The Authorities ('law enforcement') remove a protester from construction equipment at the Dakota Access Pipeline work site along Highway 6 outside of Bismarck on Wednesday, Aug. 31. Tom Stromme / Bismarck Tribune
We always see ourselves as the 'good-guy'... the hero in the 'white hat', the savior of all that is good and decent. We rewrite every event with which we are involved to paint a picture of how we did the 'right thing' and with god on our side we prevailed against evil.
In truth, our current involvement in Middle Eastern affairs paints us as totally alien to our mythical goodness and our long history on the North American Continent should fill us with shame rather than pride. The United States officially celebrates Columbus Day. It is a day established to celebrate the “discovery” of lands already discovered and occupied by huge populations. Columbus, we must admit, was lost at sea and didn't know where he was. When saved by stumbling onto the 'Americas', he tortured, killed and enslaved Native Americans. There is a growing movement to recognize Indigenous Peoples’ Day and to examine the United States policies of devastating injustices inflicted upon Native Americans. Our government joins with corporate entities who gain access to Native American lands for mining, drilling, fracking and generalized resource extraction (raping the land) without concern for the people. Despite great wealth, Native American populations are stuck in dire poverty. The US has 310 Native American reservations with a population of a million people. Living conditions have been described as “comparable to Third World” by a Gallup report from 2004. The US has a nearly unbroken record of making treaties with Native Americans and then breaking the treaty. The US government steals the land, then gives it back when it is determined to be worthless and then reclaiming the land when resources are discovered. One of many examples of this behavior is the Black Hills territory in Western South Dakota. After stealing the land from Native Americans, it was given back to Native Americans but when gold was discovered, the US government took the Black Hills territory back from Native Americans, violating past treaties. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Black Hills territory was unjustly stolen in the 1980 case United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians. The U.S. government was ordered by the courts to pay $105 million for the Black Hills territory, and another $44 million for surrounding territory. Native Americans wanted the land and not the money (the land was never for sale) so they refused the money and demanded the land be returned. To this day, the Black Hills land still hasn’t been returned, The Bureau of Indian Affairs is a large criminal organization which, mired in corruption, allows corporations a free hand at stealing from Native Americans whom the Bureau is supposed to protect. Thankfully, the Standing Rock Sioux have not given up completely. Their protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, while an uphill battle, offer hope as they have attracted attention and recruited assistance from around the world. All of us should be involved... or at the very least, educated about the subject. Additional reading could include: Lakota Lead the Fight Against the Dakota Access Pipeline from TruthOut By Jason Coppola 
Pipeline Fighters Arrested In North Dakota And Iowa After Disrupting Dakota Access Worksites
How the U.S. Government Is
Helping Corporations Plunder Native Land from In These Times by Stephanie Woodard A 6-month investigation reveals that the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs—tasked with negotiating the best possible deal for Native landowners—often makes it cheap and easy for outside corporations to exploit Native resources. As a result, corporations are able to drill, frack, farm and fell timber on Native lands, paying landowners little in return. Companies like Koch Industries and Walmart, however, reap huge profits. THEY ATTACKED MY AUNT LIKE A BUNCH OF COYOTES ATTACKING SHEEP IN A CORRAL,” recalls Navajo tribal member Roberta Tovar. “They were going, ‘Mary, Mary, just go ahead and sign it.’ ” The “coyotes” included representatives of Western Refining, a Texas-based oil company. One of the company’s pipelines carries 15,000 barrels of crude a day from oil fields in the Four Corners region to a refinery near Gallup, N.M. On the way, the line crosses a 160-acre plot of Navajo reservation land owned by 88-year-old Mary Tom and dozens of her family members. Western Refining’s right of way expired in 2010. After years of negotiations with family members, the company invited just a handful of them, including Tom, to an October 2013 meeting at the El Rancho Hotel in Gallup. Once a watering hole for the elite, the inn boasts lavish cattle-baron décor: looming chandeliers, mounted animal heads and autographed photos of past visitors, such as John Wayne and President George H. W. Bush. The purpose of the gathering: Get the signatures needed to renew the right of way for another 20 years. The oil company’s representatives weren’t the only “coyotes” in the room that day, says Tovar, Tom’s niece: Also present were officials from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the agency that manages 55 million acres of land the federal government holds in trust for Native owners. Tribes own about 44 million of those acres; individuals like Mary Tom own the rest. The BIA arranges business deals on Native land and is obligated by law to negotiate the best possible terms for landowners like Tom. But In These Times found that instead, the agency appears to make it cheap and easy for outsiders to exploit Native resources. At the 2013 luncheon at the El Rancho Hotel, BIA and company officials urged Tom to agree to the renewal, says Tovar. She recalls that a Western Refining employee told Tom she’d “lose out” if she didn’t consent to the deal, while a BIA staffer stroked her arm. Tovar, who is part of a group of family members that has fought the renewal, hadn’t been invited but attended at her aunt’s request. She says she was soon escorted out by a Western Refining representative. Speaking through a translator, Tom tells In These Times that she was distressed and confused during the gathering: “Even when we have a meeting in our own language, it’s hard to comprehend the issue. Someone has to explain.” She asked the whereabouts of other trusted family members, but they had not been invited either. Eventually, the family says, Tom gave in and signed, in return for a $2,000 bonus. That’s a huge sum on a destitute Indian reservation, but a drop in the bucket for Western Refining, a corporation with nearly $6 billion in assets. When businesses negotiate leases or rights of way, landowners often get a pittance in return. An Interior Department report shows that in 2015, 60 percent of Native landowners earned less than $25 from leasing and other land-related income. Some received as little as a few pennies. Meanwhile, access to the land is crucial to a host of companies and individual operators that drill, frack, farm and fell timber in Indian country. The list of companies that profit from access to Native land includes Koch Industries, Wal-Mart, Dollar General and many more. While the total revenue generated by these activities remains untallied, sales of oil, gas and coal extracted from Native land last year totaled over $5 billion. Native landowners are on an uneven playing field when they negotiate with corporations, and documents and interviews obtained by In These Times suggest the BIA does little to level it. While working closely with prospective lessees, the BIA appears to shut landowners out of much of the process, denying them information they need to evaluate corporations’ offers. And when landowners complain of harassment or foul play by corporations, the BIA may sometimes look the other way. CORPORATE MANIFEST DESTINY These events are taking place in the 21st century, but they sound like something out of centuries past, when the federal government encouraged its Indian Agents and others to cheat Natives under cover of law. Between the earliest days of the American republic and the end of the 19th century, millions of acres of Native land were signed away through treaties or stolen by force. The 1887 General Allotment Act, aka the Dawes Act, set the stage for what would become the prime tactic outsiders use to extract profit from Native land: exploitative leasing. The law privatized many of the communally held reservations by dividing them into small, individually owned “allotments.” Some