Trans-Pacific Partnership - Update

Compiled and edited by Jim Williams from articles by Public Citizen, The Hightower Lowdown, No Coal Coalition, Sierra Club, and Bloomberg News

March 15, 2016

Summary: 

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is one of the so called “Free Trade Agreements”, but the TPP is a "trade deal" that mostly does not deal with trade.  In fact, of the 29 chapters in this document, only five cover traditional trade matters.  (In Australia and New Zealand it is not called a free trade agreement; it is simply called the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement or TPPA.)  The TPPA was written by corporate lobbyists and corporate lawyers.  The people of the United States and their elected representatives had little or no input into the TPP Agreement. That is, it was written by corporations for corporations.  No one should believe that such a document would be good for working Americans. 

The primary purpose for the TPP is to guarantee that foreign and U.S. corporations make a profit.  To this end, provisions of the TPP create a private, supra-legal Kangaroo court that empowers corporations to sue TPP governments over environmental, health, consumer, zoning, or any other public policies that the corporations claim are either undermining or diminishing "expected future profits."  This elevates thousands of private, profit-seeking entities to the legal status of sovereign nations.  Nations that join must conform their laws and rules to TPP's restrictions, effectively supplanting US sovereignty and cancelling our people's right to be self-governing.

Here are some of the provisions that the TPP threatens:

  • Outsources US Jobs. 
  • Trashes U.S. Food Safety Laws. 
  • Prevents Local Governance of Fracking. 
  • Increases Medical Costs by Raising Drug Prices and by allowing Patents for Medical Procedures. 
  • Benefits Wall Street and Other Financial Giants. 
  • Destroys Internet freedom. 
  • Would Cause Public Services to be Taken Over by Corporations. 
  • Supplants US sovereignty.
  • Cancels people's right to be self-governing by creating virtually permanent corporate rule over “we the people”.
  • Creates a new undemocratic legal system with cases decided behind closed doors by corporate attorneys with no chance for an appeal.
  • Curtains and Circumvents Environmental Laws.

Trans-Pacific Partnership is like NAFTA.  But it is much more comprehensive and destructive to American jobs.  NAFTA promised prosperity with jobs across our land.  But only the corporations got wealthy.  NAFTA caused 60,000 American manufacturing facilities to be closed,  Five million middle-class jobs to be outsourced, and the economies of hundreds of towns and cities to be destroyed (most notably Detroit). Mexicans were also affected badly.  US grain traders like ADM dumped corn into Mexico, wiping out millions of farmers' livelihoods, and thousands of local businesses were crushed when Walmart invaded with its Chinese-made wares.  And this, of course, has contributed to current immigration crisis. 

Other FTA’s show negative results. One of the more recent free trade agreements with Korea has shown the same negative results.  The resulting trade deficit increase represents more than 70,000 lost American jobs.  Contrary to the Administration’s TPP sales pitch that more FTAs would boost U.S. exports, U.S. exports to FTA partners have grown more slowly than U.S. exports to the rest of the world over the past decade. Taking into account the data for 2014, average annual U.S. export growth to all non-FTA partners in the past 10 years outpaced that to FTA partners by 24 percent.  FTA’s are not really about exporting more goods to other countries. They are really about being able to use cheap labor and to build manufacturing plants overseas without U.S. labor, environmental, and health/safety laws and then import those products back to the U.S. with minimum or no import fees.

The TPP Is Even More Destructive Than Current FTA’s. It will create an unprecedented level of corporate rule over the economies, governments, and people of 12 Pacific Rim nations: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, and the US. This represents 40% of the world’s GDP. Other countries are expected to join later, including China and South Korea. The TPP has been called and is a “race to the bottom” for the peoples of the countries involved.  It will suck the wealth out of the U.S. and other countries middle-class.

The TPP Is An Incredible Corporate Power Grab. The TPP circumvents domestic judicial systems and, again, undermines national sovereignty.  The TPP creates sweeping new rights with escape clauses to protect multinational corporations from accountability to our governments. and to “we the people”.   

Outsources US Jobs. US corporations would get special foreign investor protections to limit the cost and risk of relocating their factories to low-wage nations that sign onto this agreement. For example, an American corporation thinking about moving a factory would know it is guaranteed a sweetheart deal if it exports to a TPP nation like Vietnam. The corporation could skirt Vietnam's laws and demand compensation at an international tribunal for any government policy or action (such as a hike in the minimum wage) that undermined its "expected" profits. These guarantees would be strong incentives for corporate chieftains to export even more of our middle-class jobs.

Trashes Food Safety Laws. Any of our government's food safety regulations that are stricter than "international standards," as most are, could be ruled as "illegal trade barriers." Then our government would have to revise our consumer protections to comply with the weaker global standards. Our government could no longer ban meat imports that do not meet our “safe to eat laws”, as long as the exporting nation simply claims that its inspection system is "equivalent" to ours. In addition, food labeling laws we rely on (organic, country-of-origin, animal-welfare approved, GMO-free, etc.) would also be subject to challenge as trade barriers.

Prevents Local Governance of Fracking. The US Department of Energy would lose its authority to regulate exports of natural gas to any TPP nation and forever cede its control over our natural gas resources. This would create an explosion of the destructive fracking process across the U.S. and would allow both foreign and U.S. corporations to export fracked gas from America to member nations without any DOE review of the environmental and economic impacts on local communities or on our national interests. It also means that most of the gas produced by this polluting process will not go to us, but to foreign users, which will raise consumer prices and cut manufacturing growth.  Raising the price of natural gas would encourage the use of coal.  It was estimated by the No Coal Coalition that one coal fired power plant would, over the course of it life, cause over 600 deaths and costs the public over $5 billion dollars in lost work time and health problems.  Additionally, natural gas must be liquefied before it can be exported.  Because of the energy required to liquefy, transport, and store natural gas, liquefied natural gas (LNG) is a more carbon intensive fuel than pipeline natural gas. Carbon-wise LNG is equivalent to some fuel oils. 

Raise Drug Prices. Large pharmaceutical companies would be given more years of monopoly pricing on each of their patents and be empowered to block distribution of cheaper generic drugs. For instance, recently the patent on a brand name drug ran out.  The new generic drug dropped the price to 4% of the branded drug price, saving the New Zealand taxpayers $32 million a year for just one drug.  Besides artificially keeping everyone's drug prices high, this would be a death sentence to many people suffering from cancer, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and other treatable diseases in impoverished lands. The deal would also restrict the rights of our government to negotiate with drug giants to get lower consumer prices with bulk purchases, as Medicare and Medicaid do in the US.  In the U.S. not being able to negotiate for lower drug prices has costs the U.S. taxpayer $50 billion dollars a year or $500 billion over the past ten years.  This is about 2.8 % of the U.S. national deficit, and this also shows how incredible greedy the drug companies are. Most thought Medicare Plan D was for Seniors. Yes, but also, it was a huge giveaway to Big Pharma. This extra money was supposed to go for research and drug development, but twice as much money is spent on advertising as on research.  

Benefits Wall Street and Other Financial Giants.  The TPP explicitly prohibits transaction taxes (such as the proposed Robin Hood Tax here) that would shut down super-rich speculators who have repeatedly triggered financial crises and economic crashes around the world; it restricts "firewall" reforms that separate consumer banking from risky investment banking (thus prohibiting Congress from reinstating the much needed Glass-Steagall firewall in our country); it could roll back reforms that governments adopted to fix the extreme bank deregulation regimen that caused Wall Street's 2007 crash; and it provides a backdoor escape from national rules that would limit the size of "too-big-to-fail" banks. These extreme provisions would be enforceable by the banks themselves.  The TPP empowers banks to force governments either to repeal reform laws or to compensate banks with taxpayer money for "losses" they say are caused by reforms.

Endangers Internet Freedom! The TPP would change the internet as we now know it.  Corporate-created content, for example, would be given copyright protection for a stunning 120 years!  The deal would also transform internet service providers into a private police force, empowered to monitor our "user activity," arbitrarily take down our content, and cut off our access to the internet.  Consumers could be assessed mandatory fines for non-commercial, small-scale copying -- like sending your mom a recipe you got off of a paid site.

