[CTC] Obama Readies One Last Push for Trans-Pacific Partnership & Activists mount last stand against Asian trade agreement

[Arthur Stamoulis]

Interesting juxtaposition of headlines in these two.  Point is, anyone who cares about the TPP one way or the other is going all-out from now through December.

Obama Readies One Last Push for Trans-Pacific Partnership
New York Times
By Jackie Calmes
August 21, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/22/business/international/trans-pacific-partnership-obama.html?mwrsm=Email&_r=0 <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/22/business/international/trans-pacific-partnership-obama.html?mwrsm=Email&_r=0>
 
WASHINGTON — His successor, whether Democrat or Republican, opposes it, as does most of his party. Delegates at the Democratic National Convention waved signs saying “T.P.P.” slashed by a bold line, while the Republican Party platform opposed any vote on it in Congress this year.
 
Yet President Obama is readying one final push for approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the largest regional trade agreement ever, between the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim nations. And though the odds may be long, a presidency defined by partisan stalemate may yet secure one last legacy — only because of Mr. Obama’s delicate alliance with the Republicans who control Congress.
 
“Both parties have candidates who have very strong rhetoric against trade,” said Representative Kevin Brady, Republican of Texas and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which is responsible for trade. “Nonetheless, we can’t grow America’s economy unless we’re not merely buying American but selling American all throughout the globe.”
 
Still, he added, timing a vote “is absolutely dependent on support for the agreement.”
 
Although the administration’s push will begin in September, no vote on the accord will occur before the election. Just as the White House and congressional Republican leaders mostly agree on the economic benefits of trade, they have parallel political interests in delaying debate.
 
Republicans do not want to provoke attacks from their presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, who called the trade accord “a rape of our country,” or hurt other Republican candidates. Mr. Obama does not want to make trouble for the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, who has struggled to persuade voters of her sincerity in switching from support of the pact to opposition. This month, during an economic address in Michigan, she declared, “I oppose it now, I’ll oppose it after the election and I’ll oppose it as president.”
 
Yet the administration does not plan to be silent or forfeit hopes for a postelection vote.
 
Mr. Obama, who advocated the trade accord in a pre-vacation news conference, will rejoin the debate during an early September trip to Asia. Cabinet officials will fan out to promote the agreement, which would end 18,000 tariffs and other nontariff barriers that Japan, Australia and the other nations have against American imports and services, and set new rules for labor and environmental practices.
 
While administration officials and bipartisan surrogates will counter opponents’ economic arguments, a big focus will be on national security. Mr. Obama has emphasized that the pact would expand American influence in the Asia-Pacific region as a counterweight to China, which is not part of the pact.
 
Among those who will hit the road will be Secretary of State John F. Kerry; Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter; retired Admiral Michael G. Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Presidents George W. Bush and Obama; Admiral Harry B. Harris Jr., commander of the United States Pacific Command; and William Cohen, a former Republican senator and defense secretary under President Bill Clinton.
 
Business and agricultural associations have been campaigning through the summer. The Business Roundtable, an association representing the chief executives of some of the largest American companies, has held events in more than 120 congressional districts during lawmakers’ summer recess.
 
Last week, with families making back-to-school purchases, the lobbying association for footwear companies circulated a report concluding that Americans could save $4 billion on children’s shoes if T.P.P. takes effect and cuts tariffs on imports from Vietnam and elsewhere.
 
Environmental and labor groups have been active, too, holding “Rock against the T.P.P.” concerts in several cities and flying protest blimps outside lawmakers’ offices.
 
“Even the most ardent supporters of the bill, which would include us, would say, ‘Please don’t put a bill on the floor if you don’t have the votes,’” said Bill Miller, a vice president at the Business Roundtable. “The parties have been working pretty well to get resolution, but they’re not there yet.”
 
Talks have begun between administration officials, chiefly Mr. Obama’s trade ambassador, Michael B. Froman, and Republican leaders, including Mr. Brady and Senator Orrin G. Hatch, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. But essential negotiations over Republican objections are not likely to take place until Republicans decide Congress will act.
 
Mr. Brady and others cite progress in addressing lawmakers’ concerns about Japanese pork, labor rights in Mexico and financial companies’ data protections. But other issues remain.
 