tracts were given to tribal members and the rest declared surplus and sold to settlers. The idea was threefold: weaken tribes, “civilize” tribal members by turning them into property owners and open up prime agricultural and timber land to non-Natives. In a 1901 message to Congress, President Theodore Roosevelt praised allotment as “a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass.” The Bureau of Indian Affairs The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) is the agency that manages 55 million acres of land the federal government holds in trust for Native owners. Established in 1824, the agency is tasked with promoting economic opportunity on Native land. The question is, opportunity for whom? The BIA arranges deals that allow outside companies and individual operators to use Native land and resources, but landowners believe they often get the short end of the stick. Soon after, Congress authorized leasing of allotted land to non-Natives, with federal agencies controlling the process and the proceeds. The “pulverizing engine” had disrupted traditional hunting, fishing, farming and gathering economies, and the weight of federal bureaucracy meant many Native landowners had—and have to this day—no choice other than leasing to outsiders to earn a living. Advocates for Native land rights say that this divide-and-conquer strategy left Native landowners isolated and exceedingly vulnerable to exploitation. Corrupt and incompetent leasing has been “a huge drain on Indian economies and is essentially a taking of resources that hadn’t yet been taken in the treaty-making process,” says Brett Lee Shelton, an Oglala Sioux attorney with the Native American Rights Fund law firm. “If you wanted to design a system to keep Indian landowners poor, you would use exactly this sort of trick.” Many remaining Native lands now sit atop valuable oil and gas reserves, and stories abound of giant corporations cutting questionable deals. A special congressional committee reported in 1989, following a yearlong investigation, that Koch Oil had for years been undertaking “sophisticated and premeditated theft” by deliberately mismeasuring oil extracted from Native land. Expert witnesses testifying before the committee described Indian country as “wide open” for theft. Native landowners also report being stalked and harassed by oil companies seeking their signatures. In a sworn affidavit, Mike Gopher told a court that, after the renewal process had begun for an oil pipeline crossing his land on the Blackfeet reservation in Montana, two oil-company agents pursued him down a highway and into his doctor’s office. He refused to sign, wishing to consult family. An agent came to his house. He refused again. Gopher’s sister and co-owner, Leona Gopher, says that $20 is the typical lure for consenting to an agreement on the Blackfeet reservation. Given the poverty, she says, “people will sign for food or gas money.” Majority-Native counties regularly make it onto the U.S. Census list of the nation’s 10 poorest. The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis reported in 2015 that tribal members’ average income countrywide barely topped $10,000, with unemployment averaging 50 percent. Natives have the nation’s shortest life expectancy, lowest education level, highest infant-mortality rate and greatest exposure to violent crime. With few or no businesses on reservations, tribes and tribal members also must look to border towns for goods and services. “The little money we work for all goes to Gallup,” says Roberta Tovar, who works as a hotel reception clerk. The local Walmart’s aisles are jammed on the first and fifteenth of each month, when paychecks and benefits arrive. “You won’t be able to get through with your basket.” “We have so many resources on our reservation, so much that others use or take,” says Leona Gopher. “Yet we also have so much poverty.” THE “MUSHROOM APPROACH” Why do Native landowners remain resource rich but cash poor? A big part of the answer has to do with the BIA’s role as a paternalistic landlord. Established in 1824, the agency is tasked with promoting economic opportunity on Native land. The question is, opportunity for whom? In a 2009 Nebraska Law Review article, Emory University visiting scholar Brian Sawers provides decades’ worth of figures showing tribal members’ land and products exploited in exchange for tiny percentages of their value on the private market. That’s perhaps unsurprising, given the agency’s origins. “The BIA’s perceived mission for many years was to develop Indian-owned resources for the public benefit,” Sawers notes. Despite reforms, the federal agency “has little incentive to bargain hard with potential lessees.” Mary Tom Tom co-owns a 160-acre plot of Navajo reservation land in New Mexico along with dozens of her family members. In October 2013, Tom, 88, was invited to a meeting at the El Rancho Hotel in Gallup, New Mexico with representatives of the Texas-based oil company Western Refining, as well as staff from the local BIA office. At the meeting, she gave her consent for the company to continue operating one of its pipelines across the family’s land for another 20 years. Some of her family members were never invited to the meeting, and say that the BIA allowed Western Refining to isolate Tom and pressure the non-English-speaking elder into signing off on the deal. “They were attacking my aunt like a bunch of coyotes attacking sheep in a corral,” recalls Tom’s niece Roberta Tovar, who attended the meeting before she was escorted out, she says. In recent years, Native landowners have shown in court that they were getting not just a raw deal, but a fraudulent one. While serving as a treasurer of the Blackfeet during the 1980s, tribal member Elouise Cobell discovered irregularities in the Interior Department’s accounting system for disbursements to Native people. In 1996, she became lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit that revealed improper records for more than a century’s worth of payments. Billions of dollars were missing. Documents had disappeared. “I have never seen more egregious misconduct by the federal government,” wrote U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth. A $3.4 billion settlement for Cobell v. Salazar was reached in 2009. During the suit, a court-appointed investigator found that Navajos were getting $25 to $40 per rod (16.5 feet) for rights of way across their BIA-supervised trust land. Meanwhile, similar land off the reservation garnered 10 to 20 times as much. Terry Beckwith, a realty expert with ICC Indian Enterprises and a Quinault Indian Nation member, says that the BIA-supervised leasing and right-of-way processes make it easy to lowball landowners. For starters, the agency typically allows prospective lessees to hire their own appraiser to determine the fair market value of the land. That’s “a conflict of interest right there,” says Beckwith. Native landowners and advocates contacted by In These Times agreed. Court documents show that in Leona and Mike Gopher’s case, the oil company seeking a right of way performed an appraisal based on lower-cost agricultural use, rather than on industrial use, as would be expected for a pipeline, according to Sally Willett, a retired Interior Department administrative law judge and Cherokee tribal member who reviewed the documents at Leona’s request. The BIA manages an intricate leasing process, made exceptionally complex by the fact that some allotments have hundreds or even thousands of co-owners. This is a relic of the Dawes Act, which eliminated traditional Native means of bequeathing land—via the family or clan, for example. Instead, Native people were made subject to state laws for those who died without a will. Leona Gopher A member of Montana’s Blackfeet tribe, Leona Gopher fought for years against a proposed deal for an oil pipeline right-of-way across her land. The oil company was offering $1,850 for 45 years of access—a figure that would be shared among 15 co-owners. Gopher struggled to get more information from the BIA, and eventually the deal went forward despite her objections. “We have so many resources on our reservation, so much that others use or take,” she says. “Yet we also have so much poverty.” As a result, all eligible heirs inherited when an allotment owner died. With each generation, the number of owners multiplied, each owning his or her own unique percentage of the whole. That process is now called “fractionation.” When landowners are declared “whereabouts unknown,” the BIA can sign off for them. When an allotment has a large number of co-owners, the BIA has even more control. It