The Trans-Pacific Partnership is NAFTA on Steroids

[thoughtone]

source: The Nation

NAFTA on Steroids

The Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would grant enormous new powers to corporations, is a massive assault on democracy.

Farmers from Miyagi prefecture raise their fists along with other farmers from across Japan during a rally against Japan participating in rule-making negotiations for the U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in Tokyo October 26, 2011.

While the Occupy movement has forced a public discussion of extreme corporate influence on every aspect of our lives, behind closed doors corporate America is implementing a stealth strategy to formalize its rule in a truly horrifying manner. The mechanism is the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Negotiations have been conducted in extreme secrecy, so you are in good company if you have never heard of it. But the thirteenth round of negotiations between the United States and eight Pacific Rim nations will be held in San Diego in early July.

The TPP has been cleverly misbranded as a trade agreement (yawn) by its corporate boosters. As a result, since George W. Bush initiated negotiations in 2008, it has cruised along under the radar. The Obama administration initially paused the talks, ostensibly to develop a new approach compatible with candidate Obama’s pledges to replace the old NAFTA-based trade model. But by late 2009, talks restarted just where Bush had left off.

Since then, US negotiators have proposed new rights for Big Pharma and pushed into the text aspects of the Stop Online Piracy Act, which would limit Internet freedom, despite the derailing of SOPA in Congress earlier this year thanks to public activism. In June a text of the TPP investment chapter was leaked, revealing that US negotiators are even pushing to expand NAFTA’s notorious corporate tribunals, which have been used to attack domestic public interest laws.

Think of the TPP as a stealthy delivery mechanism for policies that could not survive public scrutiny. Indeed, only two of the twenty-six chapters of this corporate Trojan horse cover traditional trade matters. The rest embody the most florid dreams of the 1 percent—grandiose new rights and privileges for corporations and permanent constraints on government regulation. They include new investor safeguards to ease job offshoring and assert control over natural resources, and severely limit the regulation of financial services, land use, food safety, natural resources, energy, tobacco, healthcare and more.

The stakes are extremely high, because the TPP may well be the last “trade” agreement Washington negotiates. This is because if it’s completed, the TPP would remain open for any other country to join. In May US Trade Representative Ron Kirk said he “would love nothing more” than to have China join. In June Mexico and Canada entered the process, creating a NAFTA on steroids, with most of Asia to boot.

Countries would be obliged to conform all their domestic laws and regulations to the TPP’s rules—in effect, a corporate coup d’état. The proposed pact would limit even how governments can spend their tax dollars. Buy America and other Buy Local procurement preferences that invest in the US economy would be banned, and “sweat-free,” human rights or environmental conditions on government contracts could be challenged. If the TPP comes to fruition, its retrograde rules could be altered only if all countries agreed, regardless of domestic election outcomes or changes in public opinion. And unlike much domestic legislation, the TPP would have no expiration date.

Failure to conform domestic laws to the rules would subject countries to lawsuits before TPP tribunals empowered to authorize trade sanctions against member countries. The leaked investment chapter also shows that the TPP would expand the parallel legal system included in NAFTA. Called Investor-State Dispute Resolution, it empowers corporations to sue governments—outside their domestic court systems—over any action the corporations believe undermines their expected future profits or rights under the pact. Three-person international tribunals of attorneys from the private sector would hear these cases. The lawyers rotate between serving as “judges”—empowered to order governments to pay corporations unlimited amounts in fines—and representing the corporations that use this system to raid government treasuries. The NAFTA version of this scheme has forced governments to pay more than $350 million to corporations after suits against toxic bans, land-use policies, forestry rules and more.

The slight mainstream media coverage the TPP has received repeats the usual mantra: it’s a free-trade pact that will expand US exports. But trade is the least of it. The United States already has free-trade agreements that eliminated tariffs with most TPP countries, which highlights the fact that the TPP is mainly about new corporate rights, not trade. Besides, under past free-trade agreements, US export growth to partner countries is half as much as to countries with which we do not have such agreements. Since NAFTA and similar pacts went into effect, the United States has been slammed by a massive trade deficit, which has cost more than 5 million jobs and led to the loss of more than 50,000 manufacturing plants.

How could something this extreme have gotten so far? The process has been shockingly secretive. In 2010 TPP countries agreed not to release negotiating texts until four years after a deal was done or abandoned. Even the World Trade Organization, hardly a paragon of transparency, releases draft negotiating texts. This means that although the TPP could rewrite vast swaths of domestic policy affecting every aspect of our lives, the public, press and Congress are locked out. Astoundingly, Senator Ron Wyden, chair of the Senate committee with official jurisdiction over TPP, has been denied access even to US proposals to the negotiations. But 600 corporate representatives serving as official US trade advisers have full access to TPP texts and a special role in negotiations. When challenged about the conflict with the Obama administration’s touted commitment to transparency, Trade Representative Kirk noted that after the release of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) text in 2001, that deal could not be completed. In other words, the official in charge of the TPP says the only way to complete the deal is to keep it secret from the people who would have to live with the results.

The goal was to complete the TPP this year. Thankfully, opposition by some countries to the most extreme corporate demands has slowed negotiations. Australia has announced it will not submit to the parallel corporate court system, and it and New Zealand have rejected a US proposal to allow pharmaceutical companies to challenge their government medicine formularies’ pricing decisions, which have managed to keep their drug costs much lower than in the United States. Every country has rejected the US proposal to extend drug patent monopolies. This text was leaked, allowing government health officials and activists in all the countries to fight back. Many countries have also rejected a US proposal that would forbid countries from using capital controls, taxes or other macro-prudential measures to limit the destructive power of financial speculators.

However, we face a race against time—much of the TPP text has been agreed on. Will the banksters, Big Pharma, Big Oil, agribusiness, tobacco multinationals and the other usual suspects get away with this massive assault on democracy? Will the public wake up to this threat and fight back, demanding either a fair deal or no deal? The Doha Round of WTO expansion, the FTAA and other corporate attacks via “trade” agreements were successfully derailed when citizens around the world took action to hold their governments accountable. Certainly in an election year, we are well poised to turn around the TPP as well. To learn more and get involved, go to tpp2012.com.

 

[thoughtone]

source: Huffington Post


Why House Democrats Might Kill Obama's Big Trade Deal


WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama's international trade agenda is dead in the water if he doesn't do a better job engaging with Democrats in Congress, and his administration appears to be getting that message, Democrats said Friday.

Congressional Democrats have often been frustrated by his lack of attention to their concerns, but they've been especially disturbed lately that in his grand pivot to Asia and push for a 12-nation trade pact dubbed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, they and the rest of Congress largely have been cut out of negotiations.

"We want transparency. We want to see what's going on there," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters. "We have a problem with that."

As a result, many Democrats fear the actual terms of the deal do not reflect traditional Democratic Party policy priorities.