Many Republicans and the tobacco industry object that the tobacco companies would be barred from using international trade tribunals to sue countries that restrict smoking. More problematic is the complaint of Republicans, led by Mr. Hatch, and the pharmaceutical industry that the agreement would undercut drug makers’ intellectual property protections on the advanced drugs known as biologics. The issue was the last to be settled among the T.P.P. countries in October; other nations demanded fewer years of protection, to hasten the production of less costly generics.
 
Mr. Hatch, in a statement, also said he wanted to see written plans from the T.P.P. nations on how they would “abide by their commitments.”
 
“Those issues have to be addressed in a positive way before we can move forward,” Mr. Brady said, echoing the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. “But the White House really needs to pick up the pace if we’re going to consider it this year.”
 
Yet satisfying Republicans, who not only run Congress but also provide the bulk of pro-trade votes, risks costing critical Democratic votes.
 
Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, senior Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement, “Republicans have made clear they want to gut the public health, pharmaceutical, labor and environmental provisions, which President Obama has said he will not do, and which I strongly oppose.”
 
The White House cannot afford to lose much support. The template vote is Congress’s narrow approval last year of a “fast track” law that cleared the way for final negotiations on the Pacific pact, by allowing an up-or-down vote without amendments that could unravel the agreement.
 
In the House, all 28 Democratic supporters remain on board, both sides say. While House Republicans have not counted yet whether they still have at least 190 votes for T.P.P., Mr. Brady said, pro-trade Republicans “are in a good place” if the outstanding issues get resolved.
 
But the climate has shifted for the traditionally pro-trade party. A new poll from the Pew Research Center found that since May 2015 — just before Mr. Trump began his campaign — the percentage of Republican and Republican-leaning voters with negative views of trade pacts increased 22 percentage points, to 61 percent.
 
Last week, Senator Patrick Toomey, a Republican fighting for re-election in Pennsylvania, announced he had switched against T.P.P., following Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, who did so after becoming Mrs. Clinton’s running mate.
 
Of the 60 senators who supported the fast-track bill last year, at least five have now come out against T.P.P. It will need at least 50 votes, assuming Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is the tiebreaker.
 
“There is a big gap between the rhetoric of the campaign and even in what you see in the polls,” Mr. Froman said. “It’s going to be hard. But the votes will be there.”
 

Activists mount last stand against Asian trade agreement
Crosscut
By Peter Jackson
August 22, 2016
http://crosscut.com/2016/08/tpp-seattle-rockagainsttpp-sierra-club-trade-trans-pacific-partnership/ <http://crosscut.com/2016/08/tpp-seattle-rockagainsttpp-sierra-club-trade-trans-pacific-partnership/>
 
The sing-song cadence of activist chants insinuate like a jingle. At the Showbox in Sodo on Friday, it was “hell no, TPP!” chanted to a beat, referring to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the proposed trade agreement between the United States and 11 Pacific Rim countries, and the centerpiece of President Obama’s “pivot to Asia” strategy. It was “no more NAFTAs!” a cry echoed by young people, many born after implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
 
Trade-deal dissenters trumpeting anti-trade slogans in the most trade-dependent state in the country: This is Seattle, mind you.
 
A time squeeze has ratcheted up the volume and urgency for opponents of TPP, which include many environmental groups. Both sides predict that Obama will elbow for its passage during the fall lame-duck session of Congress, saving his potential presidential successors (both of whom have said they oppose the deal) from having it on their plate.
 
In 2015, Washington’s U.S. Senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell — along with seven out of ten of the state’s U.S. House members — voted to approve “fast track” trade-promotion authority, which gives Obama more power to implement the deal. Local dissenters included Democrats Jim McDermott, Adam Smith and Denny Heck.
 
If last year’s vote foreshadows the outcome, TPP opponents face a heavy lift. Fast-track authority passed through Congress with votes to spare.
 
“Trade policy and climate policy shouldn’t be in conflict,” Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, said in an interview with Crosscut. Brune flew up from San Francisco to participate in the club’s “Rock Against the TPP” teach-in and concert. The concert tour includes stops in Portland and San Francisco, a number of progressive organizations as co-sponsors, as well as local alt-weekly The Stranger.
 
He points to one of the agreement’s primary sins of omission.
 
“In all of TPP, there is no mention of climate,” he said. “Zero.” For Brune, tweaking the trade deal is a non-starter. “It needs to be scrapped.”
 
Brune doesn’t see a problem with a trade-centric state bucking an agreement that promises to goose the amount of trade that North America does with Asia.
 
“I’m very confident our message is resonating in Washington,” he said. “Our country thrives on trade, which is why we need to strengthen climate. But that’s not how [TPP] currently works. It should help.”
 
