DN OBAMA
SEEKS FAST TRACK FOR TPP, Trade Deal that Could Thwart "Almost Any
Progressive Policy or Goal"
Guest:
Lori Wallach,
director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. http://www.democracynow.org/2015/3/19/obama_seeks_fast_track_for_tpp
Congressional Democrats are openly criticizing the secrecy
surrounding the negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), just as
President Obama begins a major push to pass the controversial deal. The United
States is engaged in talks with 11 Latin American and Asian countries for the
sweeping trade pact that would cover 40 percent of the global economy. But its
provisions have mostly been kept secret. After the White House deemed a
briefing on the trade pact "classified," Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut
called the measures "needlessly secretive," saying: "If the TPP
would be as good for American jobs as they claim, there should be nothing to
hide." This comes as Obama recently called on Congress to pass "fast
track" legislation to streamline the passage of trade deals through
Congress. Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO says it will withhold contributions to
congressional Democrats to pressure them to vote no on fast-track authority.
And some tea party-backed Republicans are saying Obama cannot be trusted with
the same negotiating authority that past presidents have had. This spring, the
White House has invited Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to address a joint
session of Congress in which he may promote the TPP. For more, we speak with by
Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, who has been
sounding the alarm about the negotiations. She says Congress could vote on the TPP
proposal in the third week in April. VIDEO available
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AMY GOODMAN: We turn to Washington, where congressional Democrats are
openly criticizing the secrecy surrounding the negotiations over the
Trans-Pacific Partnership, known as the TPP. This comes as President
Obama begins a major push to pass the controversial deal. The United States is
in talks with 11 Latin American and Asian countries for the sweeping trade pact
that would cover 40 percent of the global economy, but its provisions have
mostly been kept secret. After the White House deemed a briefing on the trade
pact classified, Congressmember Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut called the measures
"needlessly secretive," saying, quote, "If the TPP would be as
good for American jobs as they claim, there should be nothing to hide."
Well, this comes as President Obama recently called on Congress to pass
fast-track legislation to streamline the passage of trade deals through
Congress.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA:
As we speak, China is trying to write the rules for trade in the 21st century.
That would put our workers and our businesses at a massive disadvantage. We
can’t let that happen. We should write those rules. That’s why Congress should
act on something called "Trade Promotion Authority."
AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO says it will withhold contributions to
congressional Democrats to pressure them to vote no on fast-track authority.
And some tea party-backed Republicans are saying Obama cannot be trusted with
the same negotiating authority that past presidents have had. This spring, the
White House has invited Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, to address a joint
session of Congress, in which he may promote the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
For more, we’re joined by Lori
Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. As the push
for the TPP heats up, she was recently featured in a National Journal profile
headlined "The Trade Debate’s Guerilla Warrior Gets Her Day."
AG: Welcome back to Democracy Now! Tell us about what
you’re most concerned about, Lori.
LORI WALLACH: Well,
fast-tracking the TPP would make it easier to offshore our jobs and would put
downward pressure, enormous downward pressure, on Americans’ wages, because it
would throw American workers into competition with workers in Vietnam who are
paid less than 60 cents an hour and have no labor rights to organize, to better
their situation. Plus, the TPP would empower another 25,000 foreign
corporations to use the investor state tribunals, the corporate tribunals, to
attack our laws. And then there would be another 25,000 U.S. corporations in
the other TPP countries who could use investor state to attack their
environmental and health and labor and safety laws. And if all that weren’t
enough, Big Pharma would get new monopoly patent rights that would jack up
medicine prices, cutting off affordable access. And there’s rollback of
financial regulations put in place after the global financial crisis. And
there’s a ban on "Buy Local," "buy domestic" policies. And
it would undermine the policy space that we have to deal with the climate
crisis—energy policies are covered. Basically, almost any progressive policy or
goal would be undermined, rolled back. Plus, we would see more offshoring of
jobs and more downward pressure on wages. So the big battle is over fast track,
the process. And right now, thanks to a lot of pushback by activists across the
country, actually, they don’t have a majority to pass it. But there’s an
enormous push to change that, and that’s basically where we all come in.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean,
people are not used to hearing that President Obama and the Republicans have
found common ground and that President Obama’s opposition are the largest bloc
in Congress, and that’s the progressive Democrats. Can you explain why
President Obama is pushing TPP forward and TPA, the fast-track authority, which
means, again, that you can’t amend this agreement, you can only vote up or
down?
LORI WALLACH: Well, I
want to—actually, I want to take one step back before guessing why, because
it’s hard to imagine. If you go to our website, TradeWatch.org, we’ve literally
done a side-by-side of Obama’s policy goals as a president and everything
fast-tracking the TPP would do to basically undermine everything that he has
fought for, from lower medicine prices to re-regulating Wall Street, to more
energy-efficient climate crisis-combating policies, to allegedly this
middle-class economics agenda. The TPP and fast track are the antithesis.
But one other thing about fast track folks need to know,
which is—and this gets to the weird politics—you’ve got the president basically
doing the bidding of all the big corporations and commercial interests that
spent millions of dollars to make sure he wasn’t elected the first time and to
try and not elect him the second time. Against him are the entire labor
movement united. There was a letter signed by every union president—basically,
the most unity in the labor movement since certain unions left the AFL-CIO 20
years ago. And it’s the government employee unions, it’s the service sector
unions—all the unions that are affected by what happens when all of our good
jobs are taken away and the tax base crashes. And you’ve got groups that have
never been involved in a trade fight before, all the Internet freedom groups
who realize the agreement would undermine the basic rights to an accessible,
free Internet. There are issues about net neutrality that could be rolled back.
