Guest Post by Dave Pruett
“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” — James Madison in The Federalist Papers.
(Image source: Wikimedia)
You don’t have to know much about the “trade” deal called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) to be more than a little suspicious.
First, there are the very peculiar bedfellows. Supporting the TPP are President Obama and most Congressional Republicans, the same Republicans who’ve vehemently opposed his every initiative for the past six and one-half years.
Against the TPP are most (but not all) Congressional Democrats, Ford Motor Company, virtually all trade unions and environmental groups, watchdog groups such as Public Citizen, and usual Obama allies such as Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, who, in a testy open letter to the President on April 25, called for greater transparency on the TPP.
Furthermore, when asked to lend his support for so-called “Fast Track” authority for the TPP, Obama water-carrier and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid chafed, “So the answer is not only no, but hell no.”
Also opposed: liberal icon Noam Chomsky, Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, Republican hopeful Mike Huckabee, many Tea-Party groups, and conservative Republican editorialist and former presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan. Conspicuous by silence: Hillary Rodham Clinton.
What’s going on here? Why the strange alliances?
Peel back the layers of the TPP and you’ll find what some believe to be a “corporate Trojan horse.” Disguised as “free trade,” the TPP’s provisions and tactics undermine Constitutional safeguards and national sovereignty. But there’s also a silver lining. The TPP exposes who, in the marbled halls of political power, is working for whom. It forces politicians to put their cards on the table, and by their hands you will know them.
In a recent interview, Chomsky called each word false in the euphemism “free trade agreement.” There’s nothing “free” about it. With nearly 30 chapters, only a half-dozen or so about international commerce, it’s not really primarily about “trade.” And, having been conducted in secret, shielded from the watchful eyes of the public and their congressional representatives, it’s hardly a broad “agreement.”
Every citizen has an obligation to find out what’s in this “deal.” That’s difficult, because the Obama administration has decided to treat TPP documents as classified. Indeed, we know the outlines of the TPP only because of leaks.
For a quick primer on what is known, start with former Labor Secretary Robert Reich’s two-minute video. Follow with Pat Buchanan’s op-ed “Obama’s Republican Collaborators.” And finish with Amy Goodman’s 13-minute interview on Democracy Now! with Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach.
If you still haven’t made up your mind, read the chilling “The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Death of the Republic” by Ellen Brown of the Public Banking Institute. Is it all hyperbole, or could things be as ominous as they seem?
The TPP, which involves 12 nations and 40% of the earth’s trade, has been called “NAFTA on steroids.” (NAFTA, recall, was the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement of 1993 negotiated during the Clinton Presidency). Every such agreement has been sold to the public by the promise that free trade floats all boats. What’s the reality? According to Buchanan, “… almost all [the big trade agreements] have led to soaring trade deficits and jobs lost to the nations with whom we signed the agreements.” Over the past four decades of free trade, America, cites Buchanan, has lost 55,000 factories and 5-6 million manufacturing jobs, all while racking up $11 trillion dollars in trade deficits.
So, who, if anyone, benefits by so-called “free trade?” Only the multinational corporations set “free” to scour the earth for the hottest sweatshops and the cheapest labor. Free trade is a global race to the bottom.
Given the dismal track record of such deals, one would expect future agreements to be negotiated in the light of day by representatives of all stakeholders. So, who’s at the table crafting the TPP?
“The Administration’s 28 trade advisory committees on different aspects of the TPP have a combined 566 members, and 480 of those members, or 85%, are senior corporate executives or industry lobbyists,” the Warren-Brown letter asserts. “Many of the advisory committees — including those on chemicals and pharmaceuticals, textiles and clothing, and services and finance — are made up entirely of industry representatives.” Absent from that table are all congressional representatives.
In April, the Obama administration began the process of petitioning Congress for “Fast Track” authority on the TPP. Some believe that Fast Track (which originated with Richard Nixon) is executive usurpation of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution: “The Congress shall have the power… to regulate commerce with foreign nations.” An end run around Congress, Fast Track minimizes oversight and public debate. It cedes negotiating authority to the executive branch and then binds Congress to an up or down vote, severely constrained by time and without adequate discussion or filibuster.
Where are the hair-on-fire Republicans incensed over the imperial presidency of Barack Obama? Firmly in Obama’s camp! The self-proclaimed party of the Constitution, the family, and God seems only too happy to sell out all three to its prime constituencies: Wall Street and K-Street. Buchanan admits the painful truth: “Fast Track is the GOP payoff to its bundlers and big donors.”
The most troubling aspect of the TPP, asserts Ellen Brown, is the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provision, which “first appeared in a bilateral trade agreement in 1959.” Brown continues:
According to The Economist, ISDS gives foreign firms a special right to apply to a secretive tribunal of highly paid corporate lawyers for compensation whenever the government passes a law … that [negatively impacts] corporate profits — such things as discouraging smoking, protecting the environment or preventing nuclear catastrophe.
