Trade agreements are about more than business—they’re about who has final say in the way people around the world live, what they eat, how much they are paid, what medicines they can buy and whether they have jobs. Such agreements shape economic policies that impact billions of people. The discussions surrounding these agreements are far too important to done in secret. But that’s precisely how the Obama administration is trying to pass the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) (http://inthesetimes.com/article/16044/ttip_the_next_corporate_friendly_trade_deal).


More... (http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/17732/joseph_stiglitz_on_the_trans_pacific_partnership_this_is_a_big_deal/)

Joseph Stiglitz on the Trans Pacific Partnership: “This Is A Big Deal”
BY Alexandros Orphanides


Members of the American Federation of Government Employees rally against the TPP in May 2014. (AFGE / Flickr)
Trade agreements are about more than business—they’re about who has final say in the way people around the world live, what they eat, how much they are paid, what medicines they can buy and whether they have jobs. Such agreements shape economic policies that impact billions of people. The discussions surrounding these agreements are far too important to done in secret. But that’s precisely how the Obama administration is trying to pass the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP).

What Is TPP?

The TPP is a massive trade agreement between the United States, Canada, Chile, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. Observers like Miraya Solis, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, have called it “the most ambitious trade initiative pursued by the Obama Administration.”

Proponents of the TPP argue that the agreement will encourage global economic integration, increase U.S. competitiveness in a “dynamic Asia region” and stimulate political reform leading to more “open” markets. All this, they claim, will result in better jobs, wages and products.

Critics of the agreement say it amounts to the promulgation of corporate globalization and neoliberalization and have likened it to “NAFTA on steroids.” In a recent interview in Salon, Noam Chomsky described the TPP’s aims as to “maximize profit and domination and to set the working people of the world in competition with one another, to lower wages and increase insecurity, ... [and] to protect at the same time ... the top wealth sector.”

In spite of its significance, the mainstream media has not provided little coverage of the TPP. “It’s one of those issues that is deliberately obscured by its proponents," Dan Cantor, National Director of the Working Families Party, says. "When people get a clear explanation, it's like a lightbulb goes off in their head.”

The Community Meeting With Joseph Stiglitz

The Working Families Party of New York has expended considerable effort organizing in Jackson Heights, a diverse, largely immigrant section of New York City, to pressure local Rep. Thomas Crowley. Crowley is a very influential Democrat on the Ways and Means committee who has been evasive about which way he will vote on the issue. According to Cantor, similar efforts to convince reticent politicians of the agreement's dangers have been strong nationwide. In Oregon, the WFP has been working to persuade Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat who has historically supported free trade agreements, to “shift his position” on the issue.

Labor unions, community organizations and Nobel laureates don’t often share a public school auditorium, but that was precisely the constellation of characters that gathered on a recent Wednesday night at P.S. 69 in Jackson Heights to discuss the potential ramifications of the TPP, which is slated for congressional fast-tracking.

Around 400 people attended the community meeting, organized by a variety sponsors, including the WFP, Make the Road New York, Communications Workers of America (CWA), Terraza 7 (a local bar and community space) and others. The crowd of unionized workers, small business owners, activists and local residents filled the elementary school auditorium to discuss the implications of the trade agreement and hear Joseph Stiglitz’s remarks on the agreement. Within the economics discipline, Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner in economics and Columbia University professor, has been one of the TPP’s most outspoken critics.

“One of the reasons you should know [the TPP] is important is that they’ve tried to get it passed without anyone knowing about it,” Stiglitz began. “And that should make you suspicious.” The bill’s backers “always say ... they’re going to create jobs. If that were really true, you’d expect the unions that represent the workers [affected by the bill] to be all in favor of it.”

Alluding to the 2008 financial crisis, he continued, “The people that are in favor [of TPP] are the people in Wall Street.”

Calling on community organizations and unions to ramp up the pressure, he explained that U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman, an appointed government official responsible for negotiating the agreement, “comes from Citibank and does not represent workers or typical Americans—he represents a group of special interests. And that’s why the only way it is going to be defeated is if there is an outpouring of concern and … action.”