"This is a big problem now," said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee. "There is inadequate engagement on the substance of what will be in an agreement or out of an agreement."

Democrats in the House and Senate have complained for years about the secrecy standards the Obama administration has applied to the TPP, forcing members to jump over hurdles to see negotiation texts, and blocking staffer involvement. In 2012, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) complained that corporate lobbyists were given easy access while his office was being stymied, and even introduced protest legislation requiring more congressional input.

The issue came to a head Thursday in two ways. In one case, Obama's new nominee for China ambassador, Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), angered his party by introducing fast-track trade legislation backed by the White House. The bill would ease the passage of the TPP and is cosponsored by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.). But most Democrats oppose the bill, and ultimately, Baucus and the administration introduced the legislation without a House Democratic co-sponsor -- a public embarrassment that prompted House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to declare Obama needs to get his act together on trade policy.

Also Thursday, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman met with Democratic members of the Ways and Means Committee, and got an earful, lawmakers told HuffPost.

"We had a very frank discussion," said Rep. Sander Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the committee.

"They've said that they welcome congressional input," said Van Hollen, who also attended the meeting. "But in terms of actually establishing the mechanisms, they haven't put forward a proposal. But we should be putting those proposals on the table. Any administration is going to try and maintain maximum flexibility. It's up to the Congress to insist that we have an important role in the process."

Democrats are especially determined to win a role in negotiations because the bill introduced by Baucus, the departing chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, would grant the administration the ability to present Congress with trade deals that could not be amended, leaving lawmakers to take it or leave it, including on the TPP, which is opposed by many progressive groups and some tea party activists.

With opposition from the right, the administration needs to shore up support from Democrats to move the trade agenda ahead. And the Baucus bill didn't help. Even Democrats like Oregon Rep. Earl Blumenauer, who are more open to free-trade deals with the right protections, think Baucus' effort does little to improve the last fast-track bill Congress passed in 2002.

"I think it's a mistake. I think it's going to make it very hard to pass, and frankly, I don't think it should," said Blumenauer. "I'm a little disappointed that something's dropped [introduced] that was never discussed with Democrats in the House. As I understand it, it wasn't actually discussed with Democrats in the Senate."

"It's interesting Baucus introduced his bill without any -- I think a couple senators endorsed it -- but without any other Democratic senator on it," Levin said.

"And most of them hadn't seen his bill when he introduced it, including the new chairman," he said, referring to Wyden, who is replacing Baucus at the head of the Finance Committee.

There's a lot at stake for Democrats and the president in working out their rough spots. If they don't, Obama's trade agenda stalls. And for Democrats, giving the White House too much authority could undercut the centerpiece of the 2014 election argument -- that they are the party that will deal with income inequality and help the middle class. That's because many in their own party, especially grassroots activists and unions, blame flaws in previous grand trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement for siphoning off middle class jobs.

"We have had a trade deficit that has exceeded $350 billion every single year for the past 13 years. We have this enormous staggering problem with our economy called the continuing trade deficit, and this is a measure that would make that worse," Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) said. "The classic example of this is NAFTA. NAFTA has managed to hurt American workers and Mexican workers at the same time."

And most Democrats don't think the pending TPP deal addresses numerous labor, environmental and other issues adequately. Like NAFTA, the TPP would empower foreign corporations to directly challenge the laws and regulations of a country before an international tribunal. Under other trade frameworks, like the World Trade Organization treaties, only nations themselves are permitted to bring trade cases before an international arbiter, meaning companies must first win support from a government before attacking a law. Exxon Mobil, Dow Chemical, Eli Lilly and other corporations have used NAFTA to attempt to overturn Canadian regulations regarding offshore oil drilling, fracking, pesticides, drug patents and other issues.

Progressives like Grayson have long been critical of free trade deals because of their empowerment of corporations. But even members of the House Democratic leadership who have traditionally supported such pacts are upset over the current deal and worried about its impact on their 2014 message.

"No one should believe that negotiations on TPP are over, because almost -- again -- all the key issues remain," said Levin.

“Congress must have a robust role in the oversight of any trade deal," said Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "I will continue working with my colleagues to ensure any trade deal reflects 21st century realities, protects the American worker and is only agreed to after adequate and necessary consultation with Congress.”

Still, boosting trade does fit into the Democrats' agenda if it helps boost exports and create new jobs in America.

"We need to deal with trade. I don't think there's a member of Congress who isn't pro-trade, but it's got to be pro-American worker, pro-American consumer, pro-American business," said Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.). "Otherwise, why are we opening up our markets to people if we're going to get raped?"

Becerra and others acknowledge there is a great deal of pressure, in general, to take steps that promise economic growth with the economy still limping along and producing too few jobs. Crafting a trade deal that pleases their base, however, won't come easily, and almost certainly not before the election, especially if the Obama administration offers Democrats little more than token input.

"This place doesn't work on amorphous pressure. It works on touch-and-feel pressure. Unless we can come together on something that collectively, bipartisanly, we think can work, I think it's going to be tough," said Becerra. "It won't be fast. It might be on a track, but it won't be fast."

 

[SPECTRE1]

Trade deals will lead to centralization of manufacturing in low wage countries. That is what trade has consisted of American companies moving to low wage countries and "trading" or exported back at a low cost back to the U.S.

These companies want a legal framework that will allow them to invest billions of dollars and have the certainty that abrupt changes in trade polices and regulation does not change the original parameter of the deal.

 

[hybrid chef]

Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP): Pandora’s Box of Corporate Power

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/08/19/pandoras-box-of-corporate-power/



AUGUST 19, 2014
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29
An Interview with Adam Weissman
Pandora’s Box of Corporate Power
by MICKEY Z
The story of Pandora’s Box (which was really a jar) — much like the Biblical tale of “forbidden fruit” — is meant as a warning that once the evils of the world are released, it’s virtually impossible for them to be recalled. Sticking with the Greek mythology vibe, I guess you could say Adam Weissman has been playing the role of Cassandra in the struggle to inform others about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Weissman organizes against TPP and other free trade agreements with TradeJustice New York Metro, a coalition of groups from diverse social movements resisting the NAFTA neoliberal free trade model. He also works with Global Justice for Animals and the Environment, an organization addressing the threat posed by free trade agreements to animals; the environment; safe and sustainable food; and the human rights of environmentalists.

Put simply, Adam has become my go-to person when it comes to TPP and related issues so I figured it was longoverdue we did an interview. It went a little something like this…

Mickey Z.: Let’s start with the essentials. What exactly is TPP and why are you working so hard to stop it?

Adam Weissman: TPP is a 12-nation agreement currently being negotiated between the governments of the United States and 11 other countries (Canada, Mexico, Peru , Chile, New Zealand, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Japan). TPP is being pushed by corporate interests seeking to enact a wide variety of policies into law that undermine the public interest on behalf of their profits, policies that would be vigorously opposed if presented as individual pieces of legislation rather than being lumped into a massive, obscure international trade agreement.

