This Labor Day, the Pacific Rim will wash into the Midwest's flagship city, and activists will confront the tides of global commerce with a demand for global economic justice.
At trade talks in Chicago, the Obama administration will work with other officials to develop a trade agreement that will incorporate Vietnam, Brunei, Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand, Australia, Chile and Peru. Labor, environmental and human rights groups will gather in the city to warn that the structure, and guiding ideology, of the emerging trade deal could expand a model of free-marketeering that has displaced masses of workers across the globe and granted multinationals unprecedented powers to flout national and international laws.
The provisions of the Trans-Pacific Free Trade Agreement or Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are still under wraps. But the general outline seems to mimic the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and similar pacts that have brought political and economic turmoil to rich and poor countries alike. The new negotiations are also taking place amid political friction over pending trade deals with South Korea and Colombia, which have run into opposition over concerns about labor abuses abroad and offshoring of U.S. jobs. Yet the White House continues to push free trade as a path toward the country's economic revitalization.
So on Monday, activists with Stand Up! Chicago and other groups hope to get ahead of political deal-making by demanding that any new trade deal give greater priority to environmental, labor and health concerns. The ongoing trade talks offer a tiny opening for advocates to put forward ideas for making trade less hostile to ordinary people. In a way, they're taking the Obama administration on its own word, because the TPP has been billed as a "21st-century" trade pact that will presumably improve on previous trade agreements.
Of course, that could just be the tepidly liberal spin on a deal that is shaping up to be the "NAFTA of the Pacific," as activists call it: a pact that coddles corporate interests like sweatshop manufacturers, pharmaceutical makers and agribusinesses seeking to eliminate any barriers to profit.
Manuel Perez-Rocha, an analyst with the D.C.-based think tank Institute for Policy Studies, says that free trade deals tend to use "investment" and "growth" as a pretext for ruthless exploitation. The agreements "push wages lower and dislocate production with the ensuing loss of jobs," says Perez-Rocha, adding that "the prospects for the TPP are very bleak and workers everywhere must resist it."
Some Pacific Trade Partners seem to have no qualms about tying free markets with oppressive political systems. The Vietnamese government, for instance, has complemented U.S.-friendly development policies with measures to quash collective bargaining and independent labor organizing, along with general suppression of political dissent and organizing through Internet censorship, according to research by the International Trade Union Confederation.
The tiny, oil-rich regime of Brunei has faced wide criticism for failing to adhere to international labor rights conventions on unionization and non-discrimination, and for enabling the systematic abuse of foreign laborers, who fill many of Brunei's lowest-paid, low-skill jobs, like domestic work.
The very process of the trade negotiations, though, is structured to prevent basic issues, ranging from union rights to climate change, from even coming up for discussion. The Citizens Trade Campaign explains in its briefing on the TPP:
Executives from hundreds of corporations that have been named as official trade advisors have access to the texts and talks. Members of Congress, journalists and the people whose lives will be most affected, however, have no ability to see what our negotiators are bargaining for -- and bargaining away -- until a deal is done and it is effectively too late for changes.
What has so far come to public light from the negotiations doesn't look promising. A recently leaked document on prospective intellectual-property provisions of the TPP suggested, to the outrage of health advocates, that the agreement could tighten patent restrictions and constrain access to critical HIV/AIDS medications in the Pacific region.
Not surprisingly, this general disregard for civil society is reflected in elaborate trade protocols that allow companies to circumvent regulation. Public Citizen has documented many "investor-state" arbitration suits filed under NAFTA and younger cousins the Central America and Peru FTAs. In one such case, a foreign investor has tried to block action by the Peruvian government over the company's alleged failure to carry out a clean-up of a heavily polluted metal smelter site in La Oroya. An $800-million investor-state claim argued the government's action violated the company's right to "fair and equitable treatment" under the Peru Trade Promotion Agreement.
And what about the administration's claims that more free trade means more jobs for a stagnant economy? Those promises did not bear out in the years following NAFTA's implementation, which labor analysts associate with major job losses in key manufacturing sectors (not to mention economic havoc and agricultural devastation in Mexico, which in turn fueled the immigration crisis north of the border).
Even from a business standpoint, activists note that, since the U.S. already does brisk business in the Pacific Rim, the TPP isn't likely to bring a major boost to exports or multinational investment. Arthur Stamoulis, executive director of Citizens Trade Campaign, speculated that the Pacific free trade plans aim primarily to set a precedent for corporate impunity:
Clearly, Wall Street wants more financial deregulation and sees this agreement as a mechanism to get it. Beyond that though is the obvious interest in big corporations being able to shift jobs around the globe to wherever labor is the most exploited and environmental regulations are the weakest. A free trade agreement with Vietnam and Malaysia and Brunei would make it easier for corporations to do so, driving down wages and benefits for most working people, not only in Chicago or the United States, but everywhere. It's a cycle that has to stop.