A fundamental component surrounding the TPP debate is the process by which the Obama administration is trying to have it approved called fast tracking, a procedure for Congressional approval of international trade treaties. Unlike the standard procedure to pass a bill, by which members of Congress debate and deliberate on specific provisions, fast tracking allows Congress to vote “up” or “down” on the trade agreement without making any amendments or opening any of the specific provisions.

While advocates of fast track argue that the process provides the president with a necessary strong mandate when negotiating international agreements, Stiglitz found that mandate problematic. “There is a great deal of secrecy.” The U.S. trade representative hasn’t allowed some members of Congress to review the deal’s content.

“It’s much worse than a blank check about trade," Stiglitz said, "because the trade agreement has provisions that would affect a whole set of regulations that would affect the environment, worker safety, consumer safety and even the economy." TPP "would not only become the law of the land, but every other law would have to adapt to it ... and our Congress would have given up all authority in those areas.

“What are they trying to hide?” he asked.

Without naming names, Stiglitz explained that members of the business community have been privy to the agreement and have negotiated on the behalf of private interests rather than the public good.

Academics, he said, generally see it differently “even among those who were earlier supporters of free trade. ... There is an increasing recognition that today in the American economy, ... we are in a situation where the job-destroying aspects of these agreements is assured to be greater than job-creating aspects.”

He explained that the content of the TPP does not emphasize the traditional concepts of trade agreements, such as lowering tariffs and increasing imports or exports. Instead, the TPP seeks to undermine regulations in sectors like food safety, medicine and intellectual property, rendering governments and the citizenry that elects them inept in their ability to meaningfully regulate those sectors. By entangling such provisions with an agreement on international trade, the Obama administration would open up sovereign countries to unprecedented levels of interference by multinational corporations.

As a cautionary example, Stiglitz contended that countries which had been ravaged by globalization, seeing massively expanding inequality like Brazil and India, refused to join the trade agreement.

At the conclusion of the speech, audience members asked about the mainstream media’s silence on the agreement and the TPP’s potential impact on the environment. He opined that the media coverage would likely increase as the decision drew nearer, but emphasized the role that organized mobilizations could play in increasing visibility. On the environment, Stiglitz explained that the regulatory clauses in agreement could be disastrous as countries would lose the ability to regulate multinationals in sectors that could adversely impact profits.

After the event the room was abuzz with conversation. Reggie Pierre Louis, a member of the CWA, told In These Times, “This deal is going to destroy the fabric of American workers, the spirit of what’s supposed to be a democratic nation.”

Asked whether he worried about the implications of the TPP for him personally, he remarks, “Potentially, because once they start with this, who knows what’s next. How does this protect us from corporate greed and corporate malfeasance?”

Mala Huacuja del Toro was at the meeting with Somos Los Otros New York, an organization that grew out of the reaction to the recent mass murder of Mexican students.

“We fought NAFTA and we lost. Our lives changed completely; millions of Mexicans were forced to sell their lands and escape to urban places controlled by organized crime or to cross the border and become cheap labor in the U.S,” she says. These agreements help neither the Mexican people nor the U.S. people. And they are not represented by the people because they are signed in secret.”

Sounding optimistic about the potential to stop the TPP during a phone call several days after the event, the Working Families Party’s Cantor says, “I feel we're up against the strongest actors in the world capitalist system, but they don't actually have popular support. We've got a real chance to block this.”

Full disclosure: The CWA is a sponsor of In These Times. Sponsors have no role in editorial content.

Alexandros Orphanides

Well, I don't know what chance there really is at stopping this thing but i should be tried. If it is to be stopped then a significant section of the ruling class must come on board.

Well, I don't know what chance there really is at stopping this thing but i should be tried. If it is to be stopped then a significant section of the ruling class must come on board.

I am pessimistic, too. I can't see a large enough number of US oligarchs opposing this thing - too many will reap massive rewards. It is always a bad bet to bet against these capitalist fucks need to accumulate.