can approve a deal even without the consent of a majority of landowners. Beckwith, who gives seminars for Native landowners nationwide to help them navigate the leasing process, says the BIA frequently fails to provide them with sufficient information. At one of his sessions, for example, Beckwith saw the oil lease of an attendee from the Bakken region in North Dakota. “It had a line, his name written under the line and the figure $47. ... So much was missing—terms and conditions, the exact location of the property and more.” Beckwith advised him and other attendees to rescind their consent and ask for proper agreements. Leona Gopher told In These Times about her five-year fight to get the information she needed to assess an oil company’s offer of $1,850, to be shared among 14 co-owners, for a 45-year pipeline right of way. The local BIA office told her to file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, then set Gopher’s tab for staff time and copying to complete the request at amounts that vacillated, but at one point topped $3,000—money Gopher did not have and that well exceeded her portion of the oil company’s offer. She took the matter to the Interior Board of Indian Appeals (IBIA), the Interior Department administrative court for Native claims. The court ordered the BIA to “complete the record.” Then, when Gopher used the completed record to raise her objections, the court told her she was too late: She should have raised them earlier. The deal went forward despite her complaints. Those familiar with the BIA’s operations say difficulty obtaining information is the norm. “On what planet is a trustee allowed to withhold information from a beneficiary and charge an exorbitant price … to find out what the trustee is doing?” asks Willett. She calls this “the mushroom approach”—“cover the principals with manure and keep them in the dark.” BY HOOK OR BY CROOK The case of Mary Tom and her family offers a telling example of how the BIA appears to aid industry’s divide-and-conquer tactics. When Western Refining’s right of way expired in 2010, the large number of co-owners meant that the company needed to obtain signatures representing only half of the ownership interests in order to renew. In July 2010, the BIA signed off on the company’s renewed right of way. But a number of family members had refused to consent. They objected to Western Refining’s offer for the 48 co-owners of the property—a total of $6,656 total for 20 years’ access. Patrick Adakai, a retired federal official and nephew of Mary Tom, calls this “chump change.” In September 2010, Patrick and his brother Frank Adakai joined Tovar and other relatives in filing a lawsuit with the IBIA. They claimed that Western Refining had failed to obtain enough signatures and had gone after elderly, non-English-speaking family members (including Tom and her older brother) who couldn’t give informed consent. In January 2013, the court ruled in the family’s favor, saying that the BIA office had been “arbitrary and capricious” in approving the renewal. Western Refining went back for more signatures. Between April and June 2013, the company held four meetings with landowners—all while continuing to operate the pipeline, even though it no longer had a valid right of way. For these gatherings, the BIA sent letters to all landowners, letting them know the times and locations. By August 2013, Western Refining still didn’t have the consents it needed. That’s when the company pulled out all the stops, scheduling numerous gatherings, repeatedly requesting extra time and hiring other Navajos to track down family members. Patrick Adakai A retired federal official and nephew of Mary Tom, Adakai has opposed Western Refining’s terms for renewing its pipeline right of way. The company offered the family $6,656 for 20 years’ access, to be shared among 48 co-owners. Adakai calls this “chump change.” He also says the company has used under-handed tactics in its quest to ensure continued access to the family’s land, including going after the signatures of elderly and non-English-speaking family members such as Mary Tom. This has created rifts among the co-owners of the land, he says. “The oil company divided our family.” In September, the company wrote to the BIA of its plans to hold a luncheon with certain landowners whose consent it needed, including Mary Tom. Western Refining told the BIA it would like “as much as possible” to limit the luncheon to just the few family members whose signatures it was seeking, “and not other interest owners in the allotment or outsiders to that process.” Documents In These Times obtained via a FOIA request also show emails among the BIA staffers to plan a “pre-meeting” with the company. When asked about these communications, Nedra Darling, a spokesperson for the BIA, told In These Times that the BIA did not coordinate with the oil company ahead of the luncheon, or help prevent family members from attending it. At the meeting, Tom asked for her older brother and her nephew Patrick. Roberta Tovar phoned Patrick, who lives several hours from Gallup, and told him what was going on. Patrick immediately asked Tovar to hand the phone to a BIA official. No one would listen to him, he says. An oil company representative later described Adakai as “attempting to disrupt the meeting by phone.” Tovar claims a Western Refining employee escorted her and her father out of the meeting. The company put it more blandly in a report to the BIA about the event: “Roberta Tovar and Charles Irving left after lunch.” A group of family members, including the Adakais, later e-mailed Sharon Pinto, director of the BIA office for the Navajo region. They asked why some landowners had not been invited to the gathering and complained that the company was employing “bribes” to get consents. “We are concerned BIA officials and selected landowners are being wined and dined by Western Refining to persuade a signing of the …lease despite our repeated requests for re-review and evaluation,” they wrote. They asked for a sign-in sheet from the meeting. Pinto replied that the meeting “was called by Western Refining” and the agency did not get a copy of the sign-in sheet. Were landowners exhorted into signing? Darling says no. She claims the BIA was present on landowners’ behalf, “providing technical guidance” and reassuring them in the Navajo language. “At no time did BIA pressure anyone to sign or not sign,” Darling said. Tovar is adamant—her aunt was pressured. “That’s why I said they were like coyotes on a sheep,” she says. The landowners who had filed the lawsuit continued to reach out to the company to attempt to negotiate a better deal. But when they requested a copy of Western Refining’s appraisal of the land, the BIA office instructed the group to submit a FOIA request, despite the Interior Department court having ordered the office in 2013 to “provide the landowners with an appraisal of the right of way to assist them in negotiations.” The BIA’s Darling claims that Native landowners need not use FOIAs to obtain their own “trust data or information.” But landowners In These Times spoke to, BIA documents and IBIA court decisions reveal that the Freedom of Information Act must often be used to obtain needed documents. Complicating matters further, since 2014 Western Refining has brought two federal lawsuits seeking to resolve the situation. One seeks to condemn the family’s land, a technique normally used by governments to gain access to land needed for the public good. The other sues the Interior Department, seeking to reverse the IBIA’s unfavorable rulings. Citing the pending litigation, the company’s press representative, Gary Hanson, declined to comment for this article. SHIFTING INTO REVERSE Terry Beckwith says that what Native landowners want is simple: “We want to protect ourselves and our land, and maximize the money we can make on it.” He notes basic problems that need fixing—for example, some of the most cursory BIA forms date to the 1940s and 1950s and are still used today. He says they should be updated and expanded to include the purpose and time span of the agreement, remedies in case of damage to the land, such as an oil spill, and other necessary items. One solution is to return control of land and resources to tribes, reversing some of the worst effects of allotment, including fractionation. The federal government, which once wanted to “pulverize” tribes, has in recent decades flipped the script, instituting regulations to give tribes more say in their own leasing deals (this does not affect individuals’ agreements, which are still fully subject to the BIA bureaucracy). Meanwhile, buyback