Imagine a scenario in which the U.S., coming to its senses about climate change, imposes a revenue-neutral carbon fee on fossil energy. According to provisions of the TPP, a fossil-fuel company in a signatory nation could then sue the U.S. for lost profits, real or imagined.
The threat is not idle. In 2012, the U.S.’s Occidental Petroleum received an ISDS settlement of $2.3 billion from the government of Ecuador because of that country’s apparently legal termination of an oil-concession contract. Currently, the Swedish nuclear-power utility Vattenfall is suing the German government for $4.7 billion in compensation, following Germany’s phase-out of nuclear plants in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster.
The ISDS provisions of the TPP are insidious: the means by which signatory nations voluntarily surrender national sovereignty to the authority of corporate tribunals, without appeal, and apparently without exit provisions. No wonder the negotiations are secret.
Packaged as a gift to the American people that will renew industry and make us more competitive, the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a Trojan horse. It’s a coup by multinational corporations who want global subservience to their agenda. Buyer beware. Citizens beware.
(The author is indebted to the ever-vigilant Economics Working Group of Occupy Harrisonburg for numerous references, insights, and editorial suggestions.)
Pretty easy to see this TPP is bad voodoo. I’ve emailed and called my representatives in CON-gress, and encourage all readers here to do likewise. Also here’s a petition I encourage you to sign against this shit sandwich.
http://act.credoaction.com/sign/fast_track
I emailed both of my Senators. I’m sure that will have an impact, just like when I told them not to vote for TARP.
If you look at things from a world government view.They are taking poorer countries and helping them out,At the same time the wealthier countries suffer.The U.S. Gets knocked down a few pegs.
So it will help out corporations who want new poor countries to build factories in.
More places for us to lose jobs to. I guess this well help hurry along the demise of our country. Bring about an economic collapse. The wealthy,well make out like bandits of course. And they are the ones pushing this TPP through.
“The power and influence of the financial sector threatens a continuation of the regulatory capture that contributed to the financial crisis. Financial firms, too often, have significant say in the appointment of high regulatory officials. The tendency of some former government officials to obtain highly lucrative positions in the financial sector after leaving government may well act as an inducement to those remaining in government to serve the interest of the financial sector rather than those of the public.”
Brooksley Born
Bea, stuck, TE, there’s that buchanan tool popping up again.
“Where are the hair-on-fire Republicans incensed over the imperial presidency of Barack Obama? Firmly in Obama’s camp! The self-proclaimed party of the Constitution, the family, and God seems only too happy to sell out all three to its prime constituencies: Wall Street and K-Street. ”
Why did Mr. Pruett leave out Obama – he is pitching this as another glorious free-trade and increase employment (for the U.S.).
So called free trade deals are all bullshit anyway. Free trade and free markets do not require thousands of pages of laws and regulations negotiated in secret. All free trade requires is that government stop interfering with how people wish to conduct business with one another. So, this has nothing to do with free trade. This is just another scam in a long line of scams where government and large corporations collude to fuck the rest of us over, and erode the sovereignty of individual nations. If government actually wanted to improve the economy or help people, they would stop interfering at every turn. Since the government is not your friend, does not care about you, and only helps its friends, we get the TTP crammed down our throats by people who will vote for it without even reading it.
OK, I’m confused. With the government in Washington currently abandoned and all decision making in the hands of international corporations, who are we supposed to send our taxes to?
You can trust the republican party to stop this Chinese invasion, just like they out a stop to Obamacare. Rand Paul will save US.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/418055/how-five-republicans-let-congress-keep-its-fraudulent-obamacare-subsidies-brendan
How Five Republicans Let Congress Keep Its Fraudulent Obamacare Subsidies
Health-care experts call it D.C. insiderism at its worst.
The rumors began trickling in about a week before the scheduled vote on April 23: Republican leadership was quietly pushing senators to pull support for subpoenaing Congress’s fraudulent application to the District of Columbia’s health exchange — the document that facilitated Congress’s “exemption” from Obamacare by allowing lawmakers and staffers to keep their employer subsidies.
The application said Congress employed just 45 people. Names were faked; one employee was listed as “First Last,” another simply as “Congress.” To Small Business Committee chairman David Vitter, who has fought for years against the Obamacare exemption, it was clear that someone in Congress had falsified the document in order to make lawmakers and their staff eligible for taxpayer subsidies provided under the exchange for small-business employees.
But until Vitter got a green light from the Small Business Committee to subpoena the unredacted application from the District of Columbia health exchange, it would be impossible to determine who in Congress gave it a stamp of approval. When Vitter asked Republicans on his committee to approve the subpoena, however, he was unexpectedly stonewalled.
