In my Italian class last year, we were supposed to use the phrase “ho paura” to explain what we were afraid of. I racked my brain for fears and then wondered how on earth I was supposed to say “climate change, humans’ indifference, torture, slow degenerative diseases, and the future” in Italian.
I have another fear to add to the list: trade deals. It sounds almost laughable to write it--“one of my greatest fears is toxic global trade deals”--and I certainly can’t say it in Italian. But ever since the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership was finally released to the public and jumped back into the public consciousness (or the very margins, at least), I have found myself terrified to imagine the condition of the world should we fail to stop this deal.
For most of the fight against Congress authorizing Fast Track legislation, I was getting emails from various groups all delineating the disastrous impact of one or another specific aspects of the TPP--food safety, environmental protection, internet freedom, and so on. Therefore I was able to amass knowledge about this juggernaut without contemplating as a whole its colossally alarming potential (and during the Fast Track fight, there was still a hope that maybe the whole deal could end right there, but now it’s even closer at hand). Lately, though, watching hashtags like #TPPworsethanwethought floating around Twitter and listening to conference calls packed with litanies of disastrous provisions, I’m getting overwhelmed. And honestly, quite scared.
Trade is one of those issues easily brushed under the rug. It sounds about as interesting as the federal budget or the ingredients in a piece of candy and has effects just as visceral, unrecognized, and potentially harmful. It also sounds benign--who could be opposed to trade? It has the connotation of exchange, of bartering and negotiation and equality, more or less. What it actually represents, much of the time, is a trade-off--of human rights, environmental and health and food protections, internet freedom, democracy.
I have trouble even explaining to people how much is at stake, because I have so little to offer on what we can do. Protest. Be aware. Spread the word. But when I’m explaining to my friends the procedures by which corporations can sue governments in secret courts, it’s hard to come up with a solution that seems commensurate to the danger I’m talking about.
As a high school student, I see our world--the world I am inheriting--standing on a catastrophic precipice, one that endangers the future of us all but especially of my generation and younger generations. We are faced with a drastic, devastating environmental crisis that demands the fastest, strongest action possible. We are also faced with a crisis of democracy, as power concentrates ever more in the hands of the corporatist elite, and global inequality deepens.
It’s all been said before, with most alarming detail and gravity in analyses by Public Citizen and Food & Water Watch, from which I draw heavily for my facts here, but I’ll say it again.
Now is the worst possible time for a trade deal such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Despite the Obama administration’s bleating assurances, this deal is a death sentence for our rights, health, safety, and future. Giveaways to pharmaceutical corporations will ensure that prices for drugs are completely contingent on a company’s whims, and the extension of patent terms to 12 years will make it harder and harder to obtain cheaper, generic forms of medications, especially for low-income people and those in underdeveloped countries. As someone who relies on medications to treat chronic illnesses, this prospect leaves me furious and frightened. Meanwhile, I would have an increasingly hard time paying for those medications if I happened to enter a field of work that, under the TPP, will be competing with 60-cent wages in Vietnam and 13-year-old workers in Malaysia. Brunei does not even have a minimum wage, and the TPP requires only that it establish one, which could be as low as Brunei wishes. 1 million or more jobs were lost in the US due to NAFTA; this time, with 40% of the world’s trade involved, the losses are likely to be even worse. Will one of those eliminated jobs be mine?
The countries whose labor standards will precipitate a race to the bottom are also countries with whom we ought not to be doing business in any case, given their abysmal human rights records. Brunei maintains the death penalty for vulnerable groups like LGBTQ people and unwed mothers. Vietnam practices mass-scale persecution of dissidents. Malaysia’s appalling record on failing to address human trafficking for sex and labor gave them one of the world’s worst human rights records--at least until the US raised that rating to a higher level so as to make it legally and morally permissible to trade with Malaysia. The trouble is, that higher rating was not accompanied by any material change in Malaysia’s behavior; in fact, two mass graves have since been discovered there. Reuters reports that the rating change was for “geopolitical” reasons. Therefore, no shift in behavior was necessary for Malaysia to receive this higher rating, thereby stripping them of any incentive to improve their policies. The US is no paragon of morality and unerring respect for human rights, but to make trade deals with countries so notorious for perpetuating brutality with impunity is to condone such paradigms.
Another issue the TPP fails--“epically,” one could say--to address is the environment and climate change. Nowhere in the entire deal is climate change mentioned, and the language, employing words like “discourage” or “it is suggested,” used to supposedly establish environment protections is appallingly toothless. In a time when all our energies must be focused on stopping climate change and rearranging our reliance of finite fuel sources, the TPP could not be a worse proposal. It will expedite and increase exports of liquidated natural gas (LNG), which comes from fracked wells. Japan is already the top importer of LNG, and the TPP will further increase such exports. It’s a good boon to oil and gas corporations, while prices are low, as it will accelerate fracking even while public opposition to it grows.
Such opposition may be rendered meaningless, furthermore, because of the Investor-State Dispute Settlement clause (ISDS), which establishes that corporations can sue governments in secret tribunals over future lost profits due to regulations (more corporations than are already allowed to do this, anyway). If safeguards against chemicals or fraud or such are deemed “expropriation” against the easy flow of business, corporations can sue, allegedly in protection of their “anticipated earnings.” There is also nothing that forbids a judge on one of these secret tribunals to play a dual role and also have ties to the corporations bringing the suit. Already, Quebec’s moratorium on fracking has come under fire in such arbitration procedures. The cost of defending local laws may be too high for officials to bother trying make such laws to protect people.