Congress’s Cat Burglars Are Pulling a Fast One on TPP

http://www.commondreams.org/sites/default/files/styles/cd_large/public/views-article/fasttrack_2.jpg?itok=Y5qt3uwW

byBill Moyers, Bernard Weisberger4 Comments
At a New York City Day of Action against Fast Track and the TPP last year. (Photo: Stop FastTrack-Wendy Colucci/flickr/cc)
“With cat-like tread upon our foes we steal.” So boasted Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance as they decided to try a little burglary for a change. And “steal” is the appropriate word.

It’s hardly a surprise that Republican congressional leaders and their cadre of Democratic allies spurred on by Barack Obama are resorting to a bagful of parliamentary tricks to put the Trans-Pacific Partnership on a “take it or leave it but you can’t change it” fast-track to enactment by Tuesday.

“Resistance is crucial. Pass the word. Write, call, e-mail, visit or communicate with your senators by whatever means available.”No sooner had the first round gone to pro-democracy forces than Speaker Boehner – forever remembered as the man who handed out tobacco lobby checks to members on the House floor — promptly scheduled a new vote allowing time to bring pressure on naysayers.

Remember when Tom De Lay, the former House Republican majority leader used to stop the clock of a legislative day at five minutes to midnight, the lobbyists’ favorite witching hour? That way he could whipsaw doubters into line behind something President George W. Bush wanted but couldn’t get through Congress in the open.

Boehner learned a lot from watching DeLay, and now he, Senate Majority Leader Mitch (“Mr. Dark Money”) McConnell, and assorted cronies are consorting to deliver to Mr. Obama the goods he has promised multinational conglomerates in the laughable name of “free trade.” And they are doing it the old-fashioned congressional way: hocus pocus.

The bill was reintroduced last Thursday, unaccompanied by a controversial provision to assist workers displaced by the pact, and passed 218 to 208. It now returns to the Senate for approval in its new form and there its opponents will make a last stand on Tuesday.

What a terrible contraption it still is, conceived in secret with the imprimatur of multinational corporate attorneys and dedicated to the proposition that American workers are expendable, the environment is mere foodstuff to swell profit margins, and sovereign American laws are subject to second-opinion lawsuits by foreign companies. “What looks like a stone wall to a layman,” a humorist of an earlier century once wrote, “is a triumphal arch to a corporation lawyer.”

This bag of tricks is full of deceptive arguments. Fast-track proponents claim that expanded trade will be good for everybody by creating plentiful new jobs here in the US. Unfortunately, specific examples and illustrations are conspicuously lacking.

International Business Times has just published a new report examining the known text of the TPP treaty that shows it would provide special legal rights to corporations that it denies to unions, small businesses and other public interest, environmental and civic groups. Specifically, while President Obama keeps repeating the misleading promise that the deal would “level the playing field,” instead, the TPP would let corporations sue in international tribunals to try to overturn labor, environmental and human rights laws while prohibiting public-interest groups from suing in the same tribunals. How’s that for a “level playing field?” Please, Mr. President, how about you leveling with us?

They say that without the treaty, America will be pushed out of its strong role in the world’s economy by China and a potential list of Asian satellites. If so, why is it we only know about the terms of the treaty through leaks, or a carefully condensed and edited online site, or a version available to Congress only on heavily restrictive terms? And why an end run around the Constitution by giving the president a sovereign power to deny the members of Congress their right to offer amendments against provisions that they believe harm the interests of their districts? What on earth would the Founding Fathers think?

Let’s go back to 1787 and 1788 for some answers.

To begin with, the idea of secrecy appalled them. It’s true that the Constitutional Convention deliberated in secret, but that was for the very practical purpose of allowing members freely to take or change positions as the document was put together, piece by piece, until the final draft was completed. Then it was immediately released to the public and to the state ratifying conventions for debate that actually resulted in post-adoption changes (that’s how we got those first 10 amendments, the Bill of Rights.)

Even so, the secrecy troubled many. Thomas Jefferson wrote to his friend John Adams: “I am sorry they began their deliberations by so abominable a precedent as that of tying up the tongues of their members. Nothing can justify this example but the innocence of their intentions and ignorance of the value of public discussions.”

