There are those who are concerned that we might be facing Corporate
Takeover. Allow me to put their fears to rest.
It's already happened.
Agreements such as the TPP are merely frosting on the well established
Corporate Cake.
We are now at the point of no return. Continuing to pretend that we
working class Americans have some say in the Empire's government, or
that this still is "our government", will guarantee our total
enslavement. The Empire holds all the cards except one. That one is
the will of the people. We do not need to meekly allow the Empire to
crush us, but we will first need to wake up to the understanding that
we've been duped for generations.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/27/15, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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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