Wildlife Fund and the National Wildlife Federation, according to Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything.

We can be glad that the Sierra Club, along with Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, was steadfast in its opposition to NAFTA.

It was the right choice because the outcomes of NAFTA, writes Angela Bradbery of Public Citizen, include a $181 billion U.S. trade deficit with NAFTA partners Mexico and Canada, one million net U.S. jobs lost, more than $360 million paid to corporations after “investor-state” tribunal attacks on, and rollbacks of, domestic public interest policies. “The support of subsidized U.S. corn did increase under NAFTA,” Bradbery admits, but it destroyed “the livelihoods of more than one million Mexican campesino farmers and about 1.4 million additional Mexican workers…”

Free trade vs. climate action

In This Changes Everything, Klein recounts “one of the key, precedent-setting cases pitting ‘free trade’ against climate action.” This took place in Ontario, Canada, Klein’s home turf. An Italian businessman moved to Toronto to open a solar factory. Legislation created a feed-in tariff program, which allowed renewable energy providers to sell power back to the grid. In order for most of the energy providers to qualify, they had to ensure that a certain percentage of their workforces and materials were local to Ontario. By 2012, Ontario was the largest solar producer in Canada. But Japan, then the European Union, announced that they considered Ontario’s local content requirement to be a violation of WTO rules. An important provision of most free trade agreements involves “national treatment,” a requirement that governments make no distinction between goods produced by local companies and goods produced abroad. Favoring local industry constitutes illegal “discrimination.” The WTO ruled against Canada. These trade agreements make crucial parts of a robust climate change response illegal. They result in more goods traveling long distances in carbon-spewing container ships, jumbo jets and diesel trucks.

Like its predecessor, NAFTA, the TPP will allow multinationals the freedom to scour the globe in search of the cheapest and most exploitable labor force. Cheap labor and dirty energy are the twin engines of deregulated global capitalism. The planet and all living things pay a terrible price. Ilana Solomon tells us that, “The climate movement must stand up to the free trade rules and ideology that helped get us into this climate mess and that will thwart our ability to solve it…” Just so. One thing we can do is communicate with our members of Congress, especially with new members, who are coming in and maybe haven’t yet been mobbed by corporate lobbyists. Tell them we don’t want fast track. We don’t want the TPP.

Carol Henning serves on the Executive Committee of the Angeles Chapter.