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A 2014 protest in Tokyo against the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. (Shizuo Kambayashi / AP) |
The release Thursday of the 5,544-page text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership—a
trade and investment agreement involving 12 countries comprising nearly
40 percent of global output—confirms what even its most apocalyptic
critics feared.
“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.”
“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 of 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, writes a regular column for Truthdig every Monday. Hedges' most recent book is "Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt."
Source: Truthdig
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