MZ: Is it accurate to call TPP a trade agreement?

AW: TPP is considered a trade agreement and thus the Office of the United States Trade Representative is negotiating on behalf of the United States. However, but only five of TPP’s 29 chapters address trade issues, with the rest covering a wide range of topics include investor rights, intellectual property, and sanitary standards.

MZ: So why isn’t everyone talking about such a totalitarian salvo?

AW: TPP negotiating texts are being treated as classified documents, closed off from the public, the media, non-profit advocacy groups, and even elected officials. Members of Congress have highly restricted negotiating access to the texts and are sworn to secrecy about what they read. Meanwhile, 600 “cleared advisers” to the U.S. negotiating team — mostly representing corporations and industry organizations — have unfettered access to negotiating documents relevant to their interests and are able to use this access to influence U.S. negotiators to craft an agreement that advances their agendas.

Additionally TPP is getting little coverage in the mainstream print media and almost no coverage in broadcast media. A Media Matters for America study found that between Aug. 1, 2013 and Jan. 31, 2104, TPP received only one mention on network nightly news — a pro-TPP comment on PBS’ Newshour. During the same period, Fox News Channel never mentioned TPP and CNN mentioned TPP once. The one shining exception in broadcast media has been MSNBC’s The Ed Show, which during this period mentioned TPP 32 times. Unfortunately media companies have a conflict of interests regarding TPP. Many stand to benefit from TPP’s Intellectual Property chapter, which will help protect the profits of content creators. The Walt Disney Company (ABC) and News Corporation (Fox News) are both members of the U.S. Business Coalition for TPP.

MZ: How bad would it be if TPP came into existence?

AW: TPP threatens to undermine environmental protection, prohibit financial industry regulation, encourage privatization of public services, offshore jobs to sweatshops, endanger wildlife, threaten food safety standards, destroy family farms while promoting industrial agriculture, limit access to lifesaving medicines by extending the life of corporate drug patents, ban government procurement policies like “Buy Green” and “Buy Local,” curtail internet freedom, and limit democracy by creating tribunals where corporations can attack governments for enforcing laws that protect the public from destructive corporate greed.

MZ: Is it safe to say Obama is on board with TPP?

AW: TPP is a key element of President Obama’s Asia-Pacific Pivot — an effort to cement the United States, not China, as the dominant military and economic power in the Asia-Pacific region.

MZ: You’ve said that TPP is “kind of like Pandora’s Box.” Can you explain what you mean by that?

AW: Like Pandora’s Box, TPP contains unknown horrors — it’s being negotiated with an unprecedented degree of secrecy. Even the Bush-era trade agreements were negotiated with a greater degree of transparency. TPP negotiating texts are being treated as classified documents, with access denied to the media, civil society groups, academics, and the general public. Members of Congress were restricted from seeing the TPP texts until Rep. Alan Grayson launched a petition campaign demanding access. The office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) finally allowed him to see one TPP document — on the condition that no staff would be present, he take no notes, use no recording device, and would be sworn to secrecy on whatever he saw. According to Representative Grayson, “having seen what I’ve seen, I would characterize this as a gross abrogation of American sovereignty. And I would further characterize it as a punch in the face to the middle class of America. I think that’s fair to say from what I’ve seen so far. But I’m not allowed to tell you why!”

TPP is also like Pandora’s Box because once we’ve released the horrors it contains, we’re stuck with them — they won’t go back in the box. In contrast to U.S. participation in the World Trade Organization, which Congress has to renew every five years, our commitment to TPP has no expiration or renewal date. Any changes to TPP would need to be agreed upon by all member nations. TPP is described as a “docking agreement,” meaning that more countries can be added after TPP is in effect without any new act of Congress. India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia, South Korea, Colombia, and China have all been discussed as potential later additions.

MZ: Does anyone have access to at least parts of the full TPP text?

AW: There is one group that has access to the TPP negotiating texts — roughly 600 members of advisory committees to USTR — mostly representatives of corporations and organizations representing industries that stand to benefit from TPP, often at the expense of the public interest. Corporations represented include some of the most notorious human rights violating, worker exploiting, union busting, polluting, and animal abusing companies on the planet, including Chevron, Cargill, Wal-mart, Georgia Pacific, Halliburton, Weyerhaeuser, Yum! Brands (KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut ), Verizon, Caterpillar, and Dow. Nine of the companies represented are listed as being among the 20 Worst Companies on the Planet based on a metaanalysis of social responsibility surveys over the last 20 years compiled by sociologist Ellis Jones. These corporate advisers are joined from reps of organizations representing the factory farm, pharmaceutical, mining, logging, oil, genetically modified seed, tobacco, software, chemical, junk mail, and nuclear energy industries.

MZ: What’s Obama done to make sure TPP gets through Congress?

AW: President Obama has requested that Congress grant him Fast Track Trade Authority, which would allow his administration to complete TPP negotiations, draft implementing legislation (legislation to put TPP by changing existing U.S. law to adhere to the terms of the agreement) and then send that legislation to Congress. Under Fast Track, the House would be required to vote within 60 days and the Senate within 90. Fast Track prohibits Congress from amending the legislation in any way, forces committees to release the legislation for a floor vote, and limits floor debate to 20 hours. Agreements like TPP are written in dense legalese, where the presence of a comma in a sentence can have profound implications. NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, contained 22 chapters, covered three countries, and ran 1,700 pages. TPP, which is often described as “NAFTA on steroids” will contain 29 chapters, many dealing with issues never before addressed in a trade agreement, and includes 12 countries. So legislators, while dealing with a wide range of other issues, are expected to take stock of this entire agreement and decide how to vote within two-three months while corporate lobbyists are twisting their arms to get them to support it and the President and the U.S. Trade Rep are putting out propaganda about the agreement will create jobs and prosperity. Fast Track by design steamrolls bad trade deals through Congress before anyone really even knows what is being voted on.

MZ: Sounds like every CEO’s fantasy scenario.

AW: In effect, corporations are pushing for a binding and virtually irreversible mechanism to force the United States and other TPP nations into expanding corporate control. TPP’s investor rights chapter, for example, can be used against all manner of current and future food safety, environmental, or labor laws and many other forms of public interest legislation, in effect making corporations more powerful than nations. By committing to TPP, we’re pretty much throwing away the future of democracy.

And really, this is exactly why TPP negotiations are being kept secret, not national security. The U.S. Trade Representative does not want us to know what is in the box. Ron Kirk, who was U.S. Trade Representative for the first three years of U.S. involvement in TPP negotiations, told Reuters that “we have to preserve some measure of discretion and confidentiality” and noted that when hemisphere-wide Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiating texts were released a decade ago, it was impossible to complete the negotiations. What he didn’t come out and say was that the reason it was impossible to complete those negotiations was because of widespread popular resistance throughout the hemisphere, including massive demonstrations here in North America during TPP negotiating meetings in Miami and and Quebec City.

