The Green Party says (and I agree) that the agreement will undermine the laws of this country by greatly increasing the power of the giant corporations (those transnational corporations who owe no allegiance to any country -- but only to their own bottom line). Unfortunately, the governments of the countries involved (including the United States) seem to believe that whatever is good for these giant corporations is good for everyone. They are wrong.
Following are two op-ed pieces written by members of the Green Party Shadow Cabinet. The first is written by Kevin Zeese and the second is by David Cobb. They are fairly short and present a valid point of view opposing the TPP. I repost them below because I believe it is important for Americans (and others) to hear both sides of this issue -- and hopefully put pressure on government to stop this insane process of turning our government over to the mega-corporations.
The Rule of Law demands corporations be subordinate to government
The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a global corporate coup that undermines democracy and makes corporations more powerful than government. It creates a “trade tribunal” system that allows corporations to sue governments for expected lost profits resulting from environmental, labor, health, consumer protection and other laws. The judges in the tribunals will be corporate lawyers on temporary leave from corporate job in order to rule on cases brought by corporations and then returning to their corporate job. This rigged rule of law system will prevent countries from acting in the public interest and for the protection of the planet. The TPP undermines the rule of law.
Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3, of the Constitution empowers Congress “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations. . . .” The Obama administration has turned this constitutional power on its head by negotiating the TPP in secret without any congressional involvement but including 600 corporate advisers in the proces. The Obama administration not sharing its proposals with the Congress or American people, and is not releasing text as it has been negotiated being less transparent than any previous president.
The Obama administration seeks to make this constitutional violation even worse by passing this secretly negotiated trade deal under “Fast Track” provisions, also known as Trade Promotion Authority, which would undermine the role of Congress and destroy the checks and balances of the Constitution. Fast Track would allow the president to negotiate and sign the TPP and then Congress would only have an up or down vote with no committee hearings or amendments.
For too long people have been serving corporations, rather than corporations serving the people. If the TPP becomes law countries will be subservient to corporations under rules that prohibit many forms of regulation, require ever-green patent protections for pharmaceuticals, and create a rigged legal system that favors corporate profit over people and planet. In addition, public services are defined as “state-owned enterprises” and because they receive benefit from government – as they are part of government – corporate interests will be able to sue claiming public services are unfair competition. Neoliberal economics seeks to privatize public services so that corporations can profit from governments that provide clean water, healthcare, transportation, retirement and other necessities of the people.
People who feared a “new world order” should fear the TPP because it creates a corporate rule of law that empowers transnational corporations and weakens democratic rule. Rather than the people ruling through elected representatives, corporations will rule through the power granted to them by trade agreements.
Other trade agreements have had similar provisions and the results have been devastating. In one case brought under NAFTA a US company Lone Pine Resources is suing the Canadian government sued for more than $250 million due to lost profits from Quebec's moratorium on fracking, which prevents Lone Pine from fracking under the St. Lawrence River. This is one example among many, “. . . corporations such as Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Dow Chemical, and Cargill have launched 450 investor-state cases against 89 governments, including the United States. Over $700 million has been paid to corporations under U.S. free trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties, about 70 percent of which are from challenges to natural resource and environment policies. Corporations have launched attacks on a range of public interest and environmental regulations, including bans or phase-outs of toxic chemicals, timber regulations, permitting rules for mines, green jobs and renewable energy programs, and more.” Even limits on the cigarette industry have been undermined by trade agreements and resulted in trade tribunal litigation against packaging requirements.
Expanding the right of corporations to sue in rigged trade tribunals further undermines the rule of law, democracy and national sovereignty. Rather than “free market” trade agreements like the TPP, NAFTA and WTO, we should urge fair trade that empowers people and puts the planet and people before profits.
The “Trade Trade Reform, Accountability, Development and Employment Act” is a more balanced approach that shifts toward improved trade that is fair. It seeks to protect wages, health, the environment, human rights, food and consumer safety and essential services provided by governments. It seeks to reverse the loss of jobs due to offshoring, the race to the bottom in wages, the damage to the environment as well as to family farms and the food supply. The time is now for people to join together to stop the TPP and work toward a trade regimen that serves the people and planet, not corporate interests.
