TTPing the American people, royally!

WHATS SO BAD ABOUT THE TRANS PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP ANYWAY?

The most dastardly new evils in the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership (“TPP”) are super-national rights for corporate business interests, which we only know about at all because there exist leaked documents, albeit heavily redacted. The TPP purports to define any law to constrain pollution, establish labor rights, etc. as an “indirect expropriation” of expected corporate profits, and to establish an unassailable tribunal to enforce these virtally unprecedented prerogatives.

So, for example, if some mega-corporation wanted to frack in your backyard, and you didn’t like it, you would have to pay them as damages the money they would presumptively have made from destroying your environment, and your own government would be enfeebled to protect you in any way.

And that’s just the start. The TPP would make it easier to export jobs to markets where labor is even cheaper than where they exported most of our jobs under NAFTA and preceding “free” trade agreements. These are nothing but free for all labor exploitation deals, and the TPP is the worst yet by an order of magnitude. If you want to turn the entire United States of America into a third world country, this is the fast track to get there.

Why haven’t we heard more about this? It’s precisely because it’s been negotiated by corporate stooges in such extreme secrecy, the documents have been classified so top secret, that members of Congress are forbidden to tell anyone about the provisions in it. Journalists have been systematically excluded from private conclaves where this is being discussed. There are only about 600 special interest lobbyists who have such special access.

And that is why it is so outrageous that a handful of committee chairmen, Senators Max Baucus and Orrin Hatch of the Senate Finance Committee, and Dave Camp of the House Ways And Means Committee were apparently trying to push a fast track bill for this directly onto the floor of Congress. That’s what we were told when we ourselves called last Friday. But apparently they have partially relented and the Senate is going to have some kind of hearing on Thurdsay, 1/16/14. But will it be a full and OPEN hearing, or will they be dragging out anyone who protests (like the same exact committee did on health care)? Call their committees and demand that nothing be done to advance this unless the full proposed text of the TPP is on the table.

The TPP would extend drug patent monopolies, high on the Christmas wish list of the greediest pharmaceutical monoliths, who are already raking in monstrous profit margins.

The TPP purports to inhibit on an international scale the ability of governments to perform proper financial oversight and regulation of the same Wall Street banks and insurance companies that have come so close already to wrecking the entire world economy. They would be free to create toxic assets, play casino with client money, to do more and more of the very things that created such crises in the first place.

And that’s not all. The TPP would leave governments, including our own, powerless to regulate pesticides, food additive, or GMOs. They could forcefeed us this stuff against our will by infiltrating our entire food supply.

This stuff is so unbelievably bad you will have to make a serious effort to read the deliberately sparse information which is available to appreciate the kind of peril we are all in right now, unless this thing is stopped cold.

Oh, and there’s more, too. They want to monopolize global food supplies. They want to abolish policies to “buy local.” And on top of everything else they want to abolish all tariffs so THEY can retain ALL the profit from the new labor markets they want to exploit.

The only thing “free” about this so-called trade deal is to make giant corporations free from any accountability whatsover, a new world order where governments are entirely subservient to selfish business interests.

But your voice speaking out can stop these 21st century fascists in their fast tracks, if only you will speak out now while you still can. As of this moment, because of your voices, they have been unable to find a Democrat on the House side to co-sponsor the bill. It must stay that way, and only our unflagging diligence and activism can keep it that way.

The struggle for food sovereignty in the Pacific got a major boost last December when Billy Kenoi, mayor of Hawai’i’s Big Island, signed a law that prevents farmers from growing any new genetically engineered crops (with the exception of papaya). This follows a successful push on Kauai, at the other end of the islands, to force large growers to disclose the pesticides they use and which genetically engineered crops they are growing.

This is a major step in the battle for more ecologically sustainable agriculture in Hawai’i, which has suffered for over a century under the heavy weight of U.S. corporate and military domination.

Yet like other local, state, and national regulations intended to protect the public and the environment, these anti-GMO laws can be swiftly overturned if President Obama signs the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the world’s most ambitious and far reaching free trade agreement yet. On January 9, the U.S. Congress introduced “fast-track” legislation allowing the Obama administration to sign the TPP without undergoing public debate. Fast-track authority would grant the White House the power to speed up negotiations, while giving Congress only 90 days to review the TPP before voting.

The TPP spans 12 countries — including the United States, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam — comprising 40 percent of the world’s economy. Like nearly all trade agreements signed since NAFTA, the TPP is almost to certain to allow multinational corporations from anywhere in the bloc to sue governments in secret courts to overturn national or local regulations, such as Hawai’i’s recent GMO laws, that could limit their profits. So it’s not just Hawai’i’s food sovereignty that’s at risk.