MZ: Okay, let’s try to end with some activist motivation. How can people help keep this Pandora’s Box from being opened?

AW: There are some critical differences between our TPP fight and story of Pandora’s Box. Pandora didn’t have Wikileaks. Part of the reason we know as much as we do about what’s taking place in these secret negotiations is because of leaked documents — all of which have been terrifying. So, unlike Pandora, we have a bit of forewarning about what’s in the box.

The other big difference is that while Pandora released hope from the box, we have hope right now. Fast Track Authority for trade agreements expired in 2007. For President Obama to send TPP to Congress under Fast Track rules, Congress would first have to pass new legislation granting him Fast Track Authority. There is a strong grassroots movement against Fast Track and also strong opposition among many members of Congress on both sides of the aisle in the House of Representatives. One hundred, fifty one House Democrats, 22 Conservative House Republicans, and six Moderate House Republicans wrote to President Obama last November in three separate letters expressing opposition to Fast Track. The Bipartisan Trade Priorities Action of 2014, a Fast Track bill introduced in January, went over like a lead balloon — despite its name it was unable to find a Democratic sponsor in the House.

MZ: So, TPP is not a done deal nor a foregone conclusion?

AW: The fight against Fast Track is far from over, but it is a fight we can win, and if we do, President Obama will have a much harder time getting TPP through Congress. A new Fast Track bill with cosmetic changes intended to soften Congressional opposition is expected to be introduced in November after the Congressional election, a time when politicians typically move particularly sleazy pieces of legislation that the corporate lobbyists are demanding but that they would rather the voting public not know about. Right now, while our elected officials are home for the August recess is a critical time to visit their offices and attend their Congress on Your Corner events and town hall meetings to let them know that we’ll be making our decisions on election day based in part on whether or not they’ve expressed unequivocal opposition to Fast Track.

MZ: How can readers get in touch with you and/or TradeJustice New York Metro and can you recommend resources for further research and action?

AW: People can contact us by phone at (718) 218-4523 or by email at info@tradejustice.net.

They can learn more about TPP at our website, on our TPP page and on social media. Out Twitter address is twitter.com/OWSTradeJustice , our Facebook page can be found at tradejustice.net/fbp and our Facebook group at tradejustice.net/fbg. People can also sign up for e-newsletter and other email lists athttp://tradejustice.net/elists and sign our e-petition vs. Fast Track and sign up receive updates via Causes.com atcauses.com/tradejustice-ny-metro.

People who want to learn more about TPP’s implications for the environment; animals; safe, just, and sustainable food; and the human rights of environmental defenders can visit the Global Justice for Animals and the Environment website and TPP page. GJAE is on on social media. Our Facebook group can be found atgjae.org/fbg our Facebook page is at gjae.org/fbp, and our Twitter address is twitter.com/GJAEnvironment. On Causes, we’re at causes.com/gjae. People can sign up for our email list at http://gjae.org/email.

Other good websites on TPP and Fast Track include

 

[thoughtone]

Re: Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP): Pandora’s Box of Corporate Power

Repost.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is NAFTA on Steroids

 

[thoughtone]

 

[thoughtone]

source: Huffington Post

Elizabeth Warren Details Obama's Broken Trade Promises

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) issued a report Monday morning detailing decades of failed trade enforcement by American presidents including Barack Obama, the latest salvo in an ongoing public feud between Warren and Obama over the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Obama is currently negotiating the major trade pact with 11 other nations. While the text of the TPP agreement remains classified information, it is strongly supported by Republican leaders in Congress and corporate lobbying groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The deal is opposed by most congressional Democrats, along with labor unions, environmental groups and advocates of Internet freedom.

Obama has repeatedly insisted the TPP will include robust labor protections, and has dismissed Warren's criticisms as "dishonest," "bunk" and "misinformation." On Monday, Warren fired back, showing that Obama simply has not effectively enforced existing labor standards in prior trade pacts. According to the report, a host of abuses, from child labor to the outright murder of union organizers, have continued under Obama's watch with minimal pushback from the administration.

"The United States does not enforce the labor protections in its trade agreements," the report reads, citing analyses from the Government Accountability Office, the State Department and the Department of Labor.

Of the 20 countries the U.S. currently has trade agreements with, 11 have documented reliance on child labor, forced labor or other human rights abuses related to labor, according to the report. The violations are not confined to exploitation. Since Obama finalized a labor action plan with the government of Colombia in 2011, 105 union activists have been murdered. Obama called the Colombian deal "a win-win for workers" at the time.

Despite these trade violations, none of these countries have faced significant consequences from the United States government.

Warren's report undercuts an Obama public relations offensive that has repeatedly characterized TPP as "the most progressive trade deal in history." The Senate is currently considering legislation that would grant Obama "fast track" authority, barring Congress from amending any trade pact he negotiates, including TPP. Liberals are concerned TPP will exacerbate income inequality and undermine key regulations.

But while much of the TPP controversy has concerned the legal language involved in the agreement itself, Warren's report highlights a broader concern among progressives. Regardless of what the final TPP deal looks like, presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama himself, have all failed to effectively enforce promises to protect workers, even as rogue regimes have continued to benefit from other provisions of the agreements.

"We have two decades of experience with free trade agreements under both Democratic and Republican Presidents. Supporters of these agreements have always promised that they contain tough standards to protect workers," the report reads. "The rhetoric has not matched the reality."

The Obama administration has said it takes labor violations seriously and has pushed countries to improve conditions.

“The Obama Administration is taking unprecedented actions to promote and protect fundamental labor rights and ensure acceptable conditions of work,” reads a joint report from the Department of Labor and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative from February. Those commitments include “bringing the first-ever labor dispute under a free trade agreement"-- in Guatemala.

But labor unions and other critics say these measures have been ineffective. The AFL-CIO has been pressing for action on Guatemalan violations for Obama’s entire term in office, and the dispute remains unresolved. Meanwhile, as Warren's report documents, Guatemala remains one of the most dangerous places in the world for union workers. In 2013 and 2014, according to the AFL-CIO, 17 labor activists were murdered in Guatemala while the Obama administration pursued diplomatic action. Three of the slain union workers were reportedly killed during a dispute with a local government over unpaid back wages.

Much of Warren's trade critique has focused on the capacity for free trade pacts to undermine financial regulations. Last week, Canadian Finance Minister Joe Oliver gave a speech arguing that a key tenet of Obama's 2010 Wall Street reform law violates the North American Free Trade Agreement.

 

[thoughtone]

source: New York Times


Stalled Trade Bill Highlights Chasm Between Obama and Congressional Democrats

Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, right, a Democrat and opponent of the trade bill, on Tuesday. He said President Obama had been “disrespectful” and overly personal in his criticism of Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, another Democratic opponent of the bill.