programs, including the 2010 Cobell settlement, have helped tribes rebuild their land bases by funding the purchase of tribal members’ allotments. By 2015, tribes had regained and placed in trust 1.5 million acres via Cobell, according to the Interior Department. Some tribes are reconstituting their homelands their own way—and taking control of their own economic development. In South Dakota, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe operates the Tribal Land Enterprise (TLE), a land buyback program that long predates that set up by Cobell. Since its establishment in 1943, TLE has acquired about a million acres. TLE’s strategic purchases have facilitated the development of projects that make sense to tribal members, and that’s been a big part of the program’s success, according to tribal member and TLE director Ann Wilson-Frederick. These include a grocery store on a reservation where there are few, 600 units of badly needed housing and a wind farm. With more land available to Rosebud’s ranchers and farmers, they can increase production. The tribe can also put business and environmental regulations in place and choose to set aside land for spiritual and ecological reasons, adds Rosebud tribal member Wizipan Little Elk, CEO of the tribe’s economic development corporation and a former Interior Department official. All of this is done with an eye on the future, says Little Elk. “We like to say we have a one-thousand-year plan.” In the shorter term, Patrick Adakai and his relatives continue to fight Western Refining in court. He says his relatives’ goal is not just a better deal for themselves but improving how leasing is handled, including better BIA record-keeping and more landowner control of the valuation process. “We are doing this for our Indian people, so they can improve their lives. This is for the children and grandchildren.” This reporting was made possible by a grant from the Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting. STEPHANIE WOODARD is an award-winning journalist whose articles on American Indian rights and other topics have been published by many national publications and news sites. She is also a contributing writer to Rural America In These Times.  |
Moving goods around the world and integrating markets is making the wealthy more and more wealthy. The prospect of more wealth spurs those with money to encourage so called 'trade agreements' so that they can accumulate even more.
Trade Agreements are not really agreements to trade as much as agreements on the part of governments to bend normal rules and regulations to remove certain control mechanisms and allow corporations a free hand. It is largely about allowing corporations to ignore national sovereignty, national laws and international borders as they collect the wealth of the each country they 'occupy'.
The populations and the environment are sacrificed to corporate greed.
In order to go into effect, this latest 'trade agreement', the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), must be approved by our elected lawmakers. This brings up the real questions about the people and the government of the United States... do we seriously believe that the lawmakers of this country care about what is good for the environment and the people of this country or do they answer exclusively to the interests of the large corporations.
The negative impacts of the TPP are well known and well documented. The ills of those past 'trade agreements' are established and are hurting us every day. That there is any hope that this very harmful 'trade agreement' will be passed is sufficient proof of our lawmakers loyalties. The wealthy elite are in complete control of this country in every aspect and this agreement will be approved regardless of anything the citizens say or do.
Trade Agreements are not really agreements to trade as much as agreements on the part of governments to bend normal rules and regulations to remove certain control mechanisms and allow corporations a free hand. It is largely about allowing corporations to ignore national sovereignty, national laws and international borders as they collect the wealth of the each country they 'occupy'.
The populations and the environment are sacrificed to corporate greed.
In order to go into effect, this latest 'trade agreement', the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), must be approved by our elected lawmakers. This brings up the real questions about the people and the government of the United States... do we seriously believe that the lawmakers of this country care about what is good for the environment and the people of this country or do they answer exclusively to the interests of the large corporations.
The negative impacts of the TPP are well known and well documented. The ills of those past 'trade agreements' are established and are hurting us every day. That there is any hope that this very harmful 'trade agreement' will be passed is sufficient proof of our lawmakers loyalties. The wealthy elite are in complete control of this country in every aspect and this agreement will be approved regardless of anything the citizens say or do.
Like the WTO agreements or NAFTA, the TPP is an attempt
to set the rules of the global economy to favor
multinational corporations over everything else,
trampling on democracy, national sovereignty and the public good.
to set the rules of the global economy to favor
multinational corporations over everything else,
trampling on democracy, national sovereignty and the public good.
8 Terrible Things About the
Trans-Pacific Partnership
It’s no wonder the Obama administration tried to keep this secret—the corporate-friendly trade agreement, decoded.
Trans-Pacific Partnership
It’s no wonder the Obama administration tried to keep this secret—the corporate-friendly trade agreement, decoded.
from In These Times by David Moberg
In October, President Obama hailed the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as “the most progressive trade deal in history.”
But progressive public-interest organizations say that the final text, the fruit of seven years of secretive trade talks between the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries, dashed even their low expectations. The deal not only continues most of the troubling features of trade agreements since NAFTA but also breaks worrisome new ground.
Like most recent international economic agreements, the TPP only glancingly resembles a classic trade deal, concerned mainly with tariffs and quotas. Rather, like the WTO agreements or NAFTA, it is an attempt to set the rules of the global economy to favor multinational corporations over everything else, trampling on democracy, national sovereignty and the public good. The more than 600 corporate lobbyists who had access to the draft texts used their insider status to shape the deal, while labor unions, environmentalists and others offered testimony from outside, with little impact.
Like most post-World War II trade deals, the TPP also has a strategic political goal: tying as many countries as possible to the United States as trade partners—often under terms unfavorable to the average American worker—in order to win political support against anyone seen as a rival to the American economic model. When Obama defends the TPP, he often casts it as a challenge to China’s growing role in defining the Asian economy.
In June, with the help of GOP leaders, Obama very narrowly won “fast-track” authority on the deal, restricting Congress to an up-or-down vote, with no amendments. He would no doubt like that vote soon. Repudiating the TPP could become a campaign talking point across party lines. Already, all three Democratic presidential candidates and most of the Republicans have come out in opposition to it.
But Congress has never rejected a trade agreement under fast-track authority, and some TPP opponents suspect that the administration gave a small group of Democrats a pass to vote no on fast track as long as they pledged to vote yes on the final agreement if needed. This is likely to be a close fight.
To inform that fight, we’ve asked experts to explain, in plain English, some of the deal’s most alarming implications.
#1 IT GIVES 9,200 FOREIGN FIRMS THE RIGHT TO CIRCUMVENT OUR COURTS AND ATTACK THE LAWS WE RELY ON FOR A CLEAN ENVIRONMENT, SAFE FOOD AND DECENT JOBS.
Foreign corporations would be empowered to drag the U.S. government in front of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) tribunals composed of three private arbitrators. Many ISDS arbitrators are lawyers who rotate between suing governments for corporations and acting as the “judges.”