In mobilizing trade-deal skeptics, the Sierra Club hopes to capitalize on recent wins, such as the attention given to the area’s “kayaktivists’” when they pushed to halt oil drilling in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea. The anti-TPP campaign also piggybacks on the club’s successful anti-coal train campaign in the Northwest, which targeted coal-export facilities such as the Gateway Pacific Terminal at Cherry Point. Unlike the current anti-TPP effort, coal exports divided organized labor, with several heavyweights such as the Pierce and Snohomish County Labor Councils and Seattle/King County Building Trades supporting Gateway.
 
On Friday, the push took the form of an eclectic concert featuring a mix of musicians and performers, including a former star of the TV series “Lost” and the talented but inartfully named punk band Anti-Flag, took the stage.
 
“We care about trade deals for the many, not for the few!” shouted actress Evangeline Lilly, recently seen in the “Hobbit” movies. The crowd roared, hands heavenward.
 
Nothing quite says “cognitive dissonance” than a protest that pulls in Teamsters and members of the Sierra Club, groups that have not always seen eye to eye.
 
While sponsors billed the event as a “nationwide uprising and concert tour to stop the biggest corporate power grab in history,” it didn’t draw the kind uprise-adoring anarchists who hijacked the 1999 WTO protests. The crowd was a peaceable mix of millennials, the occasional Gus Hall lookalike, and Baby Boomer activists of the Ecclesiastes, nothing-new-under-the-sun breed.
 
In anticipation of the concert, the Washington Council on International Trade (WCIT) issued a statement from its president Eric Schinfeld.
 
“The truth is the TPP makes pioneering leaps toward high-standard trade, ironically addressing many of the TPP protesters’ concerns,” Schinfeld said. “For instance, the TPP will raise labor and environmental standards in participating countries and will protect the U.S. right to regulate in the public interest for the environment, health and safety.”
 
To underline the pro-TPP narrative, the WCIT produced a report with the Association of Washington Business forecasting up to 26,000 new jobs in the state with TPP. And as the WCIT’s Ashley Dutta said in an interview, a country such as Vietnam will finally be required to adhere to minimum-wage laws, eradicate child labor, and open the door to collective bargaining.
 
The Sierra Club and other TPP opponents showcase the failures of NAFTA, including domestic job losses and the demand by TransCanada that the United States pony up $15 billion for the cancelled Keystone XL pipeline. Supporters counter that the TPP’s public-interest exception gives the agreement more teeth, and that NAFTA’s shortcomings have informed American negotiators on what not to allow in it.
 
There’s a lot to absorb. The TPP is hugely complex, took years to negotiate and, much to the chagrin of transparency-partial activists, mostly got hammered out in secret. The upsides include jettisoning quotas and tariffs, dealing with the challenge of state-owned businesses, and addressing nationality requirements in software, finance and other services.
 
One of the bigger sticking points is the proposed use of tribunals for companies to fire back at government regulations and court actions. There are concerns that these tribunals will undermine national sovereignty, as well as environmental and labor standards.
 
Obama’s TPP imperative is summed up by the New York Times. “It is seen as a way to bind Pacific trading partners closer to the United States while raising a challenge to Asia’s rising power, China, which has pointedly been excluded from the deal, at least for now.”
 
Push-pull dilemmas from the 1970s and ‘80s presage what often happens when Northwest activists take on the national government’s agenda. Seattle Catholic Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen vigorously opposed the Trident nuclear submarine base in Bangor, for example, calling it “the Auschwitz of Puget Sound,” just as Washington communities embraced nuclear-free zones. But Bangor, along with Joint Base Lewis-McChord, grew and new military facilities, such as Naval Station Everett, were constructed.
 
Brune is unbowed. And he takes an expansive, coalition-building approach that either would have amused or pained past Sierra Club presidents such as David Brower, who were focused like a microscope on environmental issues alone.
 
“How many here are ‘Fight for 15?’” Brune asked the crowd, referring to the campaign for a $15 minimum wage. “Our fight also is about reproductive rights and human rights everywhere.”
 
As he continued, caught in the moment, Brune made his pitch. “Organizing, organizing [old Anglo-Saxonism explicative] organizing every day.”
 
It may be the last, best hope for TPP opponents.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.citizenstrade.org/pipermail/ctcfield-citizenstrade.org/attachments/20160822/04686c21/attachment-0001.htm>