WASHINGTON — It took only a few minutes for President Obama to become a Republican talking point.

Just after Senate Democrats deserted Mr. Obama on Tuesday by voting to block the trade bill that is one of his top priorities, the Republican leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, berated them using the president’s own words.

“I wouldn’t normally quote President Obama, but today is no ordinary day,” Mr. McConnell said. “When the president said that the hard left was just ‘making stuff up,’ or when the president said their increasingly bizarre arguments didn’t ‘stand the test of fact and scrutiny,’ it was hard to argue with him.”

The vote against the legislation to grant Mr. Obama accelerated negotiating power to complete a 12-nation Pacific Rim trade pact highlighted one of the most striking deficiencies of his tenure: his continued difficulties in dealing with Congress, even, and sometimes especially, with members of his own party.

As it turned out, the defeat was fleeting. After Mr. Obama personally weighed in with Democrats at a hastily called meeting at the White House on Tuesday evening, senators announced a deal on Wednesday to revive the bill.

But the false start underscored the precarious position Mr. Obama is in as he presses for the trade bill, which has fractured his party and forced a president who has always suffered from a dearth of trust and good will on Capitol Hill into an uneasy alliance with the Republicans who will supply most of the votes.

Mr. Obama’s decision to criticize Democrats opposed to the trade measure as misinformed, isolationist and politically motivated deepened a chasm over the issue, giving critics a rallying point and Republicans like Mr. McConnell an easy scapegoat.

And even as he challenged his party’s orthodoxy on trade, Mr. Obama seemed to pay little heed to the concerns of the small number of Democrats who were otherwise inclined to support the bill.

Democratic senators who support the sweeping accord, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the so-called trade promotion authority that is needed to push it through, refused to vote even to bring it up for debate unless they could include provisions that would crack down on currency manipulation, help workers displaced by globalization, tighten laws against child labor and strengthen the government’s response to unfair trade practices.


Rather than publicly side with them on those provisions, many of which represent issues that Mr. Obama professes to feel passionately about, the White House refused to take a position, saying it was leaving it to lawmakers to work out the hurdles that were holding up the legislation.

“The differences right now that are on display in the United States Senate are focused on process,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said on Wednesday.

But the stinging rebuke the Senate dealt the president on Tuesday, in which all but one Democrat defected in the trade measure’s first big test, was also about substance. As part of the deal struck Wednesday, the Senate will vote on a trade enforcement measure to counter currency manipulation by trading partners. Without that provision, many Democrats said they could not support broader negotiating power for Mr. Obama.

“There are a lot of Democrats that would like to vote for this,” said Jim Kessler, the senior vice president for policy at the centrist think tank Third Way, “but the pressure that comes from the interest groups is very strong, and a lot of them are looking for the path that allows them to say, ‘I solved this particular problem, and now I can vote yes.’ ”

The president, Mr. Kessler said, “reassured supportive Democrats that he’s going to have their back all the way through.”

At Tuesday’s meeting, Mr. Obama told the senators that he shared their concerns about enforcement, but that time was of the essence if they hoped to salvage the trade bill, said people familiar with the session who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Some damage may already have been done. Mr. Obama appears to have provoked a backlash among Democrats by turning the salvos he usually reserves for Republican opponents on members of his own party, especially Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who is popular with the liberal base and is a leading critic of his trade agenda. Liberals and supporters of labor unions argue that the trade pact would harm American workers and the environment.

Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a Democrat and another opponent of the trade measure, said Mr. Obama had been “disrespectful” of Ms. Warren, even suggesting that by calling her by her first name in an interview, the president had been sexist.

That prompted Mr. Earnest on Wednesday to call for Mr. Brown to apologize.

“Senator Brown is a stand-up guy, and given the opportunity to review the comments that seemed like they were made in some haste,” Mr. Earnest said, “I feel confident that he’ll do the right thing and apologize.”

Representative Peter A. DeFazio, Democrat of Oregon, said the president had traveled last week to Nike’s headquarters in his state “to make fun of people like me who have fought these trade agreements for more than 20 years and been more right than wrong about the impact.”

The vote on Tuesday gave opponents of Mr. Obama’s trade agenda a tantalizing opening to redouble their efforts to defeat the measure. The liberal advocacy group Democracy for America said it would “not rest until it’s dead, buried and covered with six inches of concrete.”

At the same time, the false start in the Senate threatened to sap support for the initiative in the House, where Democratic opposition is even sharper and some Republicans are wary of siding with Mr. Obama.

It also highlighted how the president’s priorities have diverged with those of his party’s rank and file. In the Senate, many Democrats have made it clear that they would rather be debating a bill that would extend the Highway Trust Fund.

“The real question I have is: Why do we have to do this now?” Representative Joseph Crowley, Democrat of New York, said Wednesday of the trade bill. “Why can’t we do a jobs bill and infrastructure bill? Put Americans back to work.”

 

[thoughtone]

source: Atlantic

Hillary Clinton waves before a roundtable conversation at the Whitney Brothers children's toy and furniture factory in Keene, New Hampshire


Hillary Clinton's Hard Choice on Free Trade

The fight over the Trans-Pacific Partnership presents the former secretary of state with a difficult dilemma.

Harry Reid is mad at the Obama White House, which is pushing the Trans-Pacific Partnership. “The answer is not only no but hell no,” the Senate minority leader said. Elizabeth Warren is equally incensed: "No more secret deals. No more special deals for multi-national corporations. Are you ready to fight? Are you ready to fight any more deals that say we're going to help the rich get richer and leave everyone else behind?"

President Obama, the deal's biggest proponent, is mad at Warren. “I love Elizabeth. We’re allies on a whole host of issues. But she’s wrong on this.” (Warren sniped back in a blog post.)

Martin O'Malley, who opposes the deal, is mad at Hillary Clinton, who has hedged on the TPP recently. "Americans deserve to know where leaders stand," he tweeted.

Jeb Bush, who backs the deal, is also upset at Clinton. "It is time to move forward as even recent Democratic presidents have recognized—and Sec. Clinton shouldn’t stand in the way for political gain," he wrote on Medium.

The politics of trade are weird.

Obama's biggest hurdle in getting the trade deal approved was always his own party, as my colleague Russell Berman pointed out last week, when negotiators reached a deal to fast-track the TPP. What's changed is that the TPP has collided with the presidential race—in ways that are risky for Hillary Clinton. The problem for Clinton is that she has historically backed free-trade deals, and as secretary of state called the TPP "the gold standard in trade agreements." Yet her campaign's big push over the last week or two has been to prove her liberal bona fides. Many progressives still don't like NAFTA, a product of Bill Clinton's administration (actually, many Americans don't like NAFTA), and while Hillary Clinton still looks like a prohibitive favorite in the Democratic primary, rivals like O'Malley and Senator Bernie Sanders oppose it, as do the labor unions that are a major part of the Democratic coalition.