There is no limit on the amount of our tax dollars the government can be ordered to pay when foreign corporations successfully argue that their TPP rights have been undermined. Compensation orders could include a corporation’s estimate of the future profits it would have earned in the absence of the public policy it is attacking. Even when governments win, under TPP rules they can be ordered to pay for the tribunals’ costs and legal fees, which average $8 million per case.
The TPP’s expansion of the ISDS system would come just as a surge in ISDS cases elevating corporate profits over the public interest has led other countries, such as South Africa and Indonesia, to begin revoking their ISDSenforced treaties. Recent cases include Eli Lilly’s attack on Canada’s cost-saving medicine patent system, Philip Morris’ attack on Australia’s public health policies regulating tobacco, Chevron’s attack on an Ecuadorian court ruling that ordered payment for mass toxic contamination in the Amazon, and Vattenfall’s attack on Germany’s phase-out of nuclear power.
Almost all of the 50 past U.S. ISDS-enforced pacts are with developing nations with few investors here, allowing the United States largely to dodge ISDS tribunals and fines to date. But the TPP would extend ISDS powers to more than 9,200 U.S. subsidiaries of some 1,000 corporations in TPP nations, including the economic powerhouse of Japan.
The tribunals are unaccountable to any electorate. There is no outside appeal on their dictates. In effect, the TPP elevates these foreign firms to equal status with the entire U.S. government.
—Lori Wallach, Director, Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch
#2 ITS ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTIONS ARE MOSTLY TOOTHLESS, AND IT WOULD DIRECTLY ENCOURAGE FRACKING.
Our air, water and health are all at stake with the TPP, which is why so many environmental groups have expressed grave concern.
Most noticeable is that the roughly 6,000 pages of TPP text don’t even mention the words “climate change,” much less attempt to address the fact that the TPP would increase climate-disrupting emissions. The deal takes a step back from the environmental protections of all U.S. free-trade agreements since 2007 by failing to require TPP countries to fulfill their obligations in a set of core international environmental treaties.
The TPP’s weak conservation rules won’t do enough to adequately protect marine life and wildlife from harmful practices such as shark finning or illegal logging. But fossil fuel corporations would be empowered to challenge our public health and climate safeguards in unaccountable ISDS tribunals. This corporate power grab has been used in past deals to challenge clean energy initiatives, bans or moratoriums on fracking, and more.
Speaking of fracking, we could see a whole lot more of this dirty and destructive practice in our backyards thanks to the TPP. The pact would require our Department of Energy to automatically approve all exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to all TPP countries—including Japan, the world’s largest LNG importer. This means more fracking, air and water pollution, climate emissions and reliance on fossil fuels—when we should keep those fuels in the ground and fully embrace clean energy.
—Ilana Solomon, Director, Sierra Club’s Responsible Trade Program
#3 WE’D LOSE MILLIONS OF MANUFACTURING JOBS.
Between 1997 and 2014, America lost more than 5 million manufacturing jobs. The vast majority, according to the Economic Policy Institute, vanished as a result of growing trade deficits with America’s free-trade and investment-deal partners. Some 850,000 jobs were lost to NAFTA after it took effect in 1994. China’s entry into the WTO in 2001 cost the United States a staggering 3.2 million manufacturing jobs over the next dozen years.
But the numbers on the TPP look even worse. The Wall Street Journal calculates that by 2025, the deal would increase the U.S. trade deficit in manufacturing, car assembly and car parts by $55.8 billion a year. At that rate, based on the U.S. Department of Commerce formula for jobs created by exports, the TPP would cost another 323,000 American manufacturing workers their jobs. That’s almost a million jobs every three years.
And that is a conservative estimate, because the TPP negotiators failed to include enforceable methods to stop foreign labor abuses, including poverty wages and perilous working conditions. This facilitates a race to the bottom. Corporations move factories overseas because they can’t get away with paying Americans the $107 a month that is the wage floor in Vietnam.
Also, disastrously, the TPP would lower the minimum requirement for cars and auto parts to be considered produced by a U.S. trade partner. The proportion would fall from 62.5 percent under NAFTA to 45 percent under the TPP, which means more than half of a vehicle could be manufactured in China while auto companies would still benefit from zero U.S. tariffs.
For decades, regulations for free-trade agreements like the TPP have lined the pockets of the wealthy and emptied those of workers. This must stop.
—Leo Gerard, President, United Steelworkers
#4 IT DOES NOTHING TO FIX OUR ENORMOUS TRADE DEFICIT.
Our current trade deficit is close to $500 billion annually, or 3 percent of our GDP. This money is creating demand and employment in other countries, not the United States, and implies the loss of close to 3 million U.S. jobs a year.
This matters hugely in the context of an economy facing a shortfall in demand, or “secular stagnation.” In more normal times, the demand lost to the trade deficit could be replaced by more investment or consumption spending. But under secular stagnation, neither will fill that loss.
Yet the TPP fails to address the main reason for our large and persistent trade deficit: currency manipulation by other countries. Lowering one’s currency by 10 percent against the dollar has the same effect as imposing a 10 percent tariff on all imports and paying a 10 percent subsidy on exports. Raising the price of exports and lowering the price of imports makes U.S. goods and services less competitive internationally and domestically.
A number of countries, including TPP parties Japan, Malaysia and Vietnam, have engaged in this practice over the last two decades, driving up the U.S. trade deficit.
Ordinarily we would expect the value of a currency of a country running a large trade deficit to decline. That would make its goods and services more competitive internationally, bringing its trade closer to balance. However, the dollar has not fallen in response to the trade deficit because the central banks of China and other countries have purchased huge amounts of dollar-based assets, such as U.S. government bonds. By holding these assets, central banks prop up the value of the dollar, keeping the U.S. trade deficit large.
The Obama administration opted not to make currency management an issue in TPP negotiations. As a result, there is only a side agreement that provides no new authority to combat currency management beyond what exists in current law.
—Dean Baker, Co-director, Center for Economic and Policy Research
#5 IT WOULD MAKE MEDICINES MORE EXPENSIVE, AND COMPROMISE ACCESS FOR MANY PEOPLE IN THE PACIFIC RIM.
In all countries, people and health systems depend on low-cost generic medicines to make treatment affordable. Prices of patented drugs are rising every year. Absent generic competition, there is little reason for drug companies to bring drug prices down. The brand-name pharmaceutical industry business model relies on maximizing profits by selling at very high prices to the few rather than affordable prices to the many. Most countries, including our own, ration care.
The problem is especially grave in developing countries, and the TPP would make it worse. TPP rules would require countries to change their laws in order to expand drug companies’ monopoly powers, leading consumers and healthcare providers to pay higher prices on more drugs for longer—or go without needed treatment. TPP rules are not about providing basic patent protections, as White House messaging sometimes suggests. All TPP countries already have those rules.
