By Andrew Christie, Chapter Director
As the final showdown over the Trans-Pacific Partnership draws near, I’ve been finding myself recalling a moment in time 16 years ago. Yesterday, with the help of some tattered file folders, I managed to reconstruct a warm spring day I spent in the nation’s Capitol, confirm the identity of the guy I heard speak in a church there, and reaffirm Mr. Faulkner’s observation that the past is never over, nor even past.
On the afternoon of Thursday, April 13, 2000, I filed into a small church in downtown Washington D.C. with about 50 or 60 other people to attend the Alternatives to Globalization forum and hear a little-known Congressman named Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tell us about the Global Sustainable Development Resolution.
Rep. Sanders walked over from Capitol Hill, where that morning he had introduced the resolution on the floor of the House. Its introduction, like the scheduling of the forum, was timed to coincide with massive protests against the policies of the World Bank and International
Monetary Fund. The twin architects of corporate globalization and the free-trade regime were having a joint meeting that weekend -- the event that had drawn me to Washington with several thousand others galvanized by the stunning rout of the World Trade Organization in Seattle and rejection of the corporate model of “free trade” four months previously.
The Global Sustainable Development Resolution sought to establish democratic controls over institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. The WTO and all other agreements regulating international trade would be renegotiated to reorient trade and investment so as to make it a means to just and sustainable development, guaranteeing environmental protections and labor rights.
Rep. Sanders took the pulpit and grabbed his audience. “We wanted to answer those people who say critics of globalization just criticize without offering an alternative,” he said. “Here’s the alternative.”
Noting that corporate money “is flying so fast around Capitol Hill right now you need to wear a helmet because you could get hit in the head,” Sanders said he considered the resolution’s chances of passage in the House to be slim. But he wasn’t looking for a win. “It gives us a framework to build on,” he told us, “and if we rally millions of people to our side, Congress will eventually have to do the right thing.”
Or as the Campaign for Labor Rights noted the year before: “This resolution would be a starting point for taking power away from corporations and putting it back into the hands of the people. Skeptics will rush to tell us that this resolution cannot possibly pass a Congress whose members have ridden to power on corporate money — and they will be right. Its importance lies not in its immediate legislative chances. This resolution bangs on the wall and forces the corporate cockroaches and their friends in government to come running out and declare themselves AGAINST worker rights, AGAINST environmental protection, AGAINST democratic process, AGAINST accountability. And it puts us in the affirmative on those values.”
And indeed, Rep. Sanders’ resolution did not pass. But the spirit behind the Global Sustainable Development Resolution never died. Five years later, Rep. Sherrod Brown, one of the initiative’s co-sponsors, whipped “nay” votes in Congress when the Central American Free Trade Agreement hove into view. CAFTA, son of NAFTA, managed to pass by just one vote, after midnight on July 28, 2005. The tarnished star of “free trade” was falling fast.
In 2009, The GSD resolution re-emerged as the Trade Reform, Accountability, Development and Employment (TRADE) Act. Per Global Citizen, the bill was re-introduced by Rep. Mike Michaud (D-Maine) with 106 cosponsors, including nine committee chairs. Working with labor, environmental, consumer, faith and family farm organizations, Michaud and now-Senator Sherrod Brown developed legislation that offers a progressive path to a new trade and globalization policy, and it gained the support of half the House Democrats on the day it was introduced.
And long after that sunny April afternoon in Washington D.C. when everyone in that church was feeling the bern, former Representative Sanders showed that he knows a few things about rallying millions of people to a cause.
As Brendan Smith and Jeremy Brecher described the Global Sustainable Development Resolution in Foreign Policy In Focus in 1999, it was a model that “lays out a path for reconstructing the global economy based on labor and human rights, protection of the environment, and new initiatives to encourage socially and environmentally sound national and local development.”
When the TPP showdown arrives, the steady pressure applied over the years between that day in D.C. and now will be the determining factor in its defeat. When our work ensures that the TPP falls (feel free to join up, dear reader) it will take the corporate free-trade era with it, and we will be ready with the new model in hand.