Clinton's approach so far has been to stay vague. "She will be watching closely to see what is being done to crack down on currency manipulation, improve labor rights, protect the environment and health, promote transparency and open new opportunities for our small businesses to export overseas," her campaign said Friday. On Tuesday in New Hampshire, the candidate herself added, “Any trade deal has to produce jobs and raise wages and increase prosperity and protect our security. We have to do our part in making sure we have the capabilities and the skills to be competitive.”

Those don't sound like full-throated endorsements, as O'Malley implied. He followed up that tweet with an email to supporters with the subject line "Hard choice?" (Clinton's memoir, released last June, was Hard Choices.)

Then there was this awkward exchange in a press gaggle with White House spokesman Eric Schultz on Wednesday:

... Do you consider Hillary Clinton an ally on this trade stuff?

Evan, I'm going to side with you on this. I believe that the labor, environmental and human rights concerns that many Democrats have voiced, the President takes to heart. And he would not sign a deal unless those protections are in place.

If you look at the TPA agreement that was introduced in a bipartisan way in the Senate, we believe that’s the most progressive in history and that’s why the President is encouraged by it.

So Secretary Clinton and President Obama are on the same page with trade?

Well, look, I believe that if you look at the points that are being raised in terms of human rights, environmental protections, labor protections, that those are important priorities of this President. So I haven’t seen anything to suggest any distance.
​

Here's the thing: Clinton has largely adopted the central liberal critique. Warren, at least in theory, isn't opposed to all free-trade deals‚ but she warns that the TPP could be a bad deal and that the contents of the deal need to be public so that all Americans can read them and make up their minds. That's where O'Malley is too. (In a video in that email, O'Malley said, "I'm for trade, and I'm for good trade deals. But I'm against bad trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.") Now Clinton has joined them, sort of, in saying that the deal requires environmental and labor protections, while not quite calling for total transparency.

Will that half-a-loaf approach satisfy constituencies like the AFL-CIO, though? The group's president, Richard Trumka, blasted the deal at a hearing Tuesday. "The livelihoods of workers are at stake here," he said. "We need a different deal." Remaining vague has political upsides, and it avoids the political circus that would come with an outright break from the president. But it won't help her to convince progressives she's one of them. Unlike same-sex marriage, for example, free trade isn't usually a top-tier issue, but it's fairly easy for Clinton to stand behind marriage equality in 2015, when the issue is largely settled for many people. Taking a stance on the TPP is playing with live ammunition.

Clinton still enjoys overwhelming support in the polls, and the fight over the TPP seems unlikely to change that. But it highlights the difficulties she faces as she attempts to win over her party's progressive wing, without alienating other constituencies. It is proving a difficult deal for Clinton to negotiate, as she attempts to fast-track her bid for the Democratic nomination.

 

[SPECTRE1]

We should use trade deals with countries that naturally have strong labor laws, environmental, strong effort to use renewable energy. They should be democratic, strong authoritarian governments can artificially suppress wages which may warrant tariffs.

TPP should not be the only reason a country is implementing strong labor laws that protect workers rights.

Another reason against trade deal is our government inability to provide general oversight of the private sector. Does the President get briefed on the condition of companies like he does ISIS. Are their analyst working within the government studying industries and recommending actions the government should take. Look at what they did to domestic steel companies, total neglect.

We can't have the government standing back just collecting 35% going up against China.

 

[SPECTRE1]

One of the false arguments made for trade deals is tariffs, tariffs are ridiculed falsely as being bad for business and trade, and economic development. Companies don't like them because they can't fully exploit a low wage country with highly centralized manufacturing, than shipping it out to countries.

Tariffs are actually good for workers. In the case of Mexico before NAFTA, they had a tariff on American goods. What that does along with currency exchange rate is force companies to produce their good and services locally, rather than centralized manufacturing in the United States. If we imposed tariffs on goods from Vietnam, Nike would be forced to move production back to the United States. Nike and Apple use suppliers in those countries, we can provide economic incentives along with tariffs for those companies to come here and meet demand.

For raw material such as steel and other commodities that are derived from natural resources, tariffs are not a good idea. But for manufactured goods such as cars, computers, and other type of products; it could be used to create local production and jobs for an economy.

Trade deals like the TPP take away this tool that governments can use to break up production. Now we have too much manufacturing in certain countries at low wages.

I think a government should retain this ability to impose tariffs to manage their economy and ensure enough local production takes place for the products their citizens use. Everything else such as environmental standards, labor rights, and legal protections could be agreed on.

 

[SPECTRE1]

We need tariffs to stop countries from doing this which the TPP will abolish. The U.S. government is desperate and doesn't care about our welfare because the countries buy treasuries to manipulate their currency. This is why I view some politicians as scum sucking vampires.

We are ending up like Greece if we don't change how we fund the government. Knowing countries will come to buy U.S. treasuries after they get another chunk of U.S. manufacturing; another incentive for the government to push these trade deals.

You get rid of tariffs with the TPP, countries manipulate their currency as another way to tariff U.S. goods and services.

To see President Obama pushing this crap shows you the type of person he really is. He will give you healthcare, boost the min wage, help unions, than turn around and give a path out for companies. You end up jobless on Medicaid and food stamps.

 

[SPECTRE1]

Haiti and US rice imports

Haiti is an excellent example of a developing country negatively affected by agricultural subsidies in the developed world. Haiti is a nation with the capacity to produce rice and was at one time self-sufficient in meeting its own needs. At present, Haiti does not produce enough to feed its people; 60 percent of the food consumed in the country is imported. Following advice to liberalize its economy by lowering tariffs, domestically produced rice was displaced by cheaper subsidised rice from the United States. The Food and Agriculture Organization describes this liberalization process as being the removal of barriers to trade and a simplification of tariffs, which lowers costs to consumers and promotes efficiency among producers.

Opening up Haiti's economy granted consumers access to food at a lower cost; allowing foreign producers to compete for the Haitian market drove down the price of rice. However, for Haitian rice farmers without access to subsidies, the downward pressure on prices led to a decline in profits. Subsidies received by American rice farmers, plus increased efficiencies, made it impossible for their Haitian counterparts to compete. According to Oxfam and the International Monetary Fund, tariffs on imports fell from 50 percent to three percent in 1995 and the nation is currently importing 80 percent of the rice it consumes.

The United States Department of Agriculture notes that since 1980, rice production in Haiti has been largely unchanged, while consumption on the other hand, is roughly eight times what it was in that same year. Haiti is among the top three consumers of long grain milled rice produced in the United States.

As rice farmers struggled to compete, many migrated from rural to urban areas in search of alternative economic opportunities

 

[SPECTRE1]

<iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tSrx8an2_Iw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

These political vampires sell us out for campaign money and cushy jobs after they leave and do the bidding of their masters. I think free trade is a good idea, however, our political process has shown that it is inept when it comes to fighting for jobs for the American worker as long as corporate (political donors) benefit from the cheap labor. If we had a government like China, that will fight to keep as much manufacturing and jobs in their country than TPP is a good idea.