Instead, TPP rules are lobbyist-driven bonuses for the industry. The rules include patent term extensions and patents on new uses of old medicines, and procedural requirements to give pharmaceutical companies greater opportunity to influence government drug coverage and reimbursement decisions. There are marketing exclusivity rules, which create pharmaceutical monopolies even when a product is offpatent. There is no compelling evidence that these rules will spur medical innovation or create jobs.
Some brave TPP negotiators fought the pharmaceutical industry and the U.S. Trade Representative for many years. If it were not for their efforts, the TPP would threaten even more lives. Nevertheless, if the deal is approved, the TPP’s final rules will lead to preventable suffering and death.
—Peter Maybarduk, Director, Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines Program
#6 IT WOULD COMPROMISE THE SAFETY OF OUR FOOD.
Most immediately, the TPP would open up a flood of seafood, dairy, fruit and vegetable imports to the United States at a time when import inspections are already severely underfunded. The United States currently inspects just 2 percent of food imports, and there is evidence that fish and seafood are already compromised: Consumer Reports found that 60 percent of seafood (91 percent of which is imported) tested was contaminated.
The TPP also gives companies new ways to challenge food safety processes and inspections. It would create a “rapid response mechanism” that would allow foreign companies to challenge food safety decisions and would compel inspectors to make those new assessments quickly, creating new pressures on already hard-pressed inspectors with no new resources or even basic agreement on what food safety should look like.
The deal would also increase corporate control over agriculture. The TPP is modeled on past free-trade deals that have made wildly inaccurate promises about benefits for small farmers. Under NAFTA, when U.S. corn exports to Mexico increased dramatically, more than 2 million Mexican farmers were driven from their lands. But the number of U.S. family farmers fell sharply, too. Exports increased, but revenues for most farmers did not. Along the way, large multinational companies gained more control over production, so farmers have fewer options of where to buy or sell their goods. It shouldn’t surprise us that trickledown economics doesn’t work for farmers any better than it does for factory workers.
The TPP aims above all to give multinational corporations more power over standards and supply chains, which expands a U.S. agricultural system designed to produce crops for export rather than to provide consumers with healthy food.
—Karen Hansen-Kuhn, Director of Trade, Technology and Global Governance, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
#7 IT WOULD DESTABILIZE GLOBAL FINANCE.
During nearly all of the seven years negotiators worked on the TPP, the world was mired in or recovering from the worst economic crisis in 75 years—one triggered by the collapse of a deregulated, overgrown and corrupt financial sector. Negotiators must not have noticed, because the TPP gives the world’s biggest banks and finance companies even more power. They could much more easily challenge and overturn laws and regulations in countries where they invest—plus collect compensation if their profits don’t meet the firm’s “expectations” as a result of public policies. The new terms will make it easy for big finance to file challenges to government regulations or policies in ISDS tribunals and win. The loser? Global financial stability.
The TPP would prohibit capital controls, which permit countries to block destabilizing flights of “hot money” from investors who hope to take momentary advantage of speculative opportunities, then pull out of the country just before the bubble they create collapses. It would also stop enactment of financial transaction taxes, a means of dampening speculation and raising needed public revenue.
The list goes on. TPP “market access” rules would undermine efforts to limit the size of banks or to establish “firewalls” between financial activities, such as restoring U.S. Glass-Steagall Act regulations, which were eliminated in 1999, contributing to the subsequent financial crisis. It would make it impossible for countries to reject financial “innovations” such as derivatives—the foundation of many “bubbles” that burst in 2008—if they exist in any other TPP nation. Despite evidence swirling around them every day in the form of global financial chaos, negotiators crafted the TPP’s financial rules following a flawed deregulatory model that was an affront to democracy and sound economic policy—just to protect the “expectations” of profits by big multinational banks and financial firms.
—David Moberg, Senior Editor, In These Times
#8 IT WOULD STRENGTHEN ALREADY-FLAWED INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY REGULATIONS IN AWFUL WAYS, PARTICULARLY ON THE INTERNET.
Copyright laws in America have already had a profound effect on Internet users. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, was intended to update copyright for the digital age. But over the years, the terms of the law have infringed on fair use and free speech. This ranges from YouTube users flagged for copyright violation because they posted videos of their baby dancing to a Prince song, to more troubling instances of investigative journalists being censored based on things like sketchy defamation claims.
Without an opportunity for the public to weigh in, the U.S. Trade Representative—the lead U.S. negotiator on the TPP—and negotiators for other countries were flooded by lobbyists from corporations, Hollywood and music executives, pushing for more stringent protections on their content.
The result? An agreement that forces what’s broken with copyright law in the United States upon other countries. The TPP will lengthen onerous copyright terms from a previous trade agreement—keeping information and art locked away from the public domain for decades and opening the floodgates for further abuse of copyright laws and censorship.
What’s more, Internet service providers will continue to hastily remove content flagged as a copyright violation, with little review. And countries will be required and incentivized to deliver heavy-handed sentences and fines to alleged infringers.
Perhaps most shocking to anyone who owns a website is a requirement that countries publish databases of names and addresses associated with certain domains. This is a paricularly troubling step for activists and journalists who could face threats and intimidation for the issues they champion— deterring many from speaking out at all.
This is not a done deal. The TPP must go to lawmakers in each country for final passage. Before that happens, activists must be swift to ring the alarm bells and ensure that the very architecture of the Internet is not broken.
—Sara Cederberg, Campaign Director, Demand Progress
DAVID MOBERG
David Moberg, a senior editor of In These Times, has been on the staff of the magazine since it began publishing in 1976. Before joining In These Times, he completed his work for a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago and worked for Newsweek. He has received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Nation Institute for research on the new global economy. He can be reached at davidmoberg@inthesetimes.com.
In October, President Obama hailed the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as “the most progressive trade deal in history.”
But progressive public-interest organizations say that the final text, the fruit of seven years of secretive trade talks between the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries, dashed even their low expectations. The deal not only continues most of the troubling features of trade agreements since NAFTA but also breaks worrisome new ground.
Like most recent international economic agreements, the TPP only glancingly resembles a classic trade deal, concerned mainly with tariffs and quotas. Rather, like the WTO agreements or NAFTA, it is an attempt to set the rules of the global economy to favor multinational corporations over everything else, trampling on democracy, national sovereignty and the public good. The more than 600 corporate lobbyists who had access to the draft texts used their insider status to shape the deal, while labor unions, environmentalists and others offered testimony from outside, with little impact.
Like most post-World War II trade deals, the TPP also has a strategic political goal: tying as many countries as possible to the United States as trade partners—often under terms unfavorable to the average American worker—in order to win political support against anyone seen as a rival to the American economic model. When Obama defends the TPP, he often casts it as a challenge to China’s growing role in defining the Asian economy.
