[CTC] OMGText Release? What We Already Know About the TPP

Wed Nov 4 08:14:51 PST 2015

What We Already Know About the TPP Text

TO: Reporters Covering the Release of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Text
FR: Lori Wallach, Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch   
DT: November 4. 2015

While rumors fly that a final Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) text may be released soon, a month has now passed since a final deal was announced. Congress, the public and the press are still being denied access to the TPP text.  Meanwhile, the Obama administration has engaged in a sales pitch about the TPP’s alleged benefits based on claims about the pact’s terms that cannot be verified by referencing the actual text. Cabinet secretaries and other officials have fanned out across the country conducting TPP lobbying events at the taxpayers’ expense. U.S. Trade Representative Mike Froman is busy pitching the TPP’s putative glories to Congress. President Barack Obama has used various venues to sell TPP.

Even with the extreme secrecy surrounding the TPP, we know enough to be very concerned. President Obama, cabinet secretaries and U.S. Trade Representative Mike Froman have all been making claims about the TPP that seem improbable. Thanks to text leaks and admissions by TPP negotiators, we know that the TPP would:

·         Include notorious human rights violators like Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei. Yet the TPP would not condition TPP benefits on improvements in these nations’ rampant denial of basic rights to free speech, assembly and religious freedom, or on changes to government policies discriminating against gays and women, including Brunei’s imposition of sharia law penalties of stoning to death for adultery, pregnancy outside marriage and homosexuality.

·         Not include enforceable disciplines against currency cheating. So whatever new market access the TPP allegedly provides can be easily eliminated, while our job-killing trade deficit will explode with a flood of subsidized imports. U.S. negotiators ignored the bipartisan, bicameral demands from Congress to include enforceable disciplines to stop TPP countries from manipulating their currency. TPP nations Japan, Vietnam and Malaysia often lower their currencies’ value to make exports artificially cheap and price our goods out of their markets. Addressing currency manipulation is probably the single most effective way the United States can create jobs, as it allows U.S. products to compete on fair terms.

·         Lower wages by throwing Americans into competition with Vietnamese workers making less than 65 cents per hour and increase U.S. income inequality. Vietnam is the low-cost offshoring alternative to even China. If that were not bad enough, we know that the TPP gives Vietnam a five-year pass to not meet some of TPP’s labor standards. Wages for Mexican workers remain very low and company unions dominate. The TPP will not force Mexico to change its weak labor laws so workers will remain powerless to improve wages.

·         Offshore more American jobs because it includes the investment protections that eliminate many of the risks and costs of relocating American jobs to low-wage countries, incentivizing more offshoring. A “subsidy for offshoring” is what the pro-free-trade Cato Institute calls these terms, which were already agreed by all parties in a May version of the TPP’s Investment Chapter that leaked.

·         Offshore our tax dollars to create jobs overseas instead of at home. The TPP would give firms operating in any TPP nation equal access to many U.S. government procurement contracts, rather than us continuing to give preference to local firms. The administration has confirmed that the TPP would require us to waive many Buy American & Buy Local policies that reinvest our tax dollars in our communities to create jobs and innovation. That means Chinese government-owned firms in Vietnam would get equal access to U.S. government contracts. Think about U.S. taxpayer dollars going to foreign firms to build and maintain our public libraries, parks, post offices and universities.

·         Raise prices on life-saving medicines by giving new monopoly rights to pharmaceutical firms to lock out cheaper generic competition. The final text, which leaked, includes extended patent monopolies and marketing exclusivity on lifesaving medications. The final terms roll back the “May 10, 2007” reforms congressional Democrats forced on the Bush administration with respect to access to medicine. Doctors Without Borders explains how the TPP could give pharmaceutical corporations more power to control medicine markets and “impose higher prices for longer.” <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ilvHNQ8zrs>

·         Empower corporations to attack our environmental and health safeguards before tribunals of corporate lawyers and demand unlimited taxpayer dollars as compensation. The TPP includes the notorious “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS) system. The administration says it “reformed” the regime but also admits that the final deal provides foreign firms operating here the right to challenge the U.S. government before World Bank and UN tribunals. These tribunals, staffed by private lawyers, are used by corporations to demand taxpayer compensation – if the firms think our laws violate their new TPP rights and limit their return on investments. From a recent leak, we know there is no outside appeal and that tribunals can order payment of unlimited sums of taxpayer compensation to foreign firms. And we know that the TPP’s enactment would newly empower 9,000 firms from Japan and other TPP nations operating here to launch cases against the U.S. government over policies that apply equally to domestic and foreign firms. The United States has faced few ISDS attacks because past pacts have been with developing nations whose firms have few investments here. But under U.S. NAFTA-style deals alone, more than $430 million has been paid to foreign investors in ISDS attacks on toxic bans, environmental protections and timber policies.  

Given what we know is included in the TPP, the administration’s rhetoric about it being the most progressive trade agreement ever is incredibly perverse, reflecting how retrograde past pacts have been rather than this deal being something new and different. Indeed, since the final deal was struck, reports from other TPP countries about the pact’s contents and the leak of the final Intellectual Property text indicate that some of the “reforms” on environmental standards and access to medicines that congressional Democrats forced President George W. Bush to include in his trade pacts have been rolled back and the types of policies that would be subject to the controversial investor-state dispute settlement system have been expanded beyond past pacts.

Withholding the text to try to sell the TPP as something that the eventual text release will disprove is a dangerous strategy. Bipartisan congressional suspicions have been fueled by the unprecedented secrecy of TPP negotiations and are intensifying as the final text is being withheld.

While the public, press and Congress have been locked out, 600 official U.S. trade advisers, mainly representing corporate interests, have had a seat at the table and access to the secret text. The TPP can become reality only if Congress approves it. Many members who supported Fast Track, which passed by the narrowest of margin the U.S. House of Representatives, have made demands involving enforceable currency disciplines and access to affordable medicines that we know were not met, and about labor and environmental enforcement that appear also to remain unfulfilled.

Ten U.S. presidential candidates have pushed anti-TPP messages in their campaigning, stoking U.S. voters’ ire about the pact.

An unprecedented number and wide array of organizations oppose any attempt to railroad the TPP through Congress by using the Fast Track process. Groups united on this extend well beyond labor unions and include consumer, Internet freedom, senior, health, food safety, environmental, human rights, faith, LGBTQ, student and civil rights organizations.

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