The Trans Pacific Partnership is billed as the next big trade agreement, and now Fast Track Authority is being requested. One little problem: it’s apparently not to be discussed in public. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is outraged and published a letter outlining his objections:
1) The minimum wage in Vietnam is roughly 56 cents an hour. It has been reported that Malaysia uses modern-day slave labor in its electronics industry. If the TPP goes into effect, do you have an estimate as to how many jobs in this country will be lost as American corporations move to Vietnam and Malaysia where they can pay workers less than $1 an hour?
2) Right now, the TPP includes what is called an Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which would allow foreign investors the right to use international tribunals as a forum for seeking compensation for laws and regulations that impact their ability to profit from investments. For example, under an ISDS provision of an agreement, a French firm is suing Egypt under an international tribunal for raising its minimum wage. Uruguay and Australia are both being sued for imposing requirements on how tobacco products are packaged. Eli Lilly is suing Canada for $500 million for “violating its obligations to foreign investors under the North American Free Trade Agreement by allowing its courts to invalidate patents for two of its drugs.” Transcanada is considering suing the U.S. under an international tribunal for refusing to approve the Keystone Pipeline. Quebec is being sued under an international tribunal for banning fracking. After the TPP goes into effect, could a Federal, state, or local government be forced to pay compensation to a foreign company if an international tribunal rules that this company was prevented from earning an expected future profit due to environmental, labor, or consumer laws or regulations?
3) I have been told that the TPP would force the U.S. government to waive “Buy American” procurement rules for countries that are in the TPP. It is my understanding that under the TPP the U.S. government could not choose to buy American products over Vietnamese or Malaysian products that are made without meeting prevailing wage requirements. Is this true, and if so, how many Americans will lose their jobs as a result?
4) It has been reported that 100% of Vietnamese seafood imports contained antibiotics that are not approved in the U.S. As you know, seafood imports are a common source of pathogens. Have any studies been done to determine what kind of health hazards the American people will be exposed to by the importation of these products if the TPP is implemented?
5) Today, many millions of people living in the Asia-Pacific region benefit from access to life-saving medications at affordable prices. Unfortunately, what is known about the current TPP draft text suggests that the agreement would threaten this access because the pharmaceutical companies could delay the time in which generic drugs could be put on the market. Doctors without Borders has said that “the TPP has the potential to become the most harmful trade pact ever for access to medicines.” How many people will lose access to life-saving drugs for cancer and HIV if the TPP goes into effect?
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) seconds him.
The Administration says I’m wrong – that there’s nothing to worry about. They say the deal is nearly done, and they are making a lot of promises about how the deal will affect workers, the environment, and human rights. Promises – but people like you can’t see the actual deal.
For more than two years now, giant corporations have had an enormous amount of access to see the parts of the deal that might affect them and to give their views as negotiations progressed. But the doors stayed locked for the regular people whose jobs are on the line.
If most of the trade deal is good for the American economy, but there’s a provision hidden in the fine print that could help multinational corporations ship American jobs overseas or allow for watering down of environmental or labor rules, fast track would mean that Congress couldn’t write an amendment to fix it. It’s all or nothing.
Charles Morris, former banker and lawyer, doesn’t trust China in the least:
China’s destructive brand of competition is especially grating. Consider the example of Nucor, one of the world’s most efficient steelmakers. Nucor uses only 0.4 hours of labor to make a ton of steel, says Dan DiMicco, former chief executive, or about $8 to $10 in wages. It relies mostly on scrap steel for its raw material, while China uses iron ore, which is more expensive, and its shipping cost to the United States is about $40 a ton.
Even if Chinese labor were free, DiMicco maintains in his new book, “American Made: Why Making Things Will Return Us to Greatness,” there is no way the Chinese steel producers could undersell Nucor in its home market. Yet, over much of the past year, low-cost Chinese steel has flooded US markets, which, DiMicco says, is clear evidence of illegal “dumping.” Beijing, of course, says it complies with all fair trade rules.
But China plays by different rules. Its powerful manufacturing enterprises are largely state-owned, and blessed with a host of subsidies, including Party-determined prices for financings, land purchases, taxes and fuel.
Worse than that, in recent years, the Chinese government has been pressuring European and US companies to transfer proprietary technologies as a condition of winning major contracts.
Joe Firestone at New Economic Perspectives doesn’t like it one bit, either, based on a WikiLeaks missive.
An ambitious 12 nation trade accord pushed by President Obama would allow foreign corporations to sue the United States government for actions that undermine their investment “expectations” and hurt their business, according to a classified document.
Why are we negotiating the TPP at all? Why is it the business of the Representatives of the people of the United States in Congress to support agreements that will mitigate the political risks borne by American businesses who chose to invest in other nations, as well as the political risks borne by foreign corporations, who choose to invest in the United States? Why is it their business to provide protection against such risks to foreign corporations beyond the protections we provide to our own corporations?
The “expectations” of business investors are their own business, not the public’s business; and there’s no reason why either the government of the United States or the governments of other nations should have to accommodate themselves to these expectations. If it is the will of the people of a nation as expressed through their representatives to pass legislation that destroys the “expectations” of business investors, then that’s just too bad for the investors.
Private businesses have no right to expect that their governments will protect them against risks that they alone choose to take, and that they alone will profit from. Risk is part of the game of investing. It’s business.
Paul Krugman is almost indifferent:
And you know what? That’s O.K. It’s far from clear that the T.P.P. is a good idea. It’s even less clear that it’s something on which President Obama should be spending political capital. I am in general a free trader, but I’ll be undismayed and even a bit relieved if the T.P.P. just fades away.
Why? Basically, old-fashioned trade deals are a victim of their own success: there just isn’t much more protectionism to eliminate. …
Meanwhile, opponents portray the T.P.P. as a huge plot, suggesting that it would destroy national sovereignty and transfer all the power to corporations. This, too, is hugely overblown. Corporate interests would get somewhat more ability to seek legal recourse against government actions, but, no, the Obama administration isn’t secretly bargaining away democracy.
Alyssa Burgin and Bob Cash at the Monitor are quite alarmed:
Congress will vote on it, but our representatives had no part in its making. It was largely written behind the closed doors of trans-national corporations, its details hidden away, not just from the public and the press, but from our representatives. Only a few lawmakers in Congress have seen it and under a threat of legal action have been forbidden to share what they saw with the American people. Meanwhile, 600 U.S. corporate advisers were given free access to the text as it was being negotiated.
I can’t help but wonder if a “secret law” can be held against US citizens who break it – ignorance of the law isn’t an excuse, after all. But the entire secrecy aspect is enough to turn me off. Public debate is an important part of improving our laws and our public lives. TPP appears to be lacking that important ingredient.
(h/t Tasini @ The Daily Kos)