But there's still time at least to try to turn the Pacific trade dialogue away from the status quo and toward a concept of globalization that actually strengthens protections for economic sovereignty, sustainability and decent work. Some fair-trade groups have campaigned for the TRADE Act, which would set a baseline for labor, human rights and regulatory protections in future trade deals. Public Citizen, the Institute for Policy Studies and other advocacy groups have published a model framework for protecting the public interest in transnational investment and commerce. At the core is a broad public protection exemption written into trade deals that would keep corporations from taking legal action against a nation's safeguards for the environment, labor or health and safety in the name of "free trade." By shielding essential regulations from arbitrary corporate attacks, the coalition argues, the measure would "[shift] the burden of proof for defending their public interest laws away from governments."
But currently, that burden of defending the public interest falls on the shoulders of grassroots groups, while officials rush to crack open free markets in the Global South. Perhaps the most activists can do this Labor Day is rally in Chicago's streets as negotiators meet in virtual secrecy to pen what may be the economic fate of millions across the planet. If the officials inside refuse to listen, then maybe the people outside will.
This piece is cross-posted from Colorlines.com.
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Michael Brenner: The Great Betrayal
Foreign individuals in foreign industrial nations that create wealth will eventually own everything of value in the USA as they redeem their freshly printed paper US Treasury Bonds and US dollars that they earned by manufacturing US consumer products for title to privately owned businesses, factories, casinos, hotels, farms, land, ports, breweries, refineries, forests, ports, breweries, refineries, and other privately owned wealth and assets located in the USA (that were created by previous US generations prior to de-industrialization) that are located in the USA.
Foreigners will then become the major (or maybe the only) source of employment for US citizens after they redeem their US Treasury bonds for title to and control of all of the assets located in the USA.
The US population will then become employees; possibly indentured servants; or maybe even beg to become slaves or indentured servants owned by the foreign countries and/or foreign individuals that will own everything of value in the USA in the very near future if the US government continues to destroy the US economy and the purchasing power of the US dollar with deficit spending.
We are condeming future generations of US citizens to work harder and more productive than ourselves in order to pay off these US Treasury Bonds when they become due, since we will have sold their legacy in order for US TO KEEP FROM WORKING TO PRODUCE THE THINGS THAT WE CONSUME.
Just more jobs leaving the US.............
Sounds exactly like private gain, public loss. Spending public money so a few guys can get rich. Where has that happened before? And why are we doing this again?
Now skedaddle back to that new trade school I just opened. We have easy financing for your government tuition check, and a great soup kitchen where you can spend your welfare and unemployment checks.
http://signon.org/sign/out-lobbyists
These free trade agreements mean more unemployment which leads to more foreclosures, more hunger and poverty for U.S. citizens and more shoddy goods.
Doubtful Obama talked about this in his Labor Day speech.
Who are the politicians listening to, the tens of millions of American workers who have seen their standard of living go down the tubes or they hundreds of billionaires who want to be a little bit richer at the expense of the rest of us?
Or do I even need to ask?
Clearly, you don't need to ask because you are aware of the answer. Unfortunately, there are a whole lot of people in this country who still haven't figured out the correct answer to that question.
BTW - love your micro-bio.
Signing of this type of treaty would be a rejection of all the policies that lead to WWII. It would also mean, that all the irrational talk about "them" stealing "our" jobs might finally be dead.
I recommend reading Bastiat's candle makers petition
http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html
He makes the (spoof) argument that people should be forced to blacken windows because the sun is exporting light far below what candle makers costs. Think about all the extra jobs and wealth generated!
The argument about low cost imports was proven false over 100 years ago.
I also recommend this article: http://www.good.is/post/it-s-all-made-in-china-not-so-fast/
“… A total of 88.5 percent of consumer spending in the United States is on items made here, with only 2.7 percent spent on “Made in China” goods, according to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco:”
“Even that doesn’t entirely reflect the amount of money spent on Chinese goods that stays in the United States. Chinese goods need to be transported, sold and marketed here, and so it turns out that for every dollar spent on products made in China, 55 cents go to services produced in the United States.”
In summary:
We import less than most people think
Imports still create jobs
Imports benefit consumers and the entire economy.
The current unemployment was caused by the Housing/ Banking bubbles. Too many people specialized in these areas. It will take time and huge cost for them to retrain. The first step should be to minimize the government’s ability to create bubbles in the future.
I wonder if the roads we might fix will be the ones the Republican governors like Perry have sold/ leased to foreign sovereign wealth funds...
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We need a Second Party.