Japan's Parliament is debating the TPP this week. But our Congress isn't. For all the GOP bullshit about letting the voters decide who the next Supreme Court just will be, they certainly have no intention of letting the voters decide who their next congressmembers will be based on a TPP vote. The strategy for thwarting the voters-- rigging the system, if you will-- is to keep it as quiet as you can and then vote on it after the election, probably during the lame duck session so that defeated members have been bribed and blackmailed into supporting it. Besides, congressmembers always assume voters are too stupid to remember how they voted in two (House members) or six (senators) years.Congress isn't just not debating it, Members who want to see what's in it must do so alone in a locked room and aren't allowed to bring a record devise-- or even a pen and paper! Those who have done so say only two of the 26 chapters cover traditional trade matters. The bulk of the document, which must be accepted or rejected without any modification, consists of new rights and privileges for multinational corporations (especially international banks and pharmaceutical companies) and irrevocable constraints on government regulation. The document makes it easier for companies to move jobs offshore, take control of natural resources and prevent the regulation of financial services. Kiss the whole concept of "Buy American" or even "buy local" bye-bye-- banned under the agreement.
Conventional courts cannot adjudicate individual trade disputes in the countries where they occur. All disagreements must be decided by “Investor State Dispute Resolution” conducted by TPP Tribunals staffed by lawyers from the private sector who are empowered to force governments to pay unlimited fines to corporations that believe their profits are in jeopardy.Plotted in secret, the TPP is a corporate coup d’état benefitting the drug, energy, banking and agribusiness industries. It was supposed to take effect this year but the process was delayed when Australia refused to submit to the corporate court system and New Zealand objected to pharmaceutical companies determining the price of drugs sold in New Zealand. All countries denounced America’s demand that regulations on financial speculation be eliminated and drug patent monopolies be extended so that the introduction of generic equivalents could be postponed for years.
Even before a discussion of the 448,000 U.S. jobs likely to be shipped overseas as a result of the treaty, would you vote for some who approved this? The Fast Track Authority that dictates that the treaty can't me amended by Congress, only accepted or rejected, passed 218-208. Congressional leaders have made it nearly impossible for voters to track down how their members voted by entitling the bill "To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to allow Federal law enforcement officers, firefighters, and air traffic controllers to make penalty-free withdrawals from governmental plans after age 50, and for other purposes." How's that for the transparency needed in a democracy. 158 Democrats voted against it but 28 Democrats gave the GOP the margin they needed to pass it. Of the 28, 23 are members of the Wall Street owned-and-operated New Dems, these curs:
• Brad Ashford (NE)• Ami Bera (CA)• Don Beyer (VA)• Gerry Connolly (VA)• Jim Cooper (TN)• Jim Costa (CA)• Henry Cuellar (TX)• Susan Davis (CA)• John Delaney (MD)• Suzan DelBene (WA)• Jim Himes (CT)• Derek Kilmer (WA)• Ron Kind (WI)• Rick Larsen (WA)• Gregory Meeks (NY)• Beto O'Rourke (TX)• Scott Peters (CA)• Jared Polis (CO)• Mike Quigley (IL)• Kathleen Rice (NY)• Kurt Schrader (OR)• Terri Sewell (AL)• Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL)
The interview above is with Obama's worst cabinet member, the startlingly anti-worker Penny Pritzker, billionaire corporatist and Secretary of Commerce. An anti-union fanatic who shouldn't be anywhere near a Democratic Party cabinet, she called unions' opposition to the TPP "a knee-jerk reaction. Any kind of shift has repercussions. One of the things that we've been very focused on-- as we talk about trade, as we talk about globalization, as we talk about the implications for technology on the workforce-- is that we also have to invest in workforce training. And make sure that those folks as the markets change have the opportunity to be re-skilled or up-skilled to meet the jobs as our economies are changing. But that's gonna happen with or without trade agreements."Steve Israel is another corrupt, deceitful Democrat who has been pushing the TPP but slyly and with deniability. He voted the week before for TAA in opposition to House Democratic strategy to kill the TPP.
"I cannot imagine many of my Democratic colleagues, knowing that TPA will pass, voting against TAA," Israel told reporters after the vote. "That is the quintessential cutting of our noses to spite our faces. And it's not cutting off our noses, it's cutting off the noses of working people who need trade adjustment assistance."He had no comment for Pelosi's decision last week to vote against TAA to block advancement of TAA, nor would he respond to her pronouncement at an earlier press conference that, "I don't see a path right now for TAA."No matter the outcome, Israel just said he hoped members would move on soon from the heated rhetoric and intraparty squabbles."I think everybody understands, just as a matter of politics going forward, that we can't continue to drive a narrative about Democratic House members disagreeing with our Democratic president," he said. "I'm in charge of figuring out what our message should be, a message that is about a process which is dividing House Democrats with a Democratic president, that's not a good message. So we need to put the period at the end of this sentence and move on to another topic."There is a lot left to do with a small margin for error, with outside groups advocating opposition to TPA with increasing volume and intensity. Labor and progressive organizations are questioning pro-trade Democrats' ideological purity and threatening to find primary challengers for those who defect from their party's leadership.During the vote, members huddled on the floor and watched the board as results came in. Ways and Means Chairman Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., who has been leading the Republican effort to pass Obama's trade agenda, held court with colleagues, among them members of leadership and Democrats-- those who support TPA, such as Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, and those vehemently opposed, such as Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., D-N.J.New Democrat Coalition Chairman Ron Kind, D-Wis., who has been the Obama administration's Democratic point-person on trade inside the House, stood with ally Mike Quigley, D-Ill., as the clock ticked down and the votes poured in.Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., who has led the progressive effort to bring down the trade agenda, counted votes with Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and leadership staff. Pelosi stunned colleagues last week when she came to the House floor to announce her position she'd long kept secret, and went a step further and said Democrats should vote against TPA as a tactical move to block TPA from advancing-- exactly what Obama asked members not to do.