As immediate steps three steps are required:
- The Obama administration should release all propoals it is making as part of the TPP negoations.
- The Obama administration should release the text of all TPP sections that have been negotiated.
- The Congress should refuse to enact fast track, Trade Promotion Authority, so that the normal congressional process of committee hearings, testimony from witnesses and amendments can be followed.
The reason the TPP is being kept secret is because its provisions will be unpopular with the American people. As the former trade representative, Ron Kirk, said the TPP would raise such opposition that it could make the deal impossible to sign. If a law is so unpopular that it must remain secret to pass then, in a democracy, it should not become law.
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Why the TPP is all about corporate power, not trade
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — just like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and every other so-called "trade agreement" — isn't really about trade at all.
Whether it is framed as "free trade" as touted by conservatives or "fair trade" as promoted by liberals, the real question is about who gets to make decisions about how goods, services (and now money itself) flows between international borders.
The TPP is just the latest and most blatant effort to shift decisionmaking authority away from and beyond citizen control to unelected and unaccountable transnational corporate CEOs. Transnational corporations are ever more running to the international level to escape what semblance of public control exists at the nation-state level — all in the name of "harmonizing" laws. In every single instance, it has resulted in a race to the bottom regarding both wages and health, safety and environmental protection laws.
It is worth noting that historically, corporations have attempted to escape democratic control for more than a century in three ways:
1) From one level of government to another (more to less accountable): from local to state, state to nation. The TPP is simply the latest effort to shift decisionmaking from the nation state to the global level where there are even fewer pressure points given the rigged pro-corporate decisionmaking process.
2) From the legislative to judicial arena. Judges are often appointed and, thus, easier to influence by the corporate crowd. There are fewer judges to influence and legislators. Legislators are the closest elected officials (at least on paper) to the public.
3) From the legislative to the regulatory arena. Regulatory bodies shield public officials and corpses between the public and themselves, providing a wonderful foil where the public receives their obligatory 3 minutes to testify.
This last process deserves further scrutiny. Today, most regulatory bodies are often about the business of "regulating" vs prohibiting harms — prohibitions are what legislators do. Regulatory decisions, when they do go against the public, can still be appealed to courts. Frankly, these days environmental regulations regulate environmentalists, worker safety regulations regulate workers, and so on.
Historically, regulatory agencies were used to counter widespread calls for publicly owned enterprises. They still are. To understand the history and context of how the agencies that purport to regulate a given industry are actually controlled by the industries themselves, I strongly recommend "Help I've Been Colonized and I Can't Get Up: Take a Lawyer and an Expert to a Hearing and Call Me in a Decade" by Jane Anne Morris, available at www.poclad.org. Indeed, this process is so widespread and common that it has a name in the law profession: "regulatory capture."
And as profoundly undemocratic as the process of reguallatory capture is, let's be clear that the Obama administration's TPP proposal will allow corporations to bring a challenge directly against a country over so-called trade "barriers." You know, the few remaining health, safety, environmental and consumer protection laws that we have left! Under the TPP, any corporation can take a conflict to a "dispute resolution" process which bypasses any courts or juries of any nation.
Maybe we should start calling Obama's TPP proposal what it really is: The Corporate Power Proposal (CPP). After all, only 5 of 29 of the proposal's chapters even deal with actual trade. As an important side note, one provision of the Corporate Power Proposal would either ban or severely limit the ability of local and state governments to set up public banks, which is gaining momentum every day as an alternative to the "Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Jail" banks that are pushing for the TPP.
We at the Green Shadow Cabinet are "all-in" regarding our opposition to the TPP. Who's at the table during the negotiations…and who's not…is basically all one needs to know about how much this agreement promotes peace, justice, democracy and ecology.
Opposing the TPP provides an opportunity for "We the People" to unify across the political spectrum on issues of protecting/expanding self-governance. It's going to take all of us. And we can and must win this one.
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