The writer of a letter to a Philadelphia newspaper in 1787 — who self-identified as a former officer in the Continental Army and presumably had earned the right to speak out even against the framers of the government that his patriotism and sacrifice helped make possible — was furious:

The injunction of secrecy imposed on the members of the late Convention during their deliberations was obviously dictated by the genius of Aristocracy… Whatever specious reasons may be assigned for secrecy during the framing of the plan, no good one can exist, for leading the people blindfolded into the implicit adoption of it. Such an attempt does not augur the public good. It carries on the face of it an intention to juggle the people out of their liberties … the unaccountable SUPPRESSION OF THEIR JOURNALS [was] the highest insult that could be offered to the majesty of the people.

What do we know of the anonymous draftsmen of the TPP treaty now slithering through the back corridors of Congress? What’s the reason for taking the right of consideration away from both Senate and House? According to TPP’s defenders, it’s that other nations will refuse to participate in the treaty unless there’s a guarantee that its terms will not be changed by some future action of Congress.

Think about that for a minute! The Congress of the United States — that’s our elected representatives, folks — has to guarantee forever and a day that future elected governments won’t be able to alter or even repudiate decisions made in 2015? Nonsense! When has that ever deterred sovereign nations from making good faith agreements with each other? Come to think of it, what sovereign would ever tie the hands of his descendants and future generations of his people in that way, much less a democratically elected leader?

Getting back to the framers, above all, any clear and careful reading of the debates in Philadelphia confirms that they were as suspicious as a veteran detective of any exclusive power given to the president that had a whiff of royalty about it — like, for instance, a right to bypass congressional consideration of a measure. Some of the hardest and longest struggles on the floor were over the presidency — who should elect him, for how long, with what compensation and with what causes (if any) for removal. Endowing the chief executive of government with enough energy and freedom to do a competent job, but keeping him on a long leash was the conundrum that has hung over almost every presidency since Washington’s.

In The Federalist No. 75, Alexander Hamilton, (who personally favored monarchy but knew it was impossible to impose on Americans who had just thrown off a king) put it with his usual powerful logic in explaining why the president had to get the Senate’s advice and consent to a treaty. Certainly the president should not have a crowd of pesky lawmakers criticizing his every move while actually dealing with foreign nations — and yet:

The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue, which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world, at the sole disposal of a magistrate created and circumstanced as would be a president of the United States. … It must indeed be clear, to a demonstration, that the joint possession of the power in question, by the president and senate, would afford a greater prospect of security than the separate possession of it by either of them.

So once again: Why the secrecy and what’s the hurry? Why the snatching of power from Congress and the assault on US sovereignty in the defense of corporate interests? Why the threats of disaster if there’s any delay? Why the bum’s rush to hand to any president – especially one as pro-corporate as Barack Obama – such complete power over so vital a matter as trade? This country can have expanded trade and laws that guard the environment, the rights and economic health of American workers, and the competition of small entrepreneurs. This treaty can be worked out by debate and compromise. But not if the fix is in — not if Boehner, McConnell and Obama put a fast one over on us.

Resistance is crucial. Pass the word. Write, call, e-mail, visit or communicate with your senators by whatever means available. Alert friends and kin. With apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan, the cat burglars of Congress are back — with yet another stealth attack on democracy.

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/06/23/congresss-cat-burglars-are-pulling-fast-one-tpp

Oh, the outrage, the drama! If Bill Moyers is so fucking smart why couldn't he see this coming if a blind pig could? From the beginning this was too big to fail, and we know how that works.....

Bill Moyers, like Robert Reich, always comes in with the alarms and warnings after it is already too late. That way, they get to be "progressive" and on the "right side", but not actually run the risk of stopping anything. And now it is those evil Republicans and "Mr" Obama who are to blame. Oh, doesn't it just make you so mad! We should support Bernie, and when he folds, support Hillary, that'll show those evil-doers whats whats!

Bill Moyers, like Robert Reich, is a douche...