It’s just overarchingly a delivery mechanism for a huge, broad corporate
agenda. So then, why would the president be with the Chamber of Commerce, the NAM,
all the big lobby groups that also tried to unelect him? And against him are
almost every House Democrat, and then, interestingly, a bunch of conservative
Republicans.
But it’s not—the issue is not that they, we—anyone—doesn’t
want this president to have fast track. The issue is fast track is
inappropriate for any president. Fast track lets a president unilaterally pick
negotiating partners, set wide rules, not about trade, that would rewrite
domestic policy, sign and enter an agreement that would require us to change
all of our domestic laws to meet those rules, sign and enter into that
agreement before Congress votes to approve the contents, then write
implementing legislation to change all the U.S. laws, that isn’t subject to
congressional review through committee. It goes directly to the floor. And the
president is guaranteed in 90 days a yes-or-no vote, with no filibuster,
limited debate, and no amendments. So it’s literally a form of diplomatic
legislating. And actually, since 1988, only two presidents have managed to have
Congress give away all that authority: Ronald Reagan in '88 and George Bush II
in 2002. Every other president who's tried—Clinton in '95, ’97, ’98—Congress
said no. So it's not an anti-Obama thing. It’s a no giveaway of the ability of
Congress to make our laws. And that’s what fast track is. And that’s why it
would enable something as outrageous as the TPP.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to
just ask one little example: "Buy American," the whole push to try to
buy things in the United—that are made here, because it would mean more U.S.
jobs, etc.—how would that fit in to TPP?
LORI WALLACH: So the
way that that works is TPP, amongst its 29 chapters, only five of which have
anything to do with trade, one of the nontrade chapters is a chapter about
procurement, government procurement rules. And in that chapter, the requirement
is that the U.S. government treat bids from any company in any TPP country
identically to how they would treat a U.S. company’s bid. But Buy America and
Buy American, two laws, the first one from 1934, requires you give a preference
to a domestic company, so that when we’re spending our tax dollars, instead of
offshoring our tax dollars, we’re reinvesting them in our communities to create
jobs and also, by the way, to create innovation. So, like the CAFE standards,
that are now normal, the fuel efficiency standards for cars, that was first a
procurement condition; so the Renewable Portfolio Standards, the renewable
energy standards that are now part of government procurement—that’s how you
create a market using the government funds for a behavior you want the private
sector to shift to.
Great policy tool, great job creator, super—except, under TPP,
we’d have to give a waiver to that preference. Any company in any TPP country,
so even ones that aren’t from those countries—Chinese state-owned enterprise
firms in Vietnam—would have to be treated the same as a U.S. company and get
all of those government contracts. And that’s also the same rule that
undermines all the Buy Local preferences. So to the extent—you know, for
instance, a lot of school districts have done rules that say, "Let’s buy
local food from local farmers. Let’s not have a big multinational company ship
our vegetables a thousand miles away when we have the ability from right here
to produce and procure." Those would also be violations. You have to treat
the foreign company the same, give them the same access, as you would any
domestic company. And if we don’t change our laws to meet those rules, we would
face trade sanctions until we do.
AMY GOODMAN: Who
negotiated this?
LORI WALLACH: There’s an office that’s part of the Office of the President
called the United States Trade Representative, are the actual negotiators. But
I think underlying your question is: Who the heck negotiated this? And
the reason we have such a lunatic agreement is those negotiators are advised by
an official set of trade—U.S. private sector trade advisers. There are almost
600 of these advisers, and all but a handful of them represent big corporate
interests. So, there are about 20 labor unions in the mix, of the 600. There
are three or four environmental groups. There’s one consumer group, a couple
family farm groups. Otherwise, it’s all corporate. So, literally, when it comes
to like the pharmaceutical rules, the pricing of medicines, you’ve got all the
industry there.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you
talk about the strategy that you’re—that people are using in opposing this?
Democrats in Congress have spoken out, some of them, around the issue of
secrecy. The reason we know this agreement, what’s in it, right, is because
WikiLeaks released a draft of it about a year ago. But, you know, going back to
1999, the World Trade Organization in Seattle, for example, the massive protest
outside led to the World Trade Organization—I mean, basically, the whole
ministerial being called off. What kind of organizing is taking place right
now?
LORI WALLACH: Well,
actually, what shut down the WTO expansion was a combination of inside and
outside. So, folks saw the protests in the street in Seattle in ’99, but there
was an entire year of campaigning, country by country, around the world to get
the governments who were going to that meeting to agree to not do certain
things and to demand certain things.
And where we are in the campaign now is, basically, folks
have to ramp up the inside and the outside, which is to say—you may think it
sounds corny. I swear it makes a difference. I’ve worked in Capitol Hill.
Folks, if you have not called your representative and both of your senators and
gotten them to commit to you in writing that they oppose fast track, if and
when it comes for a vote, which could be as soon as the third week of April, if
you have not done that, you must do that. Please do that. Write them snail
mail, email, call. The switchboard at the Capitol can connect you. If you’re
not sure who your representative is, all you need is your ZIP code. The Capitol
switchboard—you should write this down and stick it on a yellow sticky on your
fridge for all purposes—202-225-3121, 202-225-3121.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re
going to have to leave it there.
LORI WALLACH: We have
a webinar today, TradeWatch.org,
you’ll learn all you need to know. TradeWatch.org,
webinar today.
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DN Links
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Other links:
“NAFTA
of the Pacific” and the Trans- Pacific Partnershi... Global
Research
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The
Trans-Pacific Partnership: A Global Coalition of Big... Global Research
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Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP): More Power to...
Global Research
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Leaked
Treaty: Worse Than SOPA and ACTA | Zero Hedge Zero Hedge.com
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Treaty
Negotiated In Secret – Hidden Even from...
Zero Hedge.com
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