Deconstructing Trade Myths

"Free trade" could bear no more ironic moniker, no matter how many times President Obama claims that new treaties will be good for America and that "nothing is secret.” Trade deals are easy to dismiss as obscure or bureaucratic, but the trickle-down effects will be visceral. The two critical-to-watch trade treaties pending are the Trans-Pacific Partnership, among 12 nations of the Pacific Rim, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, between Europe and the US. It can seem pointless or futile to fight esoteric trade laws, but at this juncture our apathy will be our death sentence. The TPP/TTIP threaten our entire democracy, but multinational companies and corporatist politicians stand to gain from everything we lose--droves of US jobs, labor rights, banking regulations, environmental protections, internet freedom, affordable pharmaceuticals, food safety inspections, and the semblance of control over our political system.

The TPP and TTIP were written in secret with the help of 600 corporate advisors. No part of them has been released to the public except through WikiLeaks. Congress is currently debating Fast Track legislation for the TPP, which would allow Obama to advance the deal; Congress would be presented with a final form of it for an up-or-down vote, no debate or amendments allowed. Fast Track would tie Congress's hands and leave the fallout of the deals to neoliberal inertia. The Senate has already approved it.

The Obama administration is vociferously promoting these deals, and may yet get their wish to see them fulfilled. On Friday, Congress approved Fast Track (or TPA, Trade Promotional Authority) by a narrow margin, but the entire package is stalled due to a failure to pass the TAA, Trade Adjustment Assistance, which was meant to help workers who would be impacted by the TPP--and funding that aid by cutting Medicare.

TPP and its accompanying components will likely be back up for another round next week, so this fight is far from over. Most Democrats voted against the trade bills, but Obama and the Republicans continue pushing the issue. John Kerry and Ash Carter recently published an article in USA Today, twisting the script to attempt to portray the TPP in the favorable light it does not deserve.

To begin with, Kerry and Carter claim that the "TPP is an indispensable tool for one of the most important projects of our time. Since World War II, U.S. leadership of the global trading system has helped usher in an era of peace and prosperity unparalleled in history. It has brought jobs to our shores, partners to our defense and peace and prosperity to those around the world who have embraced openness, fairness and freedom." While there is no doubt that expanding US influence around the world has been one of this country's "most important projects," that the TPP is a tool to further that cause is less than comforting. US leadership of just about anything has not "usher[ed] in an era of peace and prosperity" in any way visible to most inhabitants of the world.

Rather, since World War II, US leadership of the global trading system has helped entrench neoliberalism, promote the fallacy that the Cold War was "won" with the triumph of capitalism, further stratify the world in terms of the one percent and all the rest, ensure corporate control of industries, livelihoods, and governments, and accelerate a race to the bottom in terms of health, safety, and environmental and working conditions. The peace and prosperity that Kerry and Carter claim responsibility for? Not so apparent.

Additionally, trade deals have historically sucked jobs away from our shores, as lifting trade barriers has consistently led to waves of outsourcing as employers depart for the countries with the cheapest labor. Kerry and Carter did add a qualifier for the "peace and prosperity" they assure us we've been seeing--it has been delivered only "to those around the world who have embraced openness, fairness and freedom." Perhaps the countries whom we have brought to our side--or forcibly restructured to our liking--have been rewarded with that peace and prosperity, though it still seems elusive. Capitalism we have certainly delivered, and all the trappings of neoliberalism, but peace and prosperity are not quite what those seem to accomplish. Rising unemployment and falling wages are the more customary accompaniments when a country has had its trading system pried open and convinced to "embrace openness, fairness, and freedom." Perhaps the "openness" that discussed here is not the same kind referenced in discussions of that other "openness" phenomenon, "transparency."

