Slow down the TPP fast-track
This secretive trade pact, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which has been quietly under negotiation by corporate lawyers and trade representatives for years, is finally surfacing to public attention as Congress is set to vote for ‘Fast Track’ authority, which would limit Congress’s role to a simple up-or-down vote. Last Wednesday, WikiLeaks blew the lid off the deal by releasing the TPP chapter on investment and arbitration. The contents are shockingly anti-democratic. The nearly total secrecy is by design: you aren’t supposed to know until it’s a done deal.
The TPP, if enacted, would transfer the capacity of national, state, and local governments to regulate healthcare, labor rights, the financial sector, and the environment to special TPP corporate tribunals, which have the power to sue our federal, state or local governments for compensation over laws and regulations that they deem would cause “loss of expected profit” or create a “competitive burden.”
The TPP tribunal consists of three judges (who can include corporate lawyers on temporary leave from their day jobs) with the power to levy fines in the billions of dollars against any country that passes environmental or labor regulations that they adjudicate a “restraint of free trade.” We will never get to vote on these guys, but we will be on the hook as taxpayers for these fines. As one union leader I know stated, “The TPP is for those who think Chinese labor is getting too expensive.” Don’t even think about banning GMOs in Sonoma County! That would land us in the dock at the Tribunal, paying fines to Monsanto.
The TPP would subvert our national sovereignty and end any prospect for a decent progressive policy agenda. The fundamentally anti-democratic TPP framework would legally enshrine corporate profits over human needs and the health of the planet. There is a case to be made for harmonizing international trade regulations, but that cannot be a lop-sided exercise that grants the benefits to the global corporate elite at the expense of global society. The magnitude of the impacts on the struggling American working class from such a consequential and fundamental transformation of the global trade regime must be carefully examined in Congressional hearings in the light of day.
We need a full public airing of the TPP to avoid repeating the historical errors of previous ‘Fast-Track’ deals like NAFTA and CAFTA, which led to the de-industrialization of the American economy, mass unemployment in the formerly robust U.S. manufacturing sector through outsourcing to low-wage Third World countries, and the collapse of the Mexican and Central American agrarian peasant economy. Those disastrous trade regimes are the direct causal link to the mass undocumented immigration of millions of desperate Mexican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan rural farm workers who had their economic life-line cut out from under them by NAFTA and CAFTA.
Opposition to the TPP has deepened the emerging progressive coalition of labor and environmentalists in Sonoma County. The North Bay Labor Council, Sierra Club National, and the locally-based Sonoma County Conservation Action have all taken a strong position against TPP ‘Fast-Track.”
As Junior Romero, field organizer, Sierra Club National, and Denny Rosatti, executive director, SCCA, have written: “The massive trade deal between the United States and 11 countries along the Pacific Rim would affect nearly every aspect of our lives, including our food sources, air and water quality, wages and jobs. It would harm our environment by allowing big polluters and foreign corporations to sue the U.S. government over policies designed to protect our air, water and communities.”
The AFL-CIO is so committed to this issue that they have pledged to withhold contributions to Congressional Democrats who have not taken a position against ‘Fast-Track’ authority. In terms of our California Congressional delegation, Rep. Jared Huffman and Sen. Barbara Boxer have staked out positions calling for full review of the TPP, while Rep. Mike Thompson and Sen. Dianne Feinstein have still not, to my knowledge, shown their hand on ‘Fast-Track’ authority re-authorization.
The smart money political experts tell us that the only real hope for defeating TPP in its current form is to oppose reauthorization of the expired ‘Fast Track’ authority in Congress. Contact your Senator or Congressional representative and demand that they hold public hearings on the TPP. Once the TPP gets to Congress under ‘Fast Track’, its game over, given the vast amount of corporate lobby money that has already been spent to get the TPP done.
Do you get why they wanted to keep this so quiet?
Now that you’re informed and want to take action, here’s what you can do. Join us at a rally, Communities United Against Fast-Track, at noon on April 8, at 2751 Napa Valley Corporate Drive, Bldg 2, in Napa. The event is sponsored by Sierra Club National and the Citizen’s Trade Council.
