Sunday, November 22, 2015

Unacceptable Trade Deals and Unconscionable Trade-Offs

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.

Saturday, November 21, 2015

A Volatile Moment, a Moment of Hope

The habit of cynicism dies hard, and it's often difficult to remember, when faced with a world of war and bloodshed and suffering and apathy and looming disaster, that there is always something hopeful to see, if you know where to look.

I've been feeling pretty bleak lately, terrified of everything from trade deals to climate change, and some days it feels like I'm walking with this weight dragging at my thoughts, reminding me of how vast and horrible and devastating our world is. This afternoon, I wasn't sure I was in any shape for attending a protest rally, but activism demands, well, action, and I thought I'd feel worse staying home.

The rally was in protest of Governor Baker's announcement, a few days ago, that Massachusetts would not be accepting Syrian refugees (he has since backtracked). That proclamation, though, was part of exactly the trend that I feared after the Paris attacks: a rise in the vicious rhetoric and actions of xenophobia, of racism, of fear. And after last week's rally against the war on Yemen, I was leery of counterprotestors shouting No one cares, unsure if I could take that again.

But this rally was thoroughly different--estimated at a thousand people present, it was the largest demonstration I've been to in Boston since the Black Lives Matter marches and protests of last year. The speakers were clear, forceful, and emotionally resonant, from various sponsoring organizations but also with an open mic for anyone of Syrian heritage who wanted to say something. The crowd swelled and stayed attentive, especially towards the beginning, echoing chants and cheering wildly. I was astounded to see so many people--I'd been expecting a medium-sized candlelight vigil on the plaza near the train stop, which is what I attended a couple of years ago, the last time the US was toying with the idea of war with Syria (that time, Obama abstained; this time, we're far gone already and the theme this time was fallout, refugees, not prevention).

I also noticed how easily speakers holding forth on the plight of refugees shifted to condemning capitalism, to urging system change and solidarity. This socialist-infused language is not something I've seen outside of quite leftist echo chambers, and I was wary of how the crowd would react at first. But they seemed receptive, and I was enormously gratified--to stand in a sea of a thousand people who chose to come out on a cold Friday night and demand better treatment of people suffering far away, that is a powerful thing. In my city well-entrenched in its indifference and divisions, here was a mass of people who care, who can cheer in response to soliloquies on anything from capitalism to personal stories to connections with Palestine. While I was being cynical, people are waking up. I want to believe that.

The scope of the rally was also impressively broad, despite its purported theme as being support of taking in Syrian refugees. It was also genuinely diverse and intersectional, and instead of platitudes and saviorism, there were comprehensive, hard-hitting analyses of history and how the current Middle East conflict developed, concrete actions for people to take, wrenching personal stories, connections to movements from Black Lives Matter to Palestine to the anti-Boston-2024 Olympics campaign. People spoke about how instead of expecting Muslims to apologize for the actions of extremists claiming to share their religion, it is white Christian society who ought to apologize for the violence done in their name--and the crowd cheered in support of that. This was not a rally of saccharine sympathy and moderation--it is the grassroots speaking out, the stirrings of a better world. Even the issues raised at the rally I went to last week, the one protested by people yelling No one cares, made an appearance--criticism of the US relationship with the brutal Saudi Arabian regime and its war on Yemen.

Nevertheless, there were a few speakers I winced at--a man who seemed to suggest that the Us's principle reason for accepting refugees is or should be that performing this basic service for human rights would help repair our reputation in the world and would allow us to stop playing "second fiddle" to European countries like Germany already stepping up to the task. This hits me as unsettling, missing the point: to take in refugees is not an act of self-aggrandizement, a self-righteous stance to make you look and feel superior. When the damage and terror being wreaked from Lebanon to France is blowback from wars and instability we caused, it is a moral responsbility to offer asylum to the people whose homes we have made unsafe. It is not a way to try to make up for the damage done to our image by our barbaric, profiteering, vicious wars.

It is true that our policies harm our reputation; I am ashamed of my country, but I cannot stomach the idea of taking in refugees chiefly as a PR move--I don't want the wars fought in our name, but neither do I want acts of false or questionably-intentioned goodwill performed in my name, too little, too late, and too insincere.

A woman also said, which I found cringeworthy, that to show our solidarity against racism and scapegoating, we should go up to a Muslim person or person of color and tell them "I support you!" I have only experienced this odd type of "solidarity" from the perspective of a queer person, but I don't quite know what's so affirming about a stranger assuring you that they support you. Support what? Your right to exist? The fact that you happen to be Muslim or nonwhite? It sounds like congratulations, like they applaud a decision or position you have taken, and that sits wrong with me. Tokenizing or patronizing displays of support are neither necessary nor helpful. We can express solidarity without walking up to a member of a marginalized group and declaring our support for their living the only life they have.

