TPP: Keeping a Massive Trade Deal Out of the Fast Lane
One thing members of Congress probably aren’t hearing about from their constituents during the August recess is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the most significant international trade agreement underway in decades. The nineteenth round of talks began yesterday in Brunei, with negotiations reportedly in the “end game.”
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As the story goes, access to new overseas markets will boost exports, decreasing our trade deficit and reviving the US manufacturing sector. But freer trade isn’t a jobs policy. “Those who say these deals are going to create thousands of jobs and increase exports, they don’t talk about imports—which are just as important, if not more so,” said Robert Scott of the Economic Policy Institute. According to his analysis, in the year after Obama’s recent agreement with South Korea was finalized, US exports fell, South Korean imports rose and the US trade deficit to South Korea increased by nearly 40 percent, costing some 40,000 jobs. The TPP could worsen income inequality, too.
Significant as its economic impact could be, the TPP is only marginally about trade. Just five of the twenty-nine draft chapters cover traditional trade matters, according to Ben Beachy, the research director for Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. The rest of the deal, he said, “could rewrite broad swathes of domestic policy that affects our daily lives, from Internet browsing to what we eat for dinner.”
“For corporations, the TPP is a convenient back-door means of undermining public interest policies that they oppose but are not able to undermine through domestic legislation,” Beachy said. If enacted, all existing and future US law would have to comply with the treaty, or the US could face trade sanctions. Environmental, health, food safety, human rights and Internet freedom protections could all be limited by the TPP. The deal could derail attempts to rein in Wall Street, making it impossible to regulate risky financial products, implement a “Robin Hood” tax on financial transactions or enforce size limits on big banks and capital controls.
Corporations, meanwhile, would gain vastly expanded privileges over federal, state and local government. A draft chapter leaked last year detailed the inclusion of a legal structure, called an investor-state dispute settlement mechanism, that would essentially allow multinationals to sue a government if they believe a policy infringes on their rights. A tribunal unaccountable to any electorate would decide the case and the damages owed, with no option for appeal. Similar investor-state rules have been included in a number of other free-trade deals, including NAFTA, and cases are surging, as are the damages awarded. Last year corporations won 70 percent of disputes.
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http://www.thenation.com/blog/175865/keeping-massive-trade-deal-out-fast-lane#
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