By the way, despite Ryan's leadership role on the TPP, 50 Republicans voted against it and it couldn't have passed without being rescued by the New Dems, Wasserman Schultz being one of the most heinous of the lot. Last January, when Glenn Greenwald interviewed Wasserman Schultz's primary opponent, Tim Canova, for The Intercept, the TPP was one of the first topics that came up.
CANOVA: Last summer, I was very active with a bunch of grassroots organizations here in South Florida, lobbying against the fast track vote for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and we were lobbying her office, trying to make contact with her or her top aides, and we got nowhere. And it was frustrating. She was one of the only Democrats in the House in the country to vote for fast track and she was the only Democrat in Florida’s delegation to vote for fast track. She had voted for the Korean Free Trade Agreement. She’s been taking lots of corporate money.According to the Center for Responsive Politics, she took $300,000 in just a two-year period, 2012 to 2014, from groups that support the TPP, and only about $23,000 from groups opposed to it. The Citizens Trade Campaign that I’ve been working with, it consists of a lot of organized labor, a lot of union people, and a lot of progressive Democrats. And these are constituencies that she’s been taking for granted, precisely because she’s run unopposed all of these years. She’s been able to take working folks for granted.And the TPP was really a lightning rod issue. I think it should be. We saw how just a week or two ago, TransCanada, the big Canadian energy giant, announced it was going to sue the U.S. government for $15 billion for not going forward with the Keystone XL pipeline. And that’s under NAFTA’s investment protection provisions. The TPP has very similar provisions. So now we’re going to open up these types of challenges to another half-dozen to dozen countries that are not in NAFTA who will be able to challenge the sovereignty of U.S. law. And when I say “challenge it,” you probably have read up on this enough to know that these companies are not going to be able to overturn the laws, but they will be able to get the taxpayer to have to pay for their compliance with the laws. So it really shifts the cost of compliance from corporations to taxpayers.It’s a way to enshrine in international law what these corporations could not get through in constitutional jurisprudence, which is the regulatory takings approach, the idea that whenever the government regulates in a way that impedes the value of an investment, it should be considered a taking of property requiring just compensation. They couldn’t get that line of analysis through the Supreme Court, they go around it and they enshrine this in multilateral trade and investment agreements, bilateral investment treaties. And it’s become a litmus test at this point, and deservedly so. It’s environmental laws, it’s health and safety, it’s labeling laws. It really puts an awful lot of the kinds of protections that we’ve come to rely on and need up for sale, in a way.GREENWALD: The TPP is obviously controversial in certain policy and intellectual circles. My guess is that a small percentage of Americans have even heard of that agreement, let alone have strong opinions about it, although they probably are a lot more informed and opinionated about trade issues generally because of the effect it’s had on jobs and the NAFTA controversy.Do you have a strategy for communicating why a seemingly esoteric conflict like the TPP is something that moved you and ought to move voters to reject their incumbent representative?CANOVA: Well, my friends in labor who are very supportive of this candidacy, and are really like-minded in that somebody should step up and challenge her-- they make the argument that it’s going to lead directly to a lot of job losses, and they’ve got the statistics about just how many job losses came about from the Korean Free Trade Agreement. I’ve been trying to link these discussions about TPP to what every Floridian should see as an existential threat, and that is climate change. In 20 or 30 years down the road, big parts of South Florida could be underwater.It’s not just the tourist industry, it’s people’s homes and businesses that could be in danger. And if we’re going to start confronting climate change, either through regulating carbon emissions or finding funds for infrastructure investments to mitigate the effects of climate change, TPP just gets in the way right down the line. Now I hear you, and I agree with you, that most people don’t understand those connections and many people have never heard of the TPP. I’m hoping this campaign starts elevating the discussion and informing people and helping to educate voters. I think it’s already beginning to happen a little bit.
Remember, it has been, and still is, Republican Paul Ryan-- not Nancy Pelosi or even corporate shill Steny Hoyer-- who is leading the Obama Administration's shady efforts in Congress to pass the horrific Trans-Pacific Partnership deal. And speaking of Speaker Ryan, he was on with Stephen Colbert last night, talking about his devious presidential campaign:Opposition to the neoliberal trade policies of the political elites is essential for any candidate looking for a Blue America endorsement. This year, though, the frontline are in South Florida (Canova vs Wasserman Schultz), southwest Michigan (Clements vs Upton), eastern Oregon (McTeague vs Schrader), northeast Iowa (Murphy vs Blum), Long Island (Gregory vs King), Nevada (Kihuen vs Hardy), Santa Clarita (Vince vs Knight) and eastern New Hampshire (Shea-Porter vs Guinta). If you want to do something about stopping TPP support the good guys; defeat the bad guys. Here: