Why trade has plunged democrats into Civil War

Neal Hasan, Correspondent

Much of President Barack Obama’s time in the Oval Office has been spent championing the middle class. Legislation from Buy America to the Affordable Care Act have helped to boost the prospects of hard-working, middle-class citizens across the country, much to the delight of the progressive wing of the Democratic party. Now, however, the president has plunged the Democratic party into civil war over fast-track authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), one of the biggest free-trade agreements the world has seen since NAFTA two decades ago.

TPP
Photo source: dcindymedia.org

The TPP, as it’s known, would open up free trade between Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Singapore, Vietnam and the United States. Nearly 40 percent of the world’s GDP is represented by those 12 countries, meaning that this deal could be one of the iconic parts of Obama’s legacy should it go through.

Right now, though, very few people seem to know anything about the details of the TPP. Pres. Obama has released next to no details on what is being negotiated, but he still has asked Congress for fast-track authority on the treaty. This trade-promotion authority, should it be passed, would give the legislative body only an up-or-down vote on the TPP once introduced with no chance to make amendments.

Proponents of the trade deal have argued that, in order to continue to compete in the global marketplace on our own terms, the United States needs to push through this agreement, and that fast-track authority would give Obama the power to do just that. Unions, populists and the “Warren wing” of the Democratic party aren’t buying it and demand a chance to see and work on the deal before it is passed.

“This is an agreement that’s going to cover 40 percent of the world’s GDP,” AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka told Vox.com. “Yet they want to be able to do it in secret, plunk it down, and have Congress vote up or down with no amendments.”

Lori Wallach, the Director and Founder of Global Trade Watch, has been one of the most vocal critics of the TPP. In one of the more famous quotes about the deal, she referred to it as “NAFTA on steroids” in an interview with Moyers and Co. NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), passed in 1994 by Bill Clinton, was a free-trade deal between the United States, Canada and Mexico. Since its passage into law, America has lost over 700,000 middle-class jobs and fallen prey to currency manipulation, corporations have gained strong power to force workers into lower wages, displaced millions of Mexican farmers and forced them into the US labor market, and otherwise increased the growing wealth gap between the rich and the poor. The TPP promises to compound that economic misery on an even greater scale.

Wallach continued to criticize the TPP by noting how little of the agreement that has so far been leaked is actually about trade.

“The agreement has 29 chapters, and only five of them have to do with trade. The other 24 chapters either handcuff our domestic governments, limiting food safety, environmental standards, financial regulation, energy and climate policy, or establish new powers for corporations,” Wallach told Moyers and Co.

Worst of all, the TPP could contain serious infringements on American sovereignty. A leak of some TPP language reveals new powers for foreign corporations that allow them to challenge U.S. policies and get taxpayer compensation if their profits are affected. WikiLeaks has also obtained documents that reveal a parallel legal system for foreign corporations, called the Investor-State Dispute Settlement, in which US laws can be challenged at the expense of American taxpayers. The judges on these international tribunals would be corporate attorneys, rotating between suing domestic governments and serving as the judges in other cases. You read that correctly; attorneys working for big businesses will be ruling on cases between government and big businesses.

It seems the whole of the TPP is in favor of large corporations and special interests. In fact, one of the major reasons this deal has been left so murky is its origins; almost the entirety of the TPP has allegedly been scribed by corporate lawyers and wealthy interest groups from the participating countries for their own benefit and pushing the expenses onto the consumers and workers.

Senate progressives like Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) have struck out against this secrecy.

“This secretive deal is backed by all of the big money interests and is a continuation of a series of bad trade agreements which have cost us millions of decent American jobs,” Sanders told a riled-up crowd protesting the TPP in the streets of Washington, D.C. last week.

Sen. Warren, considered the rising populist star of the Senate, also hit out in a scathing editorial piece written for the Washington Post last November. “The lobbyists’ agenda is not America’s agenda,” she wrote. “Americans are deeply suspicious of trade deals negotiated in secret, with chief executives invited into the room while the workers whose jobs are on the line are locked outside […] If cutting deals means helping big corporations, Wall Street banks and the already-powerful, that isn’t a victory for the American people — it’s just another round of the same old rigged game.”

These two Senators are not just against the lack of transparency in the TPP; they also point to the many failures of the previous free-trade deals. The most recent example is the US-South Korea agreement. In the three years since it was signed in March of 2012, America’s trade deficit with the Asian nation has increased by $8.7 billion (59.6 percent), and has cost the country more than 65,000 jobs, mostly in manufacturing.

The AFL-CIO, an influential national federation of labor unions, have rightly been enraged by these losses. While free-trade proponents point to increased GDP’s and growth in multinational companies, a simple look at the facts show just how badly these deals have affected middle-class jobs by reducing wages and outsourcing jobs to countries with poor labor and environmental standards.

Sen. Warren, at the anti-TPP rally last week in D.C., challenged progressives “to fight any more deals that say ‘we’re going to help the rich get richer and leave everybody else behind’.” With votes upcoming on whether or not Pres. Obama will be given that authority by Congress will be given fast-track authority on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, this challenge could not be more important.

The die is rolled, and now we wait to see whether or not the “New Dems” of Elizabeth Warren’s progressive wing of the Democratic Party can knock back this crucial step toward finalizing the TPP or if hard-working Americans will again be faced with the potentially troubling consequences of yet another free-trade failure.