Still, this was one of the most poignant displays of hopeful action that I have seen lately. Something is rising, whatever it is--dissent, revolution, awareness, anger, change. Something is shifting, in our dialogue and our conviction. Something is stirring, stretching its limbs, prying at my cynicism and insisting that no, it isn't too late for a mass uprising of conscious, justice-minded global citizens with so much to lose and so much to gain.

One of the people at the rally was holding a sign that read, "The odds are never in their favor." But maybe the display of solidarity and power last night suggests the beginnings of a movement to change that.

Friday, November 13, 2015

Tragedy and Blowback, Friday the 13th

After school today, I and two friends headed for a rally and a talk about the US-backed war on Yemen and the US relationship with Saudi Arabia. Besides being freezing cold and sparsely populated, our rally was interrupted by frequent shouts from people I can less call counterprotestors than just agitators. "Bomb them!" they shouted while we talked about Yemen. We already are, I wanted to say. Then the cry gave way to "No one cares!" which I found distinctly disturbing. Perhaps these people yelling were just doing it to let off steam, to aggravate someone, to express real annoyance that we were talking about an issue so seemingly irrelevant to them, but at all the protest and rallies and demonstrations I've been to, never have the counterprotestors shouted "No one cares."

I was asked to speak at the rally, and I hadn't wanted to--speeches I can do, when I have time to write something up ahead of time. Shouting into a microphone for all of the surrounding city to hear is not something I thought I'd do. But as I stood at the side, getting colder and listening to the chants of "No one cares," I decided I had to say something. When the event organizers ambled by again and asked if I had anything to say yet, I said yes.

It's been a long time coming that I can open my mouth and trust the words that fall out. But I took the microphone and spoke--about the danger of ignorance, about the privilege of not knowing or caring, about blowback and how our indifference will come back to bite us.

The irony was bitter, therefore, when a couple of hours later my friend got a Twitter alert informing her that there had been mass shootings in Paris. The death toll so far was about 30 people, but only minutes later, we watched it climb to 60, then 118. At the time I write this, it is estimated at 120 to 150, depending on the souce, though it may rise higher still. Details are fuzzy and reports are garbled, but one account claims one of the shooters said this was in retaliation for French involvement in Syria, which makes it reminiscent of the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris and the Boston Marathon bombing more than a year ago. Both of these were acts of violence ostensibly in response to Western intervention in and brutal mistreatment of Muslim countries, and therefore both were examples of blowback. While I was talking about the importance of caring about the world even when ignoring sounds better, and people around me were shouting "No one cares, bomb them," another dose of blowback was being cooked up.

Even now, before the dust has even settled, what I am afraid of is the aftermath. The response. The further blowback it may engender.

When I got home, my family was discussing the attacks, anguished and dismal. My brother called it a lose-lose situation--if we bomb the terrorists, we create more, but if we don't, then they think they've won, he said. "What about non-military solutions?" I said, incredulous. What about negotiations and humanitarian aid? To dichotomize our response options as to bomb or not to bomb narrows as well the possible outcomes: more chaos and instability. War is not the answer. We've tried it and tried it, and had it been the answer to our problems, we wouldn't be dealing with the fallout of our militaristic choices now. But it wasn't. And we are. And as I was trying to warn at the rally tonight, it's only so long until not just France but we as well experience drastic, large-scale blowback from the choices we have made.

But for now, I anticipate a response in the pattern of our habitual militarism. It took only three people dead after the Boston Marathon bombing to shut down the city, send in the SWAT teams, and conduct a massive manhunt. What kind of reaction will as many as 150 deaths spark? Already, French president Hollande has declared, "We will lead the fight… It will be merciless." The US promises to stand by France's response to the attacks, as does the UK. Meanwhile, US cities have also ramped up police vigilance and wiretaps/surveillance data analysis. The NYPD has deployed heavily armed teams to "sensitive French sites in the city," according to Time magazine, although "there is no credible or specific intelligence about threats to the United States."

No, there was no evidence that we were under threat, because this time the attack wasn't aimed at us--though it is our policies that the assailants were supposedly reacting to (the same geopolitical, militaristic, profiteering, imperialist, American-exceptionalist policies that we employ around the world, from Yemen to Afghanistan to Libya and onward, which have caused so much damage and may yet cause more, if they comprise our response to these bombings)--but next time it could be us in the crossfire. One day it will be, if we do not alter our reckless, deadly course.

I don't think we'll be saying "No one cares" then.