“This is not mainly about trade,” explains Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “It is a corporate Trojan horse. The agreement has 29 chapters, and only five of them have to do with trade.” More than 600 corporate lobbyists representing multinationals like Monsanto, Cargill, and Wal-Mart have had unfettered access to shape the secret agreement, while Congress and the public have only seen a few leaked chapters.

But the TPP is even more than a corporate Trojan horse. It’s a core part of the Obama administration’s Asia-Pacific Pivot, which is centrally about containing China.

A New Cold War?

Ahead of the fall 2011 Asia Pacific Economic Forum (APEC) meeting in Hawaii, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton outlined a plan to transfer U.S. military, diplomatic, and economic resources from the Middle East to the Pacific, in what she called “America’s New Pacific Century.” Describing the pivot in militaristic terms as “forward-deployed diplomacy,” Clinton hailed the TPP as a “benchmark for future agreements” leading to “a free trade area of the Asia- Pacific.”

Yet the TPP excludes China, which has become the second largest economy in the world and is poised to outpace the U.S. economy in a matter of years — a fact that is none too pleasing to U.S. elites accustomed to unrivaled hegemony.

Like the United States, the future of China’s economic growth lies in the Asia-Pacific region, which by all indicators will be the center of economic activity in the 21^st century. By 2015, according to a paper from the conservative Foreign Policy Research Institute, “East Asian countries are expected to surpass NAFTA and the euro zone to become the world’s largest trading bloc. Market opportunities will only increase as the region swells by an additional 175 million people by 2030.”

Enter the TPP. By increasing U.S. market access and influence with China’s neighbors, Washington is hoping to deepen its economic engagement with the TPP countries while diminishing their economic integration with China.

Obama’s “Pacific Pivot” also seeks to contain China militarily. By 2020, 60 percent of U.S. naval capacity will be based in the Asia-Pacific, where 320,000 U.S. troops are already stationed. The realignment will entail rebuilding and refurbishing former U.S. facilities in the Philippines, placing 2,500 marines in Australia, transferring 8,000 marines and their families from Okinawa to Guam and Hawai’i, and building new installations like the one on the tiny Pacific island of Saipan. Meanwhile, the U.S. military regularly stages massive joint military exercises involving tens of thousands of troops and nuclear-powered aircraft carriers with its key allies — and China’s neighbors — Japan and South Korea. It has been regularly conducting Cobra Gold exercises with Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and even Myanmar.

Official Washington seems to believe that these are necessary precautions. According to the RAND Corporation, for example, 90 percent of U.S. bases in the region are “under threat” from Chinese ballistic missiles because they are within 1,080 nautical miles of China. But who is threatening whom? The Chinese have precisely zero bases in the Asia-Pacific outside of their own borders.

Some U.S. analysts insist that a more robust U.S. military presence is necessary to curb China’s ambitious territorial claims in the region. Without a doubt, China has recently taken a more aggressive stance in regional territorial disputes over dwindling natural resources, angering many of its neighbors. But by turning to the United States as a check against China, less powerful nations invite a bargain with the devil as Washington will advance its own strategic interests. And by getting itself involved, Washington risks encouraging China’s rivals to behave more provocatively, as well as angering China itself. According to Mel Gurtov, “While accepting that the United States is a Pacific power, Chinese authorities now resist the notion that the United States has some special claim to predominance in Asia and the western Pacific.”

A One-Two Punch

“The hidden hand of the market,” as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman famously wrote in the 1990s, “will never work without a hidden fist.” The Asia-Pacific Pivot, a one-two neoliberal-militaristic punch, packs both.

Of all people in the world, Hawaiians know this especially well. Once a sovereign nation, Hawai’i was the starting point for America’s century of imperialism and conquest in the Pacific. Most people don’t know this critical history, but what fueled the overthrow of Hawai’i’s monarchy was trade. During the 1800s, American merchants were profiting handsomely from exporting sugar from Hawai’i to the United States. When faced with new tariffs that the U.S. government imposed to protect the domestic sugar industry in the American South, the exporters orchestrated a coup with the U.S. marines to overthrow the islands’ queen and annex Hawai’i so that Hawaiian sugar would not be subject to tariffs.

With the world facing the pressing issues of global climate change, biodiversity loss, rising food prices, and declining sources of fossil energy, what is now needed more than ever are policies that promote local, sustainable economies that ensure the well-being of their people and protect the ecosystems upon which all of our lives depend.

Local communities seem to get it — new laws like the GMO restrictions recently passed in Hawai’i are a step in that direction. But with multinational elites and the U.S. government pushing undemocratic monstrosities like the Pacific Pivot and the TPP, prospects for a more genuine security appear more distant than ever.