Would Cause Public Services to be Taken Over by Corporations. TPP rules would limit how governments regulate such public services as utilities, transportation, and education, including restricting policies meant to ensure broad or universal access to those essential needs. One rule says that member countries must open their service sectors to private competitors, which would allow the corporate provider to cherry pick the profitable customers and sink the public service. Also, corporations from any TPP nation must be allowed to bid on contracts to provide public services in the U.S. on the same terms as American corporations.

The TPP creates virtually permanent corporate rule over us -- there's no expiration date on the agreement, and no provision in it can be altered unless all countries agree.  Thus, even if Americans voted in an election to make changes, any other TPP country could overrule us by not agreeing.  If a country opts out, they still must agree to the terms of the TPP for the next ten years.

Creates New Legal System Called The "Investor-State Dispute Settlement" (ISDS) System.  In this private, supra-legal court, corporations are empowered to sue TPP governments over environmental, health, consumer, zoning, or any other public policies that the corporations claim are either undermining their TPP "rights" or diminishing their "expected future profits." Because most of these proceeding are totally secret, there's no way ever to know how many cases are underway. At present, hundreds of multinational corporations are claiming "lost profits" in ISDS cases, including: Veolia, a French company, suing Egypt for increasing its minimum wage; Philip Morris, challenging anti-smoking laws in Australia and Uruguay; Lone Pine Corporation, demanding compensation from Canada for imposing a moratorium on fracking in Quebec; Vattenfall, a Swedish corporation suing Germany for "expected profits" it might lose due to the country's decision to phase out nuclear plants; and Renco Group, taking Peru before an ISDS tribunal for closing a grossly polluting smelter and enacting toxic waste regulations. And the U.S. is being sued, too.  Under NAFTA, the TransCanada Corporation is suing the U.S. for 15 billion dollars for not allowing their Keystone XL pipeline to be built.

Elevates Thousands Of Private, Profit-Seeking Entities To The Legal Status Of Sovereign Nations.  Under the investor-state system, a smaller version of which was included in NAFTA and other free-trade schemes, the deck is stacked for corporate interests.  Cases are decided behind closed doors by three-person international tribunals of private attorneys who often have a glaring corporate bias.  The same lawyers who represent corporations in these cases routinely switch over in other cases to serve as "judges." These judges are not accountable to any electorate, and their decisions are final; there is no appeal to a real court.  If a corporation wins a case, taxpayers of the government being sued compensate the corporation for its loss of profit.  Currently, even without the TPP, corporations are demanding billions just in cases brought under current free trade arrangements that include the US. 

Negotiations have been Super-Secret.  TPP negotiations were initiated back in 2008 by none other than President George W. Bush.  The media, however, did not see the story then and have since devoted zero investigative energy to it.  In 2010, all nations involved signed a formal pledge to keep details of their deliberations from the public and to keep documents related to the deal under cover until four years after the process is completed.  (But obviously some leaks did occur.)  Congress was also kept in the dark.  The text of the TPP was finally released on November 5, 2015 and can be found on the internet.  The TPP Agreement was deemed worst than expected.

Vote Will Be Scheduled Soon. With formal negotiations finished, the 12 nations party to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) signed the agreement on Feb. 4 in New Zealand.  A vote on the TPP is scheduled soon.  President Barack Obama would like to have the TPP ratified by July.  To get the TPP passed, the White House will start with “fast track”. Under this procedure, President Obama is allowed to sign the TPP before Congress votes.  Then he writes an "implementing bill" to make US laws conform to the hundreds of pages of TPP documents.  He then sends this to Congress, where no amendments will be allowed and debate will be strictly limited.  The idea is to force members to swallow the whole deal in one, hurried, up-or-down vote.  But the fundamental problem is not procedure, it is content. The TPP stinks.  The TPP is simple; it is a power grab by the world's richest corporations.  

Recent news links and more:

Murdering American Manufacturing: 'Strictly Business', Huffington Post, 02/22/16.

The WTO Gave Environmentalists A New Reason To Oppose The TPP, Huffington Post, 02/26/16.

New Study Confirms: Private 'Trade' Courts Serve the Ultra-Wealthy, Huffington Post, 02/29/16.

Dr. Erik Monasterio - Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement, Medicine and Big Pharma, youtube: (40 minutes)