Below is taken from Mickey Z's interview with Adam Weissman from TradeJustice New York Metro, the subject TPP: link here
Mickey Z.: Let’s start with the essentials. What exactly is TPP and why are you working so hard to stop it?
Adam Weissman: TPP is a 12-nation
agreement currently being negotiated between the governments of the
United States and 11 other countries (Canada, Mexico, Peru , Chile, New
Zealand, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, and
Japan). TPP is being pushed by corporate interests seeking to enact a
wide variety of policies into law that undermine the public interest on
behalf of their profits, policies that would be vigorously opposed if
presented as individual pieces of legislation rather than being lumped
into a massive, obscure international trade agreement.
MZ: Is it accurate to call TPP a trade agreement?
AW: TPP is considered a trade agreement
and thus the Office of the United States Trade Representative is
negotiating on behalf of the United States. However, but only five of
TPP's 29 chapters address trade issues, with the rest covering a wide
range of topics include investor rights, intellectual property, and
sanitary standards.
MZ: So why isn’t everyone talking about such a totalitarian salvo?
AW: TPP negotiating texts are being
treated as classified documents, closed off from the public, the media,
non-profit advocacy groups, and even elected officials. Members of
Congress have highly restricted negotiating access to the texts and are
sworn to secrecy about what they read. Meanwhile, 600 "cleared advisers"
to the U.S. negotiating team -- mostly representing corporations and
industry organizations -- have unfettered access to negotiating
documents relevant to their interests and are able to use this access to
influence U.S. negotiators to craft an agreement that advances their
agendas.
Additionally TPP is getting little
coverage in the mainstream print media and almost no coverage in
broadcast media. A Media Matters for America study found that between
Aug. 1, 2013 and Jan. 31, 2104, TPP received only one mention on network
nightly news -- a pro-TPP comment on PBS' Newshour. During the same
period, Fox News Channel never mentioned TPP and CNN mentioned TPP once.
The one shining exception in broadcast media has been MSNBC's The Ed
Show, which during this period mentioned TPP 32 times. Unfortunately
media companies have a conflict of interests regarding TPP. Many stand
to benefit from TPP's Intellectual Property chapter, which will help
protect the profits of content creators. The Walt Disney Company (ABC)
and News Corporation (Fox News) are both members of the U.S. Business
Coalition for TPP.
MZ: How bad would it be if TPP came into existence?
AW: TPP threatens to undermine
environmental protection, prohibit financial industry regulation,
encourage privatization of public services, offshore jobs to sweatshops,
endanger wildlife, threaten food safety standards, destroy family farms
while promoting industrial agriculture, limit access to lifesaving
medicines by extending the life of corporate drug patents, ban
government procurement policies like "Buy Green" and "Buy Local,"
curtail internet freedom, and limit democracy by creating tribunals
where corporations can attack governments for enforcing laws that
protect the public from destructive corporate greed.
MZ: Is it safe to say Obama is on board with TPP?
AW: TPP is a key element of President
Obama's Asia-Pacific Pivot -- an effort to cement the United States, not
China, as the dominant military and economic power in the Asia-Pacific
region.
MZ: You’ve said that TPP is “kind of like Pandora's Box.” Can you explain what you mean by that?
AW: Like Pandora's Box, TPP contains
unknown horrors -- it's being negotiated with an unprecedented degree of
secrecy. Even the Bush-era trade agreements were negotiated with a
greater degree of transparency. TPP negotiating texts are being treated
as classified documents, with access denied to the media, civil society
groups, academics, and the general public. Members of Congress were
restricted from seeing the TPP texts until Rep. Alan Grayson launched a
petition campaign demanding access. The office of the United States
Trade Representative (USTR) finally allowed him to see one TPP document
-- on the condition that no staff would be present, he take no notes,
use no recording device, and would be sworn to secrecy on whatever he
saw. According to Representative Grayson, "having seen what I've seen, I
would characterize this as a gross abrogation of American sovereignty.
