I think one other point is that all these trade agreements are an attempt to
stifle China's economic and military power.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey
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Sent: Saturday, June 27, 2015 11:04 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] TPPA: Capitalism at its predatory best
http://socialistaction.org/tppa-capitalism-at-its-predatory-best/
TPPA: Capitalism at its predatory best
Published June 26, 2015. | By Socialist Action.
July 2015 TPPA
BY JEFF MACKLER
President Obama was granted “Fast Track” authority by Congress on June 24,
thus clearing the way to rapid passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership
Agreement (TPPA).
The TPPA has been 10 years in the making, including the last six under the
aegis of the Obama administration. The agreement, written in secret by some 600
top corporate advisers, will encompass 40 percent of world trade. It is slated
to be signed by 12 Pacific-rim countries—United States, Australia, Brunei,
Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and
Vietnam.
Despite the Obama administration’s earlier well-orchestrated “failure”
to secure Fast Track approval in Congress, Fast Track and the TPPA were quickly
resurrected in behind-the-scenes maneuvers, including a bipartisan agreement to
separately include the previously disputed Trade Adjustment Assistance program
(TAA). The latter includes, at the request of the AFL-CIO, provisions for a
government-funded program for some of the thousands of U.S. workers expected to
lose their jobs as U.S.
corporations offshore production to low-wage and virtual slave-labor nations
like Vietnam and China.
The Republicans, joined by their “progressive” Democratic Party cohorts, traded
support for this token program when the Obama administration agreed to include
in a separate “non-controversial” African trade bill some multi-billion-dollar
boons to U.S. oil corporations in exchange for the TAA bone to American labor.
Fast Track grants the president the authority to amend the TPPA at will, with
take it or leave it additions or deletions that cannot be altered, negotiated,
or filibustered in the halls of Congress. That is, the basic terms of the TPPA
have been essentially approved by ruling-class corporate negotiators from all
12 nations. When the corporate elite needs to tweak this or that point,
Congress can only vote yes or no.
Fast Track or not, however, big-time trade agreements and other such megadeals,
as with the multi-trillion-dollar bailouts immediately following the economic
meltdown of 2008, are always negotiated behind the scenes before being entered
into the record as law, with the fine print rarely open to public scrutiny.
Fast Track is simply capitalism’s way to make highly lucrative deals quickly,
always at the expense of the working class. To be sure, the general TPPA
package is nothing less than the product of broad-ranging arrangements between
the competing wings of the super-rich and their corporate representatives here
and around the world.
In essence, TPPA, like the earlier North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),
includes hundreds of thousands of secret provisions—each one aimed at fostering
or guaranteeing the profits of one or another U.S.
corporate entity at the expense of its international competitors.
As the only world superpower, the U.S. always leverages its economic might at
the expense of other nations. Either they comply or they are threatened with
being excluded from the world economy through the myriad of devices open almost
exclusively to the United States, including control over vast banking and
credit markets and the world’s only reserve currency, the U.S. dollar—today
printed with abandon and backed by nothing.
Like NAFTA, TPPA has little or nothing to do with “free trade.” It is aimed at
promoting the interests of the U.S. corporations that are world-class
state-of-the-art competitors (free trade for these monopoly giants), while
safeguarding the interests of those sectors of U.S.
capitalism that are technologically inferior and therefore less capable of
competing in the international marketplace. In these latter instances, U.S.
trade and related policies are the opposite of free trade. They are strictly
protectionist; they impose restrictions in innumerable forms, including
tariffs, against more competitive commodities produced abroad.
Little or nothing was known about TPPA until WikiLeaks in 2013 published some
of the basic sections in an eye-opening exposé that shockingly revealed its
predatory nature.
The TPPA is touted as an extension and strengthening of NAFTA, the Clinton
administration’s gift to corporate America. Like NAFTA, which was limited to
the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, the TPPA’s congressional approval is based on the
president’s securing the votes of most Republicans plus sufficient numbers of
Democrats to ram it through.
Like Bill Clinton, Obama considers his legislation central to his “legacy” to
corporate America. Unlike his legacy-burnishing but fake maneuvers to pose as a
kind-hearted liberal when “the great deporter”
used his executive powers to temporarily diminish the horrendous deportation
provisions of current immigrant law, Obama is dead serious about the TPPA. This
measure is nothing less than U.S. capitalism’s grand manifesto—an earthshaking
and massive conglomeration of largely U.S.-imposed agreements in every critical
field of corporate endeavor.
All are aimed at protecting and privileging the U.S. elite at the expense of
other nations and the broad working class.
The TPPA is a “trade” agreement with only five of its 29 sections dealing with
trade! What’s left are sections imposing a massive curtailment of government
regulation of environmental policies, the establishment of new “intellectual
property rights” (that is, extending copyrights and patents to prevent others
from using key products such as life-saving pharmaceuticals), the imposition of
restrictions on internet freedom, and innumerable other measures to strengthen
corporate prerogatives.
The patent restrictions, for example, will preserve and extend Big Pharma’s
monopoly on critical drugs, preventing competitors from manufacturing generic
forms for sale at lower prices. Preservation of the power of these monopolies
will guarantee price increases. “Buy Local” campaigns will be banned or
restricted in the name of “restraint of trade.” Noam Chomsky aptly noted, “It’s
not about trade at all, it’s about investor rights.”
TPPA includes, as with NAFTA, an Investor-State Dispute Settlement
(ISDS) section allowing foreign corporations to sue national governments before
extra-judicial three-member international arbitration tribunals composed of
corporate attorneys rotating as judges one day and corporate advocates the next.