With nine Democrats on the committee lined up against the proposal, the chairman needed the support of all ten Republicans to issue the subpoena. But, though it seems an issue tailor-made for the tea-party star and Republican presidential candidate, Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) refused to lend his support. And when the Louisiana senator set a public vote for April 23, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his allies got involved.
“For whatever reason, leadership decided they wanted that vote to be 5–5, all Republicans, to give Senator Paul cover,” one high-ranking committee staffer tells National Review. “So they worked at a member level to change the votes of otherwise supportive senators.” Four Republicans — senators Mike Enzi, James Risch, Kelly Ayotte, and Deb Fischer — had promised to support Vitter, but that would soon change.
“The amount of blood that McConnell and Paul spilled to prevent [the subpoena] from happening makes me wonder [if] maybe that isn’t all that there is to it,” the high-ranking staffer says.
Senate staffers, according to a top committee aide, reported seeing Missouri senator Roy Blunt make calls to at least two Republican committee members, lobbying them, at McConnell’s behest, to vote no on subpoenaing the exchange. By the time the committee was called to quorum, Enzi, Risch, Ayotte, and Fischer voted no.
To many observers, it was curious that any Republican would move to put the brakes on an investigation into Obamacare fraud, and particularly curious that they would pull back in an instance where the federal government was actually defrauding itself, one that so clearly illustrates Obamacare’s flaws by exposing the bureaucratic jujitsu and outright dishonesty required of federal employees themselves to navigate the law.
Conservative health-care experts can’t understand the reasoning behind the GOP senators’ opposition. They see politics and self-interest at play, and they allege that Republican leaders are as invested as their Democratic counterparts in maintaining their subsidies, fraudulently obtained, while avoiding scrutiny from an overwhelmingly disapproving American public.
“We deserve to know who signed that application, because they are robbing taxpayers,” says Michael Cannon, director of health-policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. The staffers who signed the fraudulent application, he says, “know who was directing them to do this. And so we have to follow the trail of breadcrumbs. This is the next breadcrumb, and whoever is farther up the trail wants to stop Vitter right here.”
The story of the ill-fated subpoena can be traced back to the debate over the Affordable Care Act, when Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) insisted that lawmakers and congressional staff join a health-care exchange set up under the bill. For government employees, that meant giving up government-subsidized health-care contributions of between $5,000 and $10,000 per person. The White House scrambled to find a way to allow congressional employees to keep those subsidies. In Washington, D.C., only the small-business exchange allowed them to do so. After secret meetings with House speaker John Boehner in 2013, President Obama instructed the Office of Personnel Management to allow Congress to file for classification as a small business, despite the fact that the law defines a small business as having no more than 50 employees and the House and Senate together employ tens of thousands.
When Vitter’s staffers tracked down the application and discovered obvious signs of fraud, Vitter requested approval to subpoena an unredacted copy of the application. The value of that document, says Cannon, is that it would reveal the name of the person who filed it. “Now you’ve got someone to call to testify,” he says, predicting that testimony would precipitate a congressional vote on whether to end the congressional exemption altogether.
“I think it makes sense to find out what happened,” says Yuval Levin, the editor of National Affairs, a noted conservative health-care voice and a National Review contributor. “It would be pretty interesting to see whose name is on the forms,” he says. “It has to go beyond mid-level staffers.”
But some congressional Republicans, it seems, are also resistant to getting to the bottom of the mystery — or, at the very least, they are content to let sleeping dogs lie.
Committee rules for a subpoena require either the consent of the ranking member or a majority of the group’s 19 senators. Because Democrats quickly made their opposition clear, Vitter needed the approval of all ten Republicans. Nine of them quickly consented via e-mail; one senator was strangely unresponsive.
Senior committee aides say that Rand Paul’s staff didn’t immediately reply to an e-mail requesting the senator’s consent and, when they did, they refused to provide it. When Vitter attempted to set up a member-to-member meeting, his overtures were ignored or put off. Paul’s policy staff refused to take a meeting. When Vitter tried to confront Paul on the Senate floor, they say, the Kentucky senator skirted the issue.
It wasn’t until after the vote that Paul shared his reasoning. “Senator Paul opposes allowing Congress to exempt themselves from any legislation,” an aide told the Conservative Review. “To that end, yesterday, he reintroduced his proposed constitutional amendment to prohibit Congress from passing any law that exempts themselves. Senator Paul prefers this option over a partisan cross-examination of Congressional staff.”
But a constitutional amendment is a longshot that would take years, and it hardly precluded an investigation of congressional corruption here and now.