Thursday, November 12, 2015

Some Thoughts on Veterans' Day

When some friends of mine invited me to collaborate on writing a science fiction space opera, they warned me that the character whose perspective I would be writing was a soldier in the military. They worried that might be hard for me, the raging antiwar activist, to sympathize with.
I was surprised. Just because I’m writing a character who’s in the military doesn’t mean I can’t sympathize with or like them, I said. They don’t have to be pro-war. Maybe they were drafted unwillingly. Maybe they were intending to tear down the system from within. Maybe they hoped they could make the world better from a position of power. Maybe they believed in a cause that turned out not to be what the war was really about. Maybe they were desperate and out of prospects.
Antiwar rhetoric can walk a dangerous line between decrying war itself--the lies, the death tolls, the profiteering, the Pentagon, the geopolitical and/or imperial motives--and assigning that blame as well to the people who served in those wars, as pawns if not agents in the games of war. If we cannot separate the people from the institutions, we risk erasing their stories while superimposing others. This can be done both by antiwar activists, as well as by those pro-war or simply patriotic people who seize Veterans’ Day to advance US imperial and national security rhetoric.
I think when I was younger, I did resent the soldiers. I saw people in uniform and scowled. I thought Veterans’ Day was just a diluted version of the Fourth of July, full of unearned, unthinking patriotism and militarism. I listened to my parents rail against Bush and the (second) Iraq war, and learned to associate everything camouflage-and-armed with atrocity and criminality.
I eventually unlearned this, as I came to hear and read the stories of veterans in the peace movement. In eighth grade, I was writing a story about a futuristic version of the United States in which my character was drafted unwillingly into a special ops arm of the military, where she then tried to foment a rebellion. I can’t say the story was all that good, but I remember a conversation with a friend of mine who claimed to want to join the Marines and was quite interested in the fact that my story was about the military. We were discussing how the rebellion would progress, and I said that I figured there would be protest within the military as well as the civilian world. Maybe some soldiers would desert and join the rebellion. My friend looked at me, seemed gratified, and said that it was good I wasn’t going to make all the soldiers just blindly go along with the government, that I wasn’t just going to portray them as part of the problem.
Believing that the common soldier is “part of the problem,” that they are worthy of scorn, obligated to shoulder the blame for the consequences of decisions or protocols their superiors make, is a damaging attitude (as is the attitude that members of the military should be held above reproach). Peace and justice movements are incomplete whenever they fail to recognize the experiences, the stories, the truths of the people who fought our wars. Theirs is a critical perspective. The soldiers are not the problem--oh, certainly, some of them are or become so, like those responsible the torture and other events at Abu Ghraib prison--but they are perhaps a victim, or a symptom, of it. And we must remember also that when soldiers were prosecuted for atrocities--from Vietnam to Iraq--it is the lower-ranking soldiers who take the fall, though their actions were not the result of their own mentality and policies, but ones handed down from on high.
Journalist Dahr Jamail has done, I think, an admirable job in representing and weaving together the narratives of “both sides,” as one might say, of wars (specifically the 2003-onward Iraq war). The first of his books that I read told the not-via-embedded-journalists story of the experiences of Iraqis during the US invasion and occupation, and it read with a simple, brutal clarity. Little sympathy for US soldiers was aroused through those stories, but Jamail’s next book focused singularly on the tradition of resistance to war within the US military, emphasizing the role of groups like Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans For Peace, as well as individual soldiers who left the military and spoke out against it.
Other books, like Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers, helped me realize that soldiers experience several strange kinds of invisibility: they are praised and glorified as we are urged to do our patriotic duty and support them, whether or not we the civilians or the troops themselves even believe in the “cause” they are fighting for. When it’s convenient, we invoke our soldiers as emblems of US bravery and strength and integrity. We have created a narrative that has little to do with the facets of war that Dahr Jamail, and others, reveal. And then, when those soldiers whom we faithfully “supported” come home, our alleged support falls away. Let’s think about that. Think about stories of the VA’s dysfunction, think about how “the troops” exist in our cultural mindscape only when out of sight and mind, presumably overseas serving some greater good. When that service brings them home wounded or dead, they cease to exist in our cultural consciousness.
On Veterans’ Day we are impelled to “thank a veteran,” as a few teachers urged my classmates and me as we left school on Tuesday. But what are we thanking them for? This is a third kind of invisibility: not the invisibility of faraway deployments or postwar injury, but the erasure that comes of obsequiously “remembering” people who have sacrificed, and imposing our thanks without, perhaps, considering what we think we are grateful for or what experience that veteran really had with war. When we wave our flags, or just enjoy the day off if we have it, what story are we helping to tell? What does Veterans’ Day really have to do with the people who make up our military, as opposed to the triumphant story we are told about our finest fighting forces in the world?
Before we called November 11th Veterans’ Day, it was Armistice Day, and before its rechristening, it was supposed to be more of a time to reflect on peace, on attitudes much better displayed by soldiers like Aidan Delgado (author of The Sutras of Abu Ghraib) than American Sniper Chris Kyle. But there isn’t much room for reflections on peace in this time of endless war, and not much space in our militaristic national story to remember that what has become a day for refreshing our patriotism, paying lip service to the idea that we support our troops, was once a day for imagining a better, more peaceful world--a world that the Pentagon (not to be conflated with the everyday people in the military) has no ability nor intention to build.