[CTC] Dateline Ithaca: Tompkins County board votes 11-3 against TPP

[Dolan, Mike]

Kudos to the ad-hoc Finger Lakes Fair Trade Campaign!

Resolution Excerpt:
"The disproportionate voice of powerful United States and multinational global corporations in the formation of U.S. 'free trade' agreements has advanced an agenda that undermines human rights, environmental protection, and the public interest, and threatens democracy at all levels of government."

Onward!
Mike D.
Teamsters

http://www.ithaca.com/news/dwelling-on-the-tpp-at-the-tompkins-county-legislature/article_d9c77570-c517-11e5-96aa-0f4c3a553c07.html
Dwelling on the TPP at the Tompkins County Legislature



By Jaime Cone reporter at ithacatimes.com<mailto:reporter at ithacatimes.com>

At the Jan. 19 meeting of the Tompkins County Legislature, the board passed a resolution calling upon U.S. Congress to reject the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). The resolution states that the new trade agreement was negotiated among the United States and 12 or more Pacific Rim countries by the U.S. Trade Representative-an office in the Executive branch-in secret, without consultation with U.S. elected officials but "in consultation with many transitional corporations that will benefit from its rules."



Last April the legislature opposed the fast-tracking of the TPP agreement. Now that the text of the TPP has been made public, the legislature held its stance and passed the new resolution with a vote of 11-3. Legislators Peter Stein (D-Ithaca), Jim Dennis (D-Ulysses), and Mike Sigler (R-Lansing) voted no.



Dennis pointed out that President Obama supports the TPP. Dennis himself said, "I'm going to vote on this one, and the reason is-there are people in the room here who would agree with me, I think-we get these resolutions before us and almost no one cares about them except the people who bring them, and clearly they don't listen to us at the state legislature. We pass them until we're blue in the face. I want us to not do this quite as much as we're doing it."



"I don't think this is inconsequential or irreverent to what we do," responded Legislator Will Burbank (D-Ithaca). "What we have is democracy at the most basic level. It is literally one of the last forums where the public can come out and speak to legislators. They have three minutes to speak to all of us, and we get to speak about the issues of the day."



"I think there's a huge disconnect between what's happening in everybody's normal lives and where these decisions are being made," Burbank added. "This is an issue that's been largely ignored by the media. If you Google TPP you'll find precious little reporting on it." He argued that "this, I believe, will have significant impact on us in ways we don't fully comprehend."Several members of the public spoke in favor of the resolution.



"The TPP is about the future-a future many of us will not see," said Joe Wilson of Dryden. "That makes the TPP more about our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and the world we give them to live in after we're gone."



"We know that the TPP is like NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], only more so. We know the history of NAFTA is job cuts, stagnant wages, reduced worker safety, runaway manufacturing, and environmental degradation," Wilson said.



Burbank originally brought forward the resolution, and the revised, voted-upon version of it was submitted by Legislator Dooley Kiefer (D-Cayuga Heights). The resolution says that U.S. trade deals for the past 25 years have been corporate-driven, incorporating rules that skew benefits to economic elites, resulting in working families bearing the brunt of such policies.



"The disproportionate voice of powerful United States," it reads, "and multinational global corporations in the formation of U.S. 'free trade' agreements has advanced an agenda that undermines human rights, environmental protection, and the public interest, and threatens democracy at all levels of government," said the resolution, to quote just a small portion of it.



The resolution points to NAFTA as an example and includes a clause stating that "TransCanada, the company that proposed the Keystone XL oil pipeline, announced that it is filing two lawsuits challenging the legality of President [Barack] Obama's November decision denying the pipelines its border-crossing permit ... and also that it will file a separate petition under NAFTA for violating four separate NAFTA clauses and asking the United States be required to pay not only the approximate $3 billion TransCanada has already 'invested' in the pipeline but also an additional approximate $15 billion of lost future earnings."


Michael F. Dolan, J.D.
Legislative Representative
International Brotherhood of Teamsters
Desk  202.624.6891
Fax    202.624.8973
Cell    202.437.2254

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