“That’s absurd,” says Robert Moffit, the director of the Center for Health Policy Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “You don’t need a constitutional amendment to get a subpoena . . . I don’t know where he’s coming from.”
“The answers he has given do not make sense,” Cannon says of Paul. “And when someone with his principles does something that is so obviously against his principles, and does not give an adequate explanation, you begin to think that politics is afoot. It would have to be someone very powerful that made him a powerful pitch — or threat — to keep him from doing this.”
Paul’s press secretary tells National Review that the senator “examines every opportunity to [oppose Obamacare] individually, and does not base his vote on requests made by other senators, including the majority leader.”
Asked whether McConnell pushed Paul or any other senator on the subpoena, a spokesman for McConnell says the majority leader “didn’t make any announcements when that committee voted.”
The flip-flopping Republicans justified their change of heart. Risch said in the April 23 committee meeting that legal wrangling with the D.C. exchange could take time away from the committee’s small-business work. Enzi said he saw little wrong with the application as is.
“Each of us has our own budget, each of us has our own staff,” he said. “I don’t know about everybody else, but I’m way under 50 [employees]. So my staff qualifies as a small business.”
Enzi was one of the original sponsors of Vitter’s 2013 amendment to end the congressional Obamacare exemption, but his press secretary tells National Review he felt the probe “could inadvertently target staff who simply completed paperwork as part of their job.” He insists that Enzi “made up his own mind.” Risch, Ayotte, and Fischer declined to comment.
A spokesman for South Carolina senator Tim Scott, who voted for the subpoena, says that nobody lobbied him one way or the other, while a spokesman for Florida senator Marco Rubio, who also voted in favor of the measure, declined to comment.
“The most powerful interest group in Washington D.C. is . . . members of Congress and their staffs. And when it comes to their benefits, they are all members of the same party.”
Health-care experts dismiss Enzi’s claim that each member’s office is its own small business, and not just because the health exchange application was filed for Congress as a whole. “These congressional offices that think they’re small businesses, are they LLCs?” Cannon asks. “Are they S-Corps? Are they shareholder-owned? Are they privately held? What is the ownership structure of this small business that you’re running, senator? It’s just utterly ridiculous.”
“They’re transparently absurd,” says Moffit of Senate Republicans claiming small-business status. “Who made the determination that Congress is a small business and is therefore eligible for subsidies that do not legally exist? How did that happen?”
No one quite knows what’s behind leadership’s apparent push to kill the subpoena. The move baffled some committee staffers. “The amount of blood that McConnell and Paul spilled to prevent [the subpoena] from happening makes me wonder [if] maybe that isn’t all that there is to it,” the high-ranking staffer says. “Maybe other people signed it . . . They’re clearly afraid of something bigger than a person’s name getting out there.”
Others, however, think the motives behind GOP leadership’s apparent obfuscation are clear. “If there’s one thing that absolutely drives Americans fundamentally crazy, it’s the idea that Congress can set one set of rules for themselves and another for everybody else,” says Moffit. “That’s political poison, and that’s why they have been so desperate to avoid the issue.”
“The most powerful interest group in Washington D.C., is not the Chamber or the unions or anyone else,” Cannon says. “It is members of Congress and their staffs. And when it comes to their benefits, they are all members of the same party.”
— Brendan Bordelon is a political reporter for National Review.
Starfcker
Just as Flash points out (tongue in cheek sarc) that Ron Paul will save us, the establishment will send out their paid mouthpieces like Buchanan to give the sheep hope that someone will save us from yet another blow to this country…………….it’s just theater and you bought it again.
Star, Buchanan is a tool and that is the truth.
Oops, meant to type Rand Paul above.
BL,
Rand is not Ron…make the distinction.
BL….you got it.
Bueller? Bueller? (now substitute “Sensetti” for “Bueller”).
Sens, please show me that Republicans are any “better” for us than Democrats? Thank you.
Good God are we being sold down the river or what? And down the river is a BIG waterfall!
“The Obama-proposed international-trade deals, if passed into law, will lead to “a dystopian future in which corporations and not democratically elected governments call the shots,” says Alfred De Zayas, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order.
“If the TTIP and the TPP pass and become law, then historians will almost certainly remember Obama far more for those international trade-deals than for Obamacare or anything else, because of the enormous global political change they will bring. And Obama will then probably be generally regarded as the worst President in U.S. history, because he will then have done more to bring back dictatorship as the global norm and ended democracy, than any other nation’s leader, in all of history, ever did.”
Anything done in this much secrecy has to be a catastrophe. When only legislators alone can read the document, but they cannot record or take notes, and are forbidden to talk about it, there can only be explosive provisions that would guarantee it would not pass if they were revealed. For that reason alone, it must be defeated.
Well I definitely liked reading it. This post procured by you is very practical for accurate planning.