It is said that the TPP would render meaningless and essentially undo any progress to be made on climate frameworks at the upcoming Paris climate talks. This possibility terrifies me, and the irony is staggering that Obama and his supporters on this deal can possibly speak of his positive climate legacy and claim to be working to preserve the earth for rising generations--like mine--while promoting deals like this one.
The one positive thing the TPP takes any enforceable stand on is an effort to fight the illegal rhino horn trade. But there is no mention of or mechanism for curtailing or punishing illegal whaling, a major problem in TPP countries like Japan and Singapore. There are no protections against tuna bycatch problems or the illegal wildlife trade. It is suggested that countries “undertake as appropriate” steps to combat these issues. Such language renders supposedly progressive or “strict” regulations completely toothless and unenforceable. In the past, even where enforceable provisions did exist, our government shied away from actually using them to bring challenges in situations like the import of possibly treaty-violating illegally logged timber from Peru. So this deal may change little in terms of what may actually happen, but this time there will not even be the option of enforcing environmental, health, or labor regulations, for they do not exist.
Meanwhile, though those protections are nonexistent or nonbinding, the protections of commercial interests are very binding. The TPP is worse than FTAs from late in the Bush administration--and are also worse than was even required under Fast Track. The TPP promotes ease of trade and profits at every possible opportunity, instead of health and safety for consumers, workers, and people in general. As well as environmental and labor, food safety laws are also eviscerated: TPP countries could challenge the US when our inspectors stop shipments at our borders in order to check for safety. This effective second-guessing of our safety inspections encourages fewer of them and promotes the shifting of such oversight to a private certification system, not independent or even government-run. This exposes us to huge food risks--we already import 2 billion pounds of seafood from TPP countries, food which may come from industrial farming systems with overcrowding, bad water, and harmful or unapproved chemicals. Currently, such shipments can be blocked, but with TPP, they could not be.
The trouble with trade deals--or with fighting them, since the trouble with the deals themselves is what I’ve spent a good several hundred words laying out--is that they don’t sound bad. Or they sound bad, but not too bad. Like, they could be made better. Like, we should reject this version of the TPP but then go back to the drawing board and try to fix it later instead of scrapping the whole thing.
I’ve had this conversation with people perfectly rational and well-versed in environmental activism and other fields, and many of them are still reluctant to denounce the TPP totally. In sort of a don’t-throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater mentality, they want to believe there is something worth saving in the TPP--if you apparently missed every nuance of the climate chapter and think the environmental protections are actually laudable, like David Shribman in the Jewish World Review, or if you’re Jeffrey Sachs, who acknowledges that the deal is too toxic to be passed, but believes that a better version is possible. Given Sachs’s record (no matter how reformed he may seem) on neoliberal policies and blind-eye turning towards the disastrous effects of such, I suppose it’s a marker of serious alarm that Sachs opposes it at all. In many cases, perhaps, a gradient response is a good thing, to pick out and acknowledge both the heinous and the decent. But as for the TPP, this baby deserves to drown.
The other attitude I run into, again with people who want to find some avenue in which the TPP is less reprehensible, ask me why Obama supports it. If this deal is truly so terrible, why does our so-called liberal president, with all his talk of protecting the environment and middle class, defend it so vociferously? If he’s such a staunch advocate, it really can’t be as bad as it seems, right?
I’ve been rolling out my arguments on this point for a while now--Obama wants to get this passed as a final crowning achievement to prove his presidency can accomplish things, or Obama appreciates the TPP’s potential to hamper China’s growth and reduce their “threat” potential since they’ll be kept out of this major trade pact. These are valid reasons, I believe, but there’s something more basic, too: the TPP is pro-business to the extreme; it is a distillation of every tenet of unfettered capitalism, and for every piece of liberal-esque rhetoric Obama has ever so enticingly offered us, this virulent strain of profits-first, people-as-afterthought free-marketism has never been something he has fought against. The TPP is a corporate Christmas-come-early served on a silver platter, and Obama and his administration--though not to say that he is the first or worst of this kind--are predictably happy to deliver it. Obama and his halo of wholesomeness persist, but this image must be challenged. It is not so hard to understand why so many politicians support deals like the TPP.
The TPP is simple. It is 2700 pages of rules written by the corporations, for the corporations, and against the people. There is nothing important to our safety and standards of living that this pact does not put at risk. It is a shameful deal. And shameful--not to mention deceitful or downright delusional--is anyone who lauds it as positive, progressive, necessary, or even benign. It will be anything but, unspeakably so. Those who know must not be paralyzed or give up; those who straddle the fence and want to believe in markets as a force for good must choose their sides. This fight is not a wholly doomed one, but it had better be fierce and it had better be now. I am terrified of what trade deals like this promise us, of the even more corporatized world they promise, but I am also afraid that in the end it will be less that they have succeeded than that we have failed. I am terrified to think that we will be waiting until we experience every deleterious effect firsthand before we realize the plank we have walked.