In June, with the help of GOP leaders, Obama very narrowly won “fast-track” authority on the deal, restricting Congress to an up-or-down vote, with no amendments. He would no doubt like that vote soon. Repudiating the TPP could become a campaign talking point across party lines. Already, all three Democratic presidential candidates and most of the Republicans have come out in opposition to it.
But Congress has never rejected a trade agreement under fast-track authority, and some TPP opponents suspect that the administration gave a small group of Democrats a pass to vote no on fast track as long as they pledged to vote yes on the final agreement if needed. This is likely to be a close fight.
To inform that fight, we’ve asked experts to explain, in plain English, some of the deal’s most alarming implications.
#1 IT GIVES 9,200 FOREIGN FIRMS THE RIGHT TO CIRCUMVENT OUR COURTS AND ATTACK THE LAWS WE RELY ON FOR A CLEAN ENVIRONMENT, SAFE FOOD AND DECENT JOBS.
Foreign corporations would be empowered to drag the U.S. government in front of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) tribunals composed of three private arbitrators. Many ISDS arbitrators are lawyers who rotate between suing governments for corporations and acting as the “judges.”
There is no limit on the amount of our tax dollars the government can be ordered to pay when foreign corporations successfully argue that their TPP rights have been undermined. Compensation orders could include a corporation’s estimate of the future profits it would have earned in the absence of the public policy it is attacking. Even when governments win, under TPP rules they can be ordered to pay for the tribunals’ costs and legal fees, which average $8 million per case.
The TPP’s expansion of the ISDS system would come just as a surge in ISDS cases elevating corporate profits over the public interest has led other countries, such as South Africa and Indonesia, to begin revoking their ISDSenforced treaties. Recent cases include Eli Lilly’s attack on Canada’s cost-saving medicine patent system, Philip Morris’ attack on Australia’s public health policies regulating tobacco, Chevron’s attack on an Ecuadorian court ruling that ordered payment for mass toxic contamination in the Amazon, and Vattenfall’s attack on Germany’s phase-out of nuclear power.
Almost all of the 50 past U.S. ISDS-enforced pacts are with developing nations with few investors here, allowing the United States largely to dodge ISDS tribunals and fines to date. But the TPP would extend ISDS powers to more than 9,200 U.S. subsidiaries of some 1,000 corporations in TPP nations, including the economic powerhouse of Japan.
The tribunals are unaccountable to any electorate. There is no outside appeal on their dictates. In effect, the TPP elevates these foreign firms to equal status with the entire U.S. government.
—Lori Wallach, Director, Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch
#2 ITS ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTIONS ARE MOSTLY TOOTHLESS, AND IT WOULD DIRECTLY ENCOURAGE FRACKING.
Our air, water and health are all at stake with the TPP, which is why so many environmental groups have expressed grave concern.
Most noticeable is that the roughly 6,000 pages of TPP text don’t even mention the words “climate change,” much less attempt to address the fact that the TPP would increase climate-disrupting emissions. The deal takes a step back from the environmental protections of all U.S. free-trade agreements since 2007 by failing to require TPP countries to fulfill their obligations in a set of core international environmental treaties.
The TPP’s weak conservation rules won’t do enough to adequately protect marine life and wildlife from harmful practices such as shark finning or illegal logging. But fossil fuel corporations would be empowered to challenge our public health and climate safeguards in unaccountable ISDS tribunals. This corporate power grab has been used in past deals to challenge clean energy initiatives, bans or moratoriums on fracking, and more.
Speaking of fracking, we could see a whole lot more of this dirty and destructive practice in our backyards thanks to the TPP. The pact would require our Department of Energy to automatically approve all exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to all TPP countries—including Japan, the world’s largest LNG importer. This means more fracking, air and water pollution, climate emissions and reliance on fossil fuels—when we should keep those fuels in the ground and fully embrace clean energy.
—Ilana Solomon, Director, Sierra Club’s Responsible Trade Program
#3 WE’D LOSE MILLIONS OF MANUFACTURING JOBS.
Between 1997 and 2014, America lost more than 5 million manufacturing jobs. The vast majority, according to the Economic Policy Institute, vanished as a result of growing trade deficits with America’s free-trade and investment-deal partners. Some 850,000 jobs were lost to NAFTA after it took effect in 1994. China’s entry into the WTO in 2001 cost the United States a staggering 3.2 million manufacturing jobs over the next dozen years.
But the numbers on the TPP look even worse. The Wall Street Journal calculates that by 2025, the deal would increase the U.S. trade deficit in manufacturing, car assembly and car parts by $55.8 billion a year. At that rate, based on the U.S. Department of Commerce formula for jobs created by exports, the TPP would cost another 323,000 American manufacturing workers their jobs. That’s almost a million jobs every three years.
And that is a conservative estimate, because the TPP negotiators failed to include enforceable methods to stop foreign labor abuses, including poverty wages and perilous working conditions. This facilitates a race to the bottom. Corporations move factories overseas because they can’t get away with paying Americans the $107 a month that is the wage floor in Vietnam.
Also, disastrously, the TPP would lower the minimum requirement for cars and auto parts to be considered produced by a U.S. trade partner. The proportion would fall from 62.5 percent under NAFTA to 45 percent under the TPP, which means more than half of a vehicle could be manufactured in China while auto companies would still benefit from zero U.S. tariffs.
For decades, regulations for free-trade agreements like the TPP have lined the pockets of the wealthy and emptied those of workers. This must stop.
—Leo Gerard, President, United Steelworkers
#4 IT DOES NOTHING TO FIX OUR ENORMOUS TRADE DEFICIT.
Our current trade deficit is close to $500 billion annually, or 3 percent of our GDP. This money is creating demand and employment in other countries, not the United States, and implies the loss of close to 3 million U.S. jobs a year.
This matters hugely in the context of an economy facing a shortfall in demand, or “secular stagnation.” In more normal times, the demand lost to the trade deficit could be replaced by more investment or consumption spending. But under secular stagnation, neither will fill that loss.
Yet the TPP fails to address the main reason for our large and persistent trade deficit: currency manipulation by other countries. Lowering one’s currency by 10 percent against the dollar has the same effect as imposing a 10 percent tariff on all imports and paying a 10 percent subsidy on exports. Raising the price of exports and lowering the price of imports makes U.S. goods and services less competitive internationally and domestically.
A number of countries, including TPP parties Japan, Malaysia and Vietnam, have engaged in this practice over the last two decades, driving up the U.S. trade deficit.
Ordinarily we would expect the value of a currency of a country running a large trade deficit to decline. That would make its goods and services more competitive internationally, bringing its trade closer to balance. However, the dollar has not fallen in response to the trade deficit because the central banks of China and other countries have purchased huge amounts of dollar-based assets, such as U.S. government bonds. By holding these assets, central banks prop up the value of the dollar, keeping the U.S. trade deficit large.