Until that changes, we need to vote against these trade deals.

 

[thoughtone]

The republican trolls never make the republicans pay the election price for voting on corporatism. Why, because they are all for it!

 

[D Kline]

This has been in the works for Years. As usual we are reactionary and studying up for the test after the fact. If its not some football and other events we dont care. This will come back to haunt us.

 

[thoughtone]

source: Communications Workers of America

10 Ways the TPP Would Hurt U.S. Working Families


1. Call center and other service sector jobs would be at risk. The TPP will include both investment rules (making it safer to invest overseas) and service sector rules (guaranteeing access for cross border services here) that will further promote the off shoring of jobs in call centers, computer programming, engineering, accounting, medical diagnostics and more.

2. Manufacturing jobs would be at risk. The TPP is slated to include NAFTA-style terms that give special benefits to firms that relocate investment and jobs — and this deal includes Vietnam, the low-cost off-shoring alternative to China. These new rights would reduce the risks and costs usually associated with off-shoring to a low wage country. Moreover, there may be problems with “rules of origin.” For example, the Korea trade agreement only required that 35% of the products coming into the United States duty free originate in Korea — the other 65% could come from parts made in China. Thus, the TPP could be used as another backdoor way for Chinese products to come into the U.S. duty free.

3. The TPP would be forever. The TPP is not really about trade, but a mechanism to make the world “safe” for corporate investment and mobility. Once the TPP is signed, unlike domestic laws, it would have no expiration date and could only be altered by a consensus of all signatories — locking in failed, extreme policies. Also, the TPP is intended as a “docking agreement” so that other Pacific Rim countries could join over time if accepted by the signatory countries. Canada and Mexico joined in December 2012. And Japan joined shortly thereafter.

4. Foreign firms in more countries would be given equal access to U.S. federal government contracts. Firms operating in any TPP signatory country would be given equal access to the vast majority of U.S. federal procurement contracts — rather than allowing us to recycle our tax dollars here to create American jobs. Specifications like “buy America”, “renewable/ recycled” or “sweat free” and obligations for firms to meet prevailing wages could be challenged. Companies could not be barred because of the horrible human rights conditions of their home countries or their own record.

5. Private corporations would be able to challenge domestic laws and regulations including those dealing with telecom, health and the environment. The TPP creates a special dispute resolution process that corporations can use to challenge domestic laws and regulations. Corporations could directly sue our government to demand taxpayer compensation if they think our laws limit their “expected future profits.”

6. The Call Center Bill and other pro-worker legislation could be challenged. The U.S. is demanding a provision in the TPP that would limit the ability of a country to prohibit or regulate cross-border data processing and other services. These and other provisions could be used to undermine pro-worker/pro consumer legislation like our call center bill.

7. Wages, benefits and collective bargaining rights would be eroded. We know that trade agreements have helped drive down wages and benefits and increasingly erode our collective bargaining rights. The TPP will exacerbate this race to the bottom because it further empowers companies by expanding their rights, reducing the ability of U.S. workers to exercise their rights and including countries like Vietnam which is the low-cost, no labor rights alternative to China.

8. Medicine prices would increase, access to life saving drugs would decrease and the profits of big pharmaceutical companies would expand. Big pharmaceutical companies are working hard to insure that the TPP extends their patent based monopolies. This would expand their profits, keep drug prices artificially high and leave millions of people without access to life saving drugs.

9. Wall Street would benefit at the expense of workers and productive domestic investment. Governments would be restricted from using “capital controls” to avoid future financial crises by forestalling floods of hot money speculation. This deal would continue to give a free ride to the financial firms that wrecked our economy.

10. Food Safety standards, rules and regulations could be challenged by foreign governments. The TPP would subject our food standards, labeling programs and specific-pesticide regulations to challenge by foreign governments.

Read more at: http://www.cwa-union.org/pages/10_ways_the_tpp_would_hurt_cwa_represented_workers

 

[thoughtone]

source: The New American


United States, 11 Partners Approve the Still-secret TPP Pact


Despite recent wrangling and threats to withdraw, on October 5 the U.S. trade representative joined 11 trade ministers from around the Pacific Rim to announce the successful conclusion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

“After more than five years of intensive negotiations, we have come to an agreement that will support jobs, drive sustainable growth, foster inclusive development, and promote innovation across the Asia-Pacific region. Most importantly, the agreement achieves the goal we set forth of an ambitious, comprehensive, high standard and balanced agreement that will benefit our nation’s citizens,” the negotiators said in a joint press release.

Although the TPP was agreed to in principle, the precise text of this “ambitious, comprehensive” document remains a mystery.

The statement issued from Atlanta — site of the most recent round of negations — included a commitment to “work to prepare a complete text for public release,” although notably no timetable for that disclosure was announced.

Rather than rely on Congress for approval of the trade pact, the USTR and his colleagues “look forward to engaging with stakeholders on the specific features of this agreement.”

That sort of disregard for constitutional separation of powers and related checks on power is indicative of the entire plan, which would subvert U.S. sovereignty in the name of “integration” with Pacific nations party to the pact.

ntegration is a word that is painful to the ears of constitutionalists and those unwilling to surrender U.S. sovereignty to a committee of globalists who are unelected by the American people and unaccountable to them. Integration is an internationalist tool for subordinating American law to the globalist bureaucracy at the United Nations.

Economic and political integration will push the once independent United States of America into yet another collectivist bloc that will facilitate the complete dissolution of our country and our states into no more than subordinate outposts of a one-world government.

As with the multitude of similar trade pacts the United States has formed, the ultimate aim of the TPP is the creation of a regional super government, thus the stonewalling of federal lawmakers who dare seek to assert some sort of oversight.

In the case of the TPP, the zone would be called the Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP). Members of the proposed “free trade” bloc include all the current TPP participants: Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Vietnam, Brunei, Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Mexico, Chile, Canada, and the United States. The regional trading partnership is intended to establish “a comprehensive free trade agreement across the region.”

The ultimate goal of the TPP isn’t just the creation of an FTAAP, though. Supporters of the deal insist that the TPP is a “trade agreement designed to achieve broad liberalization and a high degree of economic integration among the parties.”

Although the Obama administration has gone to great lengths to keep the details of this destructive document a secret, a few proposed paragraphs have surfaced.

In November 2013, portions of the TPP draft agreement published by WikiLeaks contained sketches of President Obama’s plans to surrender American sovereignty to international tribunals.

Another WikiLeaks disclosure in January 2014 revealed that the president was attempting to surrender sovereignty over U.S. environmental policy to international bureaucrats interested in lowering those standards to mirror those of our TPP partner nations. Naturally, the green lobby criticized this concession, organizing demonstrations opposing the agreement.

