[CTC] JFK Wouldn't Have Recognized Today's Trade Deals (Fortune)

[Sarah Anderson]

http://fortune.com/2015/06/16/what-jfk-wouldnt-have-liked-about-obamas-trade-agenda/

*What JFK wouldn't have liked about Obama's trade agenda*



By Sarah Anderson <http://fortune.com/author/sarah-anderson/> @Anderson_IPS
<https://twitter.com/Anderson_IPS> JUNE 16, 2015, 10:17 AM EDT



As President Obama
<http://fortune.com/2015/06/12/obama-stunned-on-trade-defeat/>scrambles to
salvage his trade agenda, his top emissary to Japan is appealing to
Democrats by lifting up one of the party’s most beloved icons — her father.



In “My Dad, JFK, Was for Free Trade
<http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/dad-jfk-free-trade-democrats-today-should-be-too-tpp-kennedy-118888.html#ixzz3dA8KDWjf>,”
Ambassador Caroline Kennedy wrote “For my father, President John F.
Kennedy, expanding trade was integral to America’s prosperity and security.”



There’s no doubt trade was high on Kennedy’s agenda. He championed the Trade
Expansion Act of 1962
<http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=8946#axzz1e2KUnkgS>, which
established the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and led to a
successful “Kennedy Round” of multilateral trade talks.



The thing is, though, JFK would have a hard time recognizing today’s trade
agreements.



Back in his era, the main goal was tariff reduction, plain and simple. Six
European governments had just formed the Common Market, the Brits were
talking about joining, and Kennedy feared a Fortress Europe that locked out
American products.



There are some 1960s-style tariff schedules in the Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP), the 12-country pact the Obama administration hopes to
finalize—if they can get Congress to approve “fast track” trade promotion
authority.



But that’s not why a diverse coalition of labor, environmental, faith,
immigrant, food safety, civil rights, and consumer groups came together to
block Obama’s trade package last Friday.



What’s strengthened the opposition are the pact’s 24 chapters
<http://www.citizen.org/TPP> that have nothing to do with old-fashioned
trade in goods but instead impose rules on financial services, sanitary
standards, government procurement, and other domestic policies. Such
international rules simply didn’t exist in JFK’s day.



The president who created the Peace Corps might have also been surprised to
learn that global health groups have been fighting TPP provisions on patent
rights for pharmaceutical companies. Based on leaked drafts
<https://wikileaks.org/tpp-ip2/> of the intellectual property rights
chapter, Doctors Without Borders
<http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/article/tpp-trade-deal-will-be-devastating-access-affordable-medicines>
has
called the TPP “the most damaging trade agreement we have ever seen in
terms of access to medicines for poor people.”



Another major difference in today’s trade deals are the rights granted to
foreign investors. Back in Kennedy’s day, foreign corporations couldn’t sue
the U.S. government to demand compensation over actions—including public
interest regulations —that reduce the value of their investment. That’s
come about through the “investor-state” dispute settlement procedures in
the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other more recent
trade and investment treaties.



The leaked draft of the TPP investment chapter
<https://wikileaks.org/tpp-investment/> includes these investor powers, a
revelation that has united strange political bedfellows. In a piece
applauding Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren for speaking out on the issue, Daniel
Ikenson of the libertarian Cato Institute
<http://www.cato.org/blog/hyperbole-aside-elizabeth-warren-right-about-risk-investor-state>
wrote
that these investor rights raise “serious questions about democratic
accountability, sovereignty, checks and balances, and the separation of
power.”



At a meeting I attended in the 1990s, a U.S. Trade Representative (USTR)
negotiator responded to concerns about environmental and social impacts of
trade agreements by saying these issues were secondary to his primary job
of advancing the interests of U.S. corporations. Afterwards, I contacted
one of my organization’s former board members, William Matson Roth, who’d
served as the second U.S. Trade Representative, after Kennedy had
established the position in 1962.



“Was this his understanding at the time of USTR’s mission?” I asked.
“Absolutely not,” he said. The official aim of the 1962 Act
<http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/STATUTE-76/pdf/STATUTE-76-Pg872.pdf> that
created the agency was “to promote the general welfare, foreign policy, and
security of the United States.” Because of this broad mandate, there had
been a big debate over where to situate USTR, he explained. Should it be in
the State Department? No — that would make it too politicized. Should it be
in the Commerce Department? No — it should not just represent narrow
commercial interests.



USTR was given an independent perch within the government, but that doesn’t
mean our current negotiators have risen above narrow interests.



Would JFK have been for or against the Trans-Pacific Partnership? I don’t
feel the need to speculate. What we do need is a debate based on the actual
content of our modern-day “trade” policies.



*Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for
Policy Studies in Washington, DC.*
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