The Obama administration opted not to make currency management an issue in TPP negotiations. As a result, there is only a side agreement that provides no new authority to combat currency management beyond what exists in current law.
—Dean Baker, Co-director, Center for Economic and Policy Research
#5 IT WOULD MAKE MEDICINES MORE EXPENSIVE, AND COMPROMISE ACCESS FOR MANY PEOPLE IN THE PACIFIC RIM.
In all countries, people and health systems depend on low-cost generic medicines to make treatment affordable. Prices of patented drugs are rising every year. Absent generic competition, there is little reason for drug companies to bring drug prices down. The brand-name pharmaceutical industry business model relies on maximizing profits by selling at very high prices to the few rather than affordable prices to the many. Most countries, including our own, ration care.
The problem is especially grave in developing countries, and the TPP would make it worse. TPP rules would require countries to change their laws in order to expand drug companies’ monopoly powers, leading consumers and healthcare providers to pay higher prices on more drugs for longer—or go without needed treatment. TPP rules are not about providing basic patent protections, as White House messaging sometimes suggests. All TPP countries already have those rules.
Instead, TPP rules are lobbyist-driven bonuses for the industry. The rules include patent term extensions and patents on new uses of old medicines, and procedural requirements to give pharmaceutical companies greater opportunity to influence government drug coverage and reimbursement decisions. There are marketing exclusivity rules, which create pharmaceutical monopolies even when a product is offpatent. There is no compelling evidence that these rules will spur medical innovation or create jobs.
Some brave TPP negotiators fought the pharmaceutical industry and the U.S. Trade Representative for many years. If it were not for their efforts, the TPP would threaten even more lives. Nevertheless, if the deal is approved, the TPP’s final rules will lead to preventable suffering and death.
—Peter Maybarduk, Director, Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines Program
#6 IT WOULD COMPROMISE THE SAFETY OF OUR FOOD.
Most immediately, the TPP would open up a flood of seafood, dairy, fruit and vegetable imports to the United States at a time when import inspections are already severely underfunded. The United States currently inspects just 2 percent of food imports, and there is evidence that fish and seafood are already compromised: Consumer Reports found that 60 percent of seafood (91 percent of which is imported) tested was contaminated.
The TPP also gives companies new ways to challenge food safety processes and inspections. It would create a “rapid response mechanism” that would allow foreign companies to challenge food safety decisions and would compel inspectors to make those new assessments quickly, creating new pressures on already hard-pressed inspectors with no new resources or even basic agreement on what food safety should look like.
The deal would also increase corporate control over agriculture. The TPP is modeled on past free-trade deals that have made wildly inaccurate promises about benefits for small farmers. Under NAFTA, when U.S. corn exports to Mexico increased dramatically, more than 2 million Mexican farmers were driven from their lands. But the number of U.S. family farmers fell sharply, too. Exports increased, but revenues for most farmers did not. Along the way, large multinational companies gained more control over production, so farmers have fewer options of where to buy or sell their goods. It shouldn’t surprise us that trickledown economics doesn’t work for farmers any better than it does for factory workers.
The TPP aims above all to give multinational corporations more power over standards and supply chains, which expands a U.S. agricultural system designed to produce crops for export rather than to provide consumers with healthy food.
—Karen Hansen-Kuhn, Director of Trade, Technology and Global Governance, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
#7 IT WOULD DESTABILIZE GLOBAL FINANCE.
During nearly all of the seven years negotiators worked on the TPP, the world was mired in or recovering from the worst economic crisis in 75 years—one triggered by the collapse of a deregulated, overgrown and corrupt financial sector. Negotiators must not have noticed, because the TPP gives the world’s biggest banks and finance companies even more power. They could much more easily challenge and overturn laws and regulations in countries where they invest—plus collect compensation if their profits don’t meet the firm’s “expectations” as a result of public policies. The new terms will make it easy for big finance to file challenges to government regulations or policies in ISDS tribunals and win. The loser? Global financial stability.
The TPP would prohibit capital controls, which permit countries to block destabilizing flights of “hot money” from investors who hope to take momentary advantage of speculative opportunities, then pull out of the country just before the bubble they create collapses. It would also stop enactment of financial transaction taxes, a means of dampening speculation and raising needed public revenue.
The list goes on. TPP “market access” rules would undermine efforts to limit the size of banks or to establish “firewalls” between financial activities, such as restoring U.S. Glass-Steagall Act regulations, which were eliminated in 1999, contributing to the subsequent financial crisis. It would make it impossible for countries to reject financial “innovations” such as derivatives—the foundation of many “bubbles” that burst in 2008—if they exist in any other TPP nation. Despite evidence swirling around them every day in the form of global financial chaos, negotiators crafted the TPP’s financial rules following a flawed deregulatory model that was an affront to democracy and sound economic policy—just to protect the “expectations” of profits by big multinational banks and financial firms.
—David Moberg, Senior Editor, In These Times
#8 IT WOULD STRENGTHEN ALREADY-FLAWED INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY REGULATIONS IN AWFUL WAYS, PARTICULARLY ON THE INTERNET.
Copyright laws in America have already had a profound effect on Internet users. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, was intended to update copyright for the digital age. But over the years, the terms of the law have infringed on fair use and free speech. This ranges from YouTube users flagged for copyright violation because they posted videos of their baby dancing to a Prince song, to more troubling instances of investigative journalists being censored based on things like sketchy defamation claims.
Without an opportunity for the public to weigh in, the U.S. Trade Representative—the lead U.S. negotiator on the TPP—and negotiators for other countries were flooded by lobbyists from corporations, Hollywood and music executives, pushing for more stringent protections on their content.
The result? An agreement that forces what’s broken with copyright law in the United States upon other countries. The TPP will lengthen onerous copyright terms from a previous trade agreement—keeping information and art locked away from the public domain for decades and opening the floodgates for further abuse of copyright laws and censorship.
What’s more, Internet service providers will continue to hastily remove content flagged as a copyright violation, with little review. And countries will be required and incentivized to deliver heavy-handed sentences and fines to alleged infringers.
Perhaps most shocking to anyone who owns a website is a requirement that countries publish databases of names and addresses associated with certain domains. This is a paricularly troubling step for activists and journalists who could face threats and intimidation for the issues they champion— deterring many from speaking out at all.
This is not a done deal. The TPP must go to lawmakers in each country for final passage. Before that happens, activists must be swift to ring the alarm bells and ensure that the very architecture of the Internet is not broken.
—Sara Cederberg, Campaign Director, Demand Progress
DAVID MOBERG
David Moberg, a senior editor of In These Times, has been on the staff of the magazine since it began publishing in 1976. Before joining In These Times, he completed his work for a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago and worked for Newsweek. He has received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Nation Institute for research on the new global economy. He can be reached at davidmoberg@inthesetimes.com.
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