Kerry and Carter also seem to be laboring under the delusion that continued US leadership in the Asia-Pacific region is what the inhabitants of those countries want (or perhaps what we have judged that they need). US presence there ought not to be looked on as quite so rosy, however: Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, and the Philippines, at least, should recall well the consequences of excessive US presence in their region. Perhaps a good, novel idea could be allowing the people whose region it is to exercise the leadership of said region. Our trade ambassador-cheerleaders assure us that "in meeting after meeting across the region, we hear calls about the importance of TPP and the desire for more U.S. engagement," but remember that the meetings they were conducting were with government echelons, not the people in the countries whom these trade regulations--or deregulations--would strip even more control from.

They do add that the "TPP would help us promote a global order that reflects our interests and our values," which is probably true. Those interests and values, however, are rarely protected in the public interest or in such a way that they value the lives of the faraway people on the ground who must deal with their ramifications. The "cooperation, accountability and greater respect for human dignity" that Kerry and Carter insist TPP would bring lack historical precedent in the "tradition" that they say the TPP continues. NAFTA certainly did not deliver; nor has any other notable free-trade agreement.

"One of the greatest bulwarks against the spread of violent extremism is to replace poverty with opportunity, and TPP would create economic growth and unlock opportunities for workers and businesses across the region." Yet who locked those opportunities in the first place? Poverty is not a naturally occurring phenomenon, nor is it an unfortunate consequence of lazy backward people who don't know how to work in an industrialized advanced economy. It is a byproduct of the same kind of global economic system that the TPP (and TTIP) would deepen ever further: Kerry and Carter may claim that "the alternative [to the TPP] is a race to the bottom," but that is no alternative. That is precisely the race Congress would be signing us up for by choosing Fast Track/Trade Promotional Authority, let alone the TPP itself.

The other unpleasant side effect Kerry and Carter would attribute to the failure to approve the TPP is that without it, "America's influence abroad" would be "undercut." In the next breath, they invoke the threat of China, who might arise to fill the power vacuum that the lack of TPP would ostensibly create. And so now we come to one of the core reasons these government officials are cheerleading so hard for this deal that is the virtual photographic negative of everything they paint it to be: China. The possible challenger on the horizon, the threat to our hegemony, to our influence abroad, to that most pristine economic record of delivering the "peace and prosperity" they're sure you've been experiencing... Allowing China to gain a handle on trade in its region might, yes, perhaps "reward those quickest to abandon values and compete at any cost." But that path of global trade and policies will not be one for China to blaze alone--we have walked it first, and over and over again. The TPP will be a familiar jaunt down that same road, though the destination could be darker than ever before, given the enormous threat of climate change that Kerry and Carter blithely skip over. They assure us that the TPP will contain stronger environmental regulations than ever before, but that should be neither reassuring nor placating.

From what little we know of the TPP, it is clear that activism of any stripe is on the chopping block, from human rights to the environment. One especially ominous clause is called State-Investor Dispute Settlement: it establishes secret tribunals in which multinational corporations could bring lawsuits against any country’s laws or public safety regulations on the grounds that those laws hinder profits. The implications of such unrestrained power are enormous, inhibiting the struggles for justice of everyone from environmentalists to labor unions to Boycott-Divest-Sanctions activists in Palestine.

The Obama administration, Republicans, and Kerry and Carter, here, insist that the TPP will "revitalize and expand the system that has served us so well." I don't doubt that the system has served them well, but it might do them well to remember that the word "us" extends far beyond the corporate captains of this sinking ship.

We've seen this before. We are choosing to repeat history. Already, under NAFTA (which eliminated a million US workers' jobs as manufacturers departed for the cheapest labor), corporations have sued the US, Canada, and Mexico, claiming that their profits are being hampered by consumer- or environment-protection regulations. The TPP/TTIP would only make cases like these more rampant.

At a point where we need to force serious action against climate change and grant rights to the poor, oppressed, and disenfranchised, the TPP/TTIP are a recipe for disaster. This is no "new-and-improved" trade deal. It's not improved, and it isn't even new--it's the same old toxic medicine, with stakes higher than ever. If ever there were a time for the US to change its foreign and economic policies and begin learning better, urgent lessons from history (and current events), that time is now.

USA Today article:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/06/08/tpp-tpa-trade-democrats-vote-house-obama-column/28566641/