NAFTA’s ISDS sections, virtually unchanged in the TPPA, give these
corporate-appointed “arbitrators” the power “… to issue non-appealable
judgments on claims against domestic laws that corporate claimants believe
violate their right to do business. If corporations win, they are entitled to
financial rewards based upon their projected future profits, payable in
taxpayer’s money.”
Linda Nordquist, quoted immediately above and writing for the Pittsburgh-based
newsletter of the Thomas Merton Center, cites some appropriate examples of ISDS
decisions under NAFTA in which the sovereignty of nation states is subordinated
to global corporations in the name of “free trade.”
Nordquist writes, “2012 Chevron v. Ecuador (Amazonian oil pollution):
Chevron seeks to evade payment of a multi-billion-dollar court ruling against
the company for widespread pollution of the Amazon rainforest.
Ecuadorian courts found that Chevron dumped billions of gallons of toxic water
and dug hundreds of open-air oil sludge pits in Ecuador’s Amazon, poisoning the
communities of some 30,000 Amazon residents, including the entire populations
of six indigenous groups (one of which is now
extinct.) $9.5 billion desperately needed to provide cleanup and healthcare to
afflicted indigenous communities.
“The tribunal in this case ordered Ecuador’s government to violate its own
Constitution and block enforcement of a ruling upheld on appeal in its
independent court system. Pending. To date, several issues decided in Chevron’s
favor.
“2015 Bilcon v. Canada (environmental protection): investor win (seeking $300
million.) Corporation sought to expand basalt quarry in Bay of Fundy, Nova
Scotia. Government rejected on basis of environmental impact report stating
blasting and increased shipping would be hazardous to endangered whales and
salmon; negative effects on tourism and community values.
“Dissent by third lawyer-judge criticized the decision as challenging the right
of government to implement environmental safeguards reflecting community
concerns. Further it would have a ‘chilling effect on future environmental
policies as governments face possible punishing financial awards.’ He noted,
the ruling was a “significant intrusion into domestic jurisdiction,” giving
more power to NAFTA than the Canadian legal system.”
Nordquist properly concludes, “Obama’s TPPA elevates corporations from
personhood to nationhood.” In truth, it’s always been that way.
Labor bureaucrats lay aside their token opposition to TPPA
A sideshow to the carefully orchestrated ruling-class squabble over TPPA was
the subservient role of the AFL-CIO and its president, Richard Trumka. A June
14, 2015, front-page New York Times headline read, “Labor’s Might Seen in
Failure of Trade Deal.” The Times credited labor’s powerful lobbying of
“progressive Democrats” for the initial congressional defeat of Fast Track
approval. Business Day chimed in to tout labor’s power with the headline,
“Labor’s Might Seen in Failure of Trade Deal as Unions Allied to Thwart It.” Of
course, only the naïve believed that TPPA would be derailed by the tragically
impotent AFL-CIO.
Since March, AFL-CIO lobbyists bragged that union members had held 650 events
opposing the TPPA; 160,000 phone calls were made to members of Congress along
with some 20,000 letters sent. The federation also produced digital ads, which
have received more than 30 million views, aimed at several dozen members of
Congress.
“We are very grateful for all the activists, families, community leaders and
elected officials who worked so tirelessly for transparency and worker rights
in international trade deals,” said Richard Trumka. “This was truly democracy
in action.” But the “democracy” and praise for “labor’s power” ended abruptly a
week later.
Originally, Trumka and Co., along with an extremely broad range of
environmental and social justice organizations, had pledged total opposition to
the TPPA, even if TAA provisions were included. But when the chips were down, a
week later Trumka and his fast track opposition team reversed course and agreed
to sign onto Obama’s agenda—providing only that a TAA provision for some labor
compensation for lost jobs was included, one way or another.
With barely a shrug, Trumka’s team of hardened class-collaborationist
bureaucrats, tied to the Democrats hand and foot, jumped ship, leaving its
former environmental (anti-climate crisis/global warming) and social justice
allies in the lurch and once again identifying labor’s future “fortunes” with
the welfare of the U.S. capitalist state and its plundering corporate
institutions.
Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, a longtime ferocious TPPA and NAFTA
advocate, happily engaged in the week-long game of posing as “labor’s friend,”
as did virtually all “progressive Democrats.” As with the Democrats’ granting
Trumka two minutes speaking time at the last Democratic Party national
convention, at a time when virtually no one was present at the convention hall,
the Democrats organized to promote “labor’s cause” for a few days before
cutting yet another secret deal behind their backs.
The TPPA is the modern-day expression of the needs of a world capitalism in
deep crisis. The ruling rich have no solutions other than at the expense of
their corporate competitors and the broad working class of every nation.
Today’s labor movement stands at a low ebb, with its bureaucratic mis-leaders
incapable of offering even the most minimal of challenges to capitalist
austerity. That the AFL-CIO tops focused on organizing member phone calls and
letter writing to its claimed Democratic Party allies, as opposed to exercising
its class power at the point of production, is a testament to its bankruptcy.
A new and fighting labor leadership that operates in the class struggle instead
of in the class collaborationist mode, and organizes in the political arena
independently of and against all capitalist parties, is an absolute necessity.
Today, the gap is glaring between the pent-up anger and hatred of working
people toward the deepening capitalist-imposed austerity and the development of
a conscious fightback. But in time, the insults to labor’s dignity and quality
of life will inevitably fuel unprecedented struggles that will challenge
capitalist rule in all its forms. The precondition for the success of these
struggles will depend on revolutionaries’ sinking deep roots in the coming
struggles and building a mass working-class socialist party capable of ending
capitalist’s inherent horrors once and for all.
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Posted in East Asia, Economy, International, Labor. | Tagged AFL-CIO, NAFTA,
TPPA, Trumka.
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