The TPPA: Capitalism at its predatory best

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President Obama was granted “Fast Track” authority by Congress on June 24, thus clearing the way to rapid passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA).

The TPPA has been 10 years in the making, including the last six under the aegis of the Obama administra­ tion. The agreement, written in secret by some 600 top corporate advisers, will encompass 40 percent of world trade. It is slated to be signed by 12 Pacific-rim countries—United States, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam.

Despite the Obama administration’s earlier well-orchestrated “failure” to secure Fast Track approval in Congress, Fast Track and the TPPA were quickly res­ urrected in behind-the-scenes maneuvers, including a bipartisan agreement to separately include the previ­ ously disputed Trade Adjustment Assistance program (TAA). The latter includes, at the request of the AFL-CIO, provisions for a government-funded program for some of the thousands of U.S. workers expected to lose their jobs as U.S. corporations offshore produc­ tion to low-wage and virtual slave-labor nations like Vietnam and China.

The Republicans, joined by their “progressive” Dem­ ocratic Party cohorts, traded support for this token program when the Obama administration agreed to include in a separate “non-controversial” African trade bill some multi-billion-dollar boons to U.S. oil corporations in exchange for the TAA bone to Ameri­ can labor.

Fast Track grants the president the authority to amend the TPPA at will, with take it or leave it addi­ tions or deletions that cannot be altered, negotiated, or filibustered in the halls of Congress. That is, the ba­ sic terms of the TPPA have been essentially approved by ruling-class corporate negotiators from all 12 na­ tions. When the corporate elite needs to tweak this or that point, Congress can only vote yes or no.

Fast Track or not, however, big-time trade agree­ ments and other such megadeals, as with the multitrillion-dollar bailouts immediately following the economic meltdown of 2008, are always negotiated behind the scenes before being entered into the re­ cord as law, with the fine print rarely open to public scrutiny.

Fast Track is simply capitalism’s way to make highly 6 SOCIALIST ACTION JULY 2015 lucrative deals quickly, always at the expense of the working class. To be sure, the general TPPA package is nothing less than the product of broad-ranging ar­ rangements between the competing wings of the su­ per-rich and their corporate representatives here and around the world.

In essence, TPPA, like the earlier North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), includes hundreds of thousands of secret provisions—each one aimed at fostering or guaranteeing the profits of one or an­ other U.S. corporate entity at the expense of its inter­ national competitors.

As the only world superpower, the U.S. always le­ verages its economic might at the expense of other nations. Either they comply or they are threatened with being excluded from the world economy through the myriad of devices open almost exclusively to the United States, including control over vast banking and credit markets and the world’s only reserve curren­ cy, the U.S. dollar—today printed with abandon and backed by nothing.

Like NAFTA, TPPA has little or nothing to do with “free trade.” It is aimed at promoting the interests of the U.S. corporations that are world-class state-ofthe-art competitors (free trade for these monopoly giants), while safeguarding the interests of those sec­ tors of U.S. capitalism that are technologically infe­ rior and therefore less capable of competing in the international marketplace. In these latter instances, U.S. trade and related policies are the opposite of free trade. They are strictly protectionist; they impose restrictions in innumerable forms, including tariffs, against more competitive commodities produced abroad.

Little or nothing was known about TPPA until WikiLeaks in 2013 published some of the basic sec­ tions in an eye-opening exposé that shockingly re­ vealed its predatory nature.

The TPPA is touted as an extension and strength­ ening of NAFTA, the Clinton administration’s gift to corporate America. Like NAFTA, which was limited to the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, the TPPA’s congressio­ nal approval is based on the president’s securing the votes of most Republicans plus sufficient numbers of Democrats to ram it through.

Like Bill Clinton, Obama considers his legislation central to his “legacy” ­to corporate America. Unlike his legacy-burnishing but fake maneuvers to pose as a kind-hearted liberal when “the great deporter” used Mike Moreu / itsourfuture.org (Left) Mike Moreu’s cartoon “Heights” won Judges’ Prize in “having fun with TPPA” competition sponsored by ourfuture2 and other New Zealand groups in 2012.

This executive powers to temporarily di­ minish the horrendous deportation pro­ visions of current immigrant law, Obama is dead serious about the TPPA. This measure is nothing less than U.S. capital­ ism’s grand manifesto—an earthshaking and massive conglomeration of largely U.S.-imposed agreements in every critical field of corporate endeavor. All are aimed at protecting and privileging the U.S. elite at the expense of other nations and the broad working class.

The TPPA is a “trade” agreement with only five of its 29 sections dealing with trade! What’s left are sections imposing a massive curtailment of government regulation of environmental policies, the establishment of new “intellectual prop­ erty rights” (that is, extending copyrights and patents to prevent others from using key products such as life-saving pharma­ ceuticals), the imposition of restrictions on internet freedom, and innumerable other measures to strengthen corporate prerogatives.

The patent restrictions, for example, will preserve and extend Big Pharma’s monopoly on critical drugs, preventing competitors from manufacturing generic forms for sale at lower prices. Preserva­ tion of the power of these monopolies will guarantee price increases. “Buy Local” campaigns will be banned or restricted in the name of “restraint of trade.” Noam Chomsky aptly noted, “It’s not about trade at all, it’s about investor rights.”

TPPA includes, as with NAFTA, an Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) section allowing foreign corporations to sue national governments before extra-judicial three-member international arbitration tribunals composed of corporate attorneys rotating as judges one day and corporate advocates the next.

NAFTA’s ISDS sections, virtually unchanged in the TPPA, give these corporate-appointed “arbitrators” the power “… to issue non-appealable judgments on claims against domestic laws that corporate claim­ ants believe violate their right to do business. If cor­ porations win, they are entitled to financial rewards based upon their projected future profits, payable in taxpayer’s money.”

Linda Nordquist, quoted immediately above and writing for the Pittsburgh-based newsletter of the Thomas Merton Center, cites some appropriate ex­ amples of ISDS decisions under NAFTA in which the sovereignty of nation states is subordinated to global corporations in the name of “free trade.”

Nordquist writes, “2012 Chevron v. Ecuador (Amazo­ nian oil pollution): Chevron seeks to evade payment of a multi-billion-dollar court ruling against the com­ pany for widespread pollution of the Amazon rainfor­ est. Ecuadorian courts found that Chevron dumped billions of gallons of toxic water and dug hundreds of open-air oil sludge pits in Ecuador’s Amazon, poi­ soning the communities of some 30,000 Amazon residents, including the entire populations of six in­ digenous groups (one of which is now extinct.) $9.5 billion desperately needed to provide cleanup and healthcare to afflicted indigenous communities.

“The tribunal in this case ordered Ecuador’s gov­ ernment to violate its own Constitution and block enforcement of a ruling upheld on appeal in its inde­ pendent court system. Pending. To date, several issues decided in Chevron’s favor.

“2015 Bilcon v. Canada (environmental protection): investor win (seeking $300 million.) Corporation sought to expand basalt quarry in Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia. Government rejected on basis of environmen­ tal impact report stating blasting and increased ship­ ping would be hazardous to endangered whales and (continued on page 9, in “Racist attacks on Muslims in Myanmar”)