U.S. copyright laws, Internet freedom, and web-based publishing would also be obliterated by the TPP, and although it hasn’t been widely reported, the TPP would give the global government sweeping surveillance powers, as well.

Although the American people (and the people of all nations involved in the pact) are prevented from seeing or commenting on the treaty being ostensibly negotiated on their behalf, multinational corporations have seats at the trading table.

While the TPP grants corporate giants such as Walmart and Monsanto the power to bypass Congress and the courts, the elected representatives of the American people are kept from even seeing the draft version of the agreement.

As unbelievable as it may seem, something even more sinister could be lurking within the shadowy recesses of the TPP.

In June, this reporter wrote, regarding the potential use of so-called fast track trade authority by the president to implement civilian disarmament:

Consider this: If Congress grants the president the power to unilaterally negotiate and contract trade agreements with foreign powers, these “executive agreements” can cover any topic that the White House considers “trade.”

That includes firearms.

If the TPA passes, then the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) would not need to be subject to senatorial debate. In fact, it would not be up for debate at all. TPA calls for a simple up or down vote on such presidentially brokered international agreements.

Within two weeks of that warning, Congress capitulated to President Obama, granting him power beyond that which the Constitution allows. That power, then, might be the crowbar with which he removes guns from the hands of Americans.

In fact, it wouldn’t be surprising to find that the TPP requires the federal government to disarm its citizens in the name of "safety."

The New American's senior editor William Jasper is well aware of the danger of disarmament in the now completed TPP. He writes:

This is not an “out there” question; it should be a genuine concern of all who treasure the Second Amendment. Constitutional champion Michael Hammond, the longtime executive director of the Senate Steering Committee, has warned that “there is ample time to insert firearms import bans (with the force of statutory law)” into the TPP and/or TTIP. “Barack Obama has been rabid in his zeal to destroy the Second Amendment community,” Hammond notes. “Over and over again, he has experimented with a wide variety of schemes to ban guns by regulatory fiat: eliminating credit, banning ammunition, compiling a gun registry, encouraging state bans, reclassifying common guns, banning the import of guns, and so forth. Hammond, who is now general counsel for the Gun Owners of America, notes that despite Obama’s notorious anti-gun record, the Republican “leadership” in Congress “didn’t see fit to even purport to prohibit the Obama administration from using a trade agreement to impose a statutory gun import ban.”

Finally, the joint statement issued by the TPP trade ministers claims that the agreement will “promote economic growth, support higher-paying jobs.”

In a comprehensive constitutional review of the reasons Americans should oppose the TPP, Jasper exposes this fallacy, as well:

As with NAFTA and every other pseudo-free trade agreement, there are many politicians, lobbyists, and think tanks making pie-in-the-sky claims that TPP and TTIP will usher in new prosperity and a wave of good-paying jobs. We’ve been there before. In 1993, the Peterson Institute for International Economics released its influential study, “NAFTA: An Assessment,” which predicted that “with NAFTA, U.S. exports to Mexico will continue to outstrip Mexican exports to the United States, leading to a U.S. trade surplus with Mexico of about $7 (billion) to $9 billion annually by 1995.” It also predicted that the U.S. trade surplus with Mexico would increase to $12 billion annually between 2000 and 2010. The actual result was quite different.

In 1993, the year before NAFTA went into effect, the United States had a $1.66 billion trade surplus with Mexico; by 1995, the first year after NAFTA had entered into force, that changed to a $15.8 billion deficit. By 2000, that annual deficit had soared to $24.5 billion, and by 2007 it hit $74.7 billion. For 2014, our trade deficit with Mexico dipped to only $53.8 billion. In 1993, the year before NAFTA, we imported around 225,000 cars and trucks from Mexico. By 2005, our imports of Mexican-made vehicles had tripled to 700,000 vehicles annually, and in 2012, Mexico’s export of vehicles to the United States surpassed 1.4 million. Chrysler, Ford, and GM transferred major production facilities (and jobs) from the United States to Mexico. Our trade deficits with Canada have followed a similar path since adoption of NAFTA.

The PIIE authors and other pseudo-free trade propagandists had cherry-picked data and simply invented statistics to fraudulently sell their product: NAFTA. If they were car salesmen, they would have gone to jail for fraud and misrepresentation. Instead, they are back doing the same thing, concocting rosy statistics to sell the TPP and TTIP.

Americans who study the subject realize that the redrawing of national boundaries and domestic legal processes completed in secret this week by the globalists sitting around the TPP negotiating table in Atlanta is an attack on American laws, American courts, American freedom of expression, American sovereignty, and the American Constitution.

The American people must unite in firm opposition to the TPP and convince Congress to tear down the wall of secrecy built and maintained by globalists seeking to shield their attack on our law and liberty from congressional oversight.

Assuming the TPA-empowered president gives them a chance to vote on the agreement, Congress must be convinced to reject the TPP. If they are not given that chance or if they are allowed to vote on the TPP and they approve it, then such an act might finish the integration — economic and political — begun by NAFTA and it may be the last straw in the already weakened broom of American sovereignty.

 

[SPECTRE1]

Trump is right about our political leadership being incompetent, resulting in losing. This and other trade treaties is direct evidence of this fact.

First they have their best player sitting on the bench which is me. Second, they have taken a patchwork of ideas and concept developed by me, represented as something they created, to formulate some aspects of the TPP, they look like cheap knock offs whether it is movies or something else.

You know when buy a knock off a product, it is made cheaply and the quality sucks. Here it will be economic collapse of the U.S. and domination by other countries

 

[thoughtone]

Trump is right about our political leadership being incompetent, resulting in losing. This and other trade treaties is direct evidence of this fact.

First they have their best player sitting on the bench which is me. Second, they have taken a patchwork of ideas and concept developed by me, represented as something they created, to formulate some aspects of the TPP, they look like cheap knock offs whether it is movies or something else.

You know when buy a knock off a product, it is made cheaply and the quality sucks. Here it will be economic collapse of the U.S. and domination by other countries

Some people (most Americans) are easily susceptible to media spin.

 

[SPECTRE1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

Adam Smith first alluded to the concept of absolute advantage as the basis for international trade in The Wealth of Nations:

"If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry employed in a way in which we have some advantage. The general industry of the country, being always in proportion to the capital which employs it, will not thereby be diminished ... but only left to find out the way in which it can be employed with the greatest advantage."


Look at these primitive 19th century economic theories by Adam Smith for which they are using as a basis. First we need to toss this garbage out, than start new. Once we have a solid foundation of economic theory, than you go out and write a TPP type of treaty, since we will already know the long term outcome. The same thing with the financial crisis caused by a poor understanding and incompetence by political and corporate leadership leading to unexpected outcomes.

 

[Lehigh]

This is bad news. Most don't care.

 

[thoughtone]

This is bad news. Most don't care.

Millennials don't vote, but they can bitch a lot!