Columnist

Tricks of the trade

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

-- Abraham Lincoln

Let's establish right off that for me to be discussing trade agreements is right up there with me personally waxing eloquent on brain surgery or nuclear physics. It won't happen. However, like all high-powered and esoteric topics, eventually the consequences of actions taken in lofty realms become more understandable when they translate directly or indirectly down into the lives and finances of us, the common folk. So it is with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed trade agreement involving about a dozen, mostly Pacific Rim, countries.

As with the North America Free Trade Agreement and the Central America Free Trade Agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership pushers beat their usual political drum claiming job creation on a massive scale. However, U.S. labor organizations have long said the consequences of those agreements have been devastating to the tune of hundreds of thousands of American jobs along with numerous manufacturing closures. They feel the partnership will be even worse, calling it "NAFTA on steroids," because it represents 40 percent of America's global trade.

Opponents also point out these trade agreements really have less to do with trade than with corporate controls and shields from various countries' policies and laws, be they human rights, environmental protections, financial regulations, labor conditions, food safety standards, etc. These agreements expose nations to being sued if national policies can be shown to somehow cause corporations to fail to profit, to operate as they wish, or even just frustrate their profit expectations. The examples of such cases can be wild, even preposterous. Philip Morris, for example, has sued Uruguay and Australia over those countries' anti-smoking initiatives. Imagine how environmental protections that have taken us generations to establish in this country will fare when they frustrate the profit-making abilities of international corporations. Should we just kiss environmental laws goodbye?

The fines to a country if it loses a judgment can run into billions, which many governments cannot afford, so they give in to corporate overlords. This is why opponents say joining such agreements puts independent governmental sovereignty at risk. That includes ours, by the way.

U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton's answer to my concern over some of the terms in the Trans-Pacific Partnership was a typical what-to-tell-the-citizens response. He wrote, "The TPP has the potential to be a game-changing trade pact for American businesses. With the right protections in place, such a pact would facilitate increased trade among all parties, raising our standard of living and providing an increased market for Arkansas rice, aeronautics equipment, and cotton, among other products we currently export." We innocents may ask, "What could be the problem with this?"

Perhaps Sen. Cotton should have written the phrase, "With the right protections in place" and "businesses" in bold capitalized lettering because within those few words exists a world of very different beneficiaries. First and foremost, the question should be, "Whose protections?" In addition, those who have been critical of the agreement greatly fear the "fast-track" authority, which Congress may vote to give the president as early as next week, that allows secretive negotiations without public input or awareness. It also lasts for six years so one or two more presidents could use this beyond-the-reach-of-citizens technique to aid and abet geopolitical corporate wants and power.

Renee Parsons, in a Huffington Post article in 2013 titled, "With the Trans-Pacific Partnership's Fast Track Authority, Who Needs Congress?" pointed out the so-called protections generate, "a massive economic integration toward a fully corporatized global economy." Ellen Brown's article of April 27 on her Web of Debt blog is titled, "The TPP and the Death of the Republic," and reports that "On April 22, the Senate Finance Committee approved a bill to fast-track the TPP ... that would override our republican form of government and hand judicial and legislative authority to a foreign three-person panel of corporate lawyers." She also points out that fast-tracking "means Congress will be prohibited from amending the trade deal."

What can we do about this? Read those articles and others online, search links www.peopledemandingaction.org and www.citizen.org for information, and contact our Arkansas senators and congressmen immediately with your opinions. This is urgent. Politicians turning secretive tricks of any kind on the people of this country should be found as guilty as those practicing that other oldest profession.

Commentary on 05/05/2015

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