And I would further characterize it as a punch in the face to the middle
class of America. I think that's fair to say from what I've seen so
far. But I'm not allowed to tell you why!"
TPP is also like Pandora's Box because
once we've released the horrors it contains, we're stuck with them --
they won't go back in the box. In contrast to U.S. participation in the
World Trade Organization, which Congress has to renew every five years,
our commitment to TPP has no expiration or renewal date. Any changes to
TPP would need to be agreed upon by all member nations. TPP is described
as a "docking agreement," meaning that more countries can be added
after TPP is in effect without any new act of Congress. India,
Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia, South Korea,
Colombia, and China have all been discussed as potential later
additions.
MZ: Does anyone have access to at least parts of the full TPP text?
AW: There is one group that has access to
the TPP negotiating texts -- roughly 600 members of advisory committees
to USTR -- mostly representatives of corporations and organizations
representing industries that stand to benefit from TPP, often at the
expense of the public interest. Corporations represented include some of
the most notorious human rights violating, worker exploiting, union
busting, polluting, and animal abusing companies on the planet,
including Chevron, Cargill, Wal-mart, Georgia Pacific, Halliburton,
Weyerhaeuser, Yum! Brands (KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut ), Verizon,
Caterpillar, and Dow. Nine of the companies represented are listed as
being among the 20 Worst Companies on the Planet based on a metaanalysis
of social responsibility surveys over the last 20 years compiled by
sociologist Ellis Jones. These corporate advisers are joined from reps
of organizations representing the factory farm, pharmaceutical, mining,
logging, oil, genetically modified seed, tobacco, software, chemical,
junk mail, and nuclear energy industries.
MZ: What’s Obama done to make sure TPP gets through Congress?
AW: President Obama has requested that
Congress grant him Fast Track Trade Authority, which would allow his
administration to complete TPP negotiations, draft implementing
legislation (legislation to put TPP by changing existing U.S. law to
adhere to the terms of the agreement) and then send that legislation to
Congress. Under Fast Track, the House would be required to vote within
60 days and the Senate within 90. Fast Track prohibits Congress from
amending the legislation in any way, forces committees to release the
legislation for a floor vote, and limits floor debate to 20 hours.
Agreements like TPP are written in dense legalese, where the presence of
a comma in a sentence can have profound implications. NAFTA, the North
American Free Trade Agreement, contained 22 chapters, covered three
countries, and ran 1,700 pages. TPP, which is often described as "NAFTA
on steroids" will contain 29 chapters, many dealing with issues never
before addressed in a trade agreement, and includes 12 countries. So
legislators, while dealing with a wide range of other issues, are
expected to take stock of this entire agreement and decide how to vote
within two-three months while corporate lobbyists are twisting their
arms to get them to support it and the President and the U.S. Trade Rep
are putting out propaganda about the agreement will create jobs and
prosperity. Fast Track by design steamrolls bad trade deals through
Congress before anyone really even knows what is being voted on.
MZ: Sounds like every CEO’s fantasy scenario.
AW: In effect, corporations are pushing
for a binding and virtually irreversible mechanism to force the United
States and other TPP nations into expanding corporate control. TPP's
investor rights chapter, for example, can be used against all manner of
current and future food safety, environmental, or labor laws and many
other forms of public interest legislation, in effect making
corporations more powerful than nations. By committing to TPP, we're
pretty much throwing away the future of democracy.
And really, this is exactly why TPP
negotiations are being kept secret, not national security. The U.S.
Trade Representative does not want us to know what is in the box. Ron
Kirk, who was U.S. Trade Representative for the first three years of
U.S. involvement in TPP negotiations, told Reuters that "we have to
preserve some measure of discretion and confidentiality" and noted that
when hemisphere-wide Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiating
texts were released a decade ago, it was impossible to complete the
negotiations. What he didn't come out and say was that the reason it was
impossible to complete those negotiations was because of widespread
popular resistance throughout the hemisphere, including massive
demonstrations here in North America during TPP negotiating meetings in
Miami and and Quebec City.
Go to the link here for more information.
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