The Trans-Pacific Partnership is Inherently Anti-Human

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is free trade in the same way the Donner Party was a party. The end is the same: The strong sup well, the rest get eaten. The TPP is not really about exchanging goods between the peoples of the earth. Rather, it is an investor-rights agreement. That means it’s protectionism for companies, not people.

The TPP gives rich multinationals even more power to do what they please, where they please, to whomever they please, without much interference from the rest of us. The Democrats are currently debating whether or not to denounce the TPP in their official party platform (they’ve decided “no” twice, though there’s a theoretical third chance at the convention itself). They should oppose it. The TPP is inside baseball of the highest order, and it is time the game ended.

WHAT THE TPP IS

The TPP is a big-time trade deal between the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Brunei, Malaysia, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. The document itself was drafted in October 2015 and signed by trade representatives on February 4 of this year. But it does not have the force of law. Yet. To become official, the TPP must be ratified within two years. It’s being sold to us as a serious opener of markets — it will ring in prosperity and possibly the millennium, increase wages, bring better products, more jobs, and …

Oh man, I can’t keep a straight face. Look, this agreement is going to absolutely kneecap us. I know this seems just like a dry document and who cares, but it’s not dry, it’s about so much more: how people will work and where they will live, basic questions of existence which will collide with the day-to-day life of literally billions of people. The TPP’s stated goal is to promote economic growth, much as Sauron’s stated goal was to enforce border security, when his actual interests lay more in line with the cooking and serving of Hobbit.

I get it. This stuff comes across as tedious, and explaining free trade has probably, secretly, killed more people than James “King of the World” Cameron. But trade is like law. The moment you throw up your hands and say “Oh, this is too complex for me to understand,” you’re underrating yourself and overrating the professionals. The reason people think trade is dishwater-level dull is because trade and finance are 1) the job of an elite priesthood who 2) have never cared to communicate the crucial ideas to everyone else.

That’s where I come in. Remember that scene in “Love Actually” where Rick Grimes comes to Keira Knightley’s door on Christmas Eve with a tape deck full of carols and those signs telling her how his wasted heart will always love her? I see that as my job, but instead of being a sweater full of repressed British lust, I’m writing for a hip music magazine, and rather than professing my undying yearning for you, I’m holding up cue cards reading “Hey girl, Fight the Power,” and “DTR = Down to Revolt?”

I’ve named the crime. I’ve explained the what of this deal. Next up: the when, how, who, and why.

THE WHEN, or WHY THIS MATTERS NOW

Here’s the short version of the story: over the last seven years, twelve countries got together to cook up this huge agreement, which helps big corporations do stuff like keep generic drugs from coming to market, enforce harsh copyright, and allow companies to sue governments over matters like environmental laws. They met in secret so the public wouldn’t find out. Someone put parts of the document on WikiLeaks. People got upset. Now we’re fighting over it, and this is a crucial moment in the battle. A time when critical voices can put a dent in the monster.

Obama has made ratifying the TPP a central goal of his second term. A majority of Congressional Democrats voted against advancing the bill last year. The left and right joined forces in opposing it. Trump and Sanders are against it. Warren too. Hillary was pro, but switched to con, sort of, back in February.

Which brings us to now. On June 24, Bernie’s supporters fought mightily to have anti-TPP language included in the Democratic Party platform. They lost the vote 10-5, suggesting the establishment machinery still wants it. Bernie and his followers lost the TPP battle at the Dem Platform Committee meeting in Orlando. Opponents to the TPP still hope to win the battle at the convention. They’ve sent the word out: we must bring down this treaty.

We have to keep the pressure up, even if the Sanders and his followers tear the plank from the party’s agenda. TPP supporters want to get the agreement passed after the November vote-a-palooza; they’re planning on ramming through it during the lame-duck period after the election and before mid-January. Deborah Elms, executive director of Singapore’s Asian Trade Centre — probably laughing from atop a throne of burning peasants — noted “The lame-duck session is one where all rules don’t apply. Lots of unpopular things get done in the lame-duck period, and I think in this particular lame-duck period TPP is the first thing on the agenda of unpopular things that will get done.”

Now, the GOP and Dem platforms don’t actually bind the party to do anything. However, party platforms matter. Their symbolic importance is huge, and so it’s a good measure of who has power inside the coalition. In 1948, when the Democratic Party — the party of the Slavemaster of Monticello — adopted a Civil Rights plank in their platform, it was such a Big Deal that it temporarily led to the formation of a third party, the Dixiecrats.

Should the TPP backers succeed, it would be a poison in the heart of the American system. The TPP must be stopped, and the Democrats must not endorse it, now or ever. Public awareness matters. First, we need to talk about how the TPP actually operates.

THE HOW

The TPP is an amazing piece of work — in the same way German military ambition was an awesome monument in our grandparent’s time. That this agreement is called “free trade” is ridiculous. There has never been a real free trade deal in the history of human economics, because in this world, money can fly to other countries, but labor can’t move where it please; the government protects doctors and lawyers from competition but not auto workers. TPP is no different. Michael Wessel, a former member of the U.S. Trade Deficit Review, was asked by the government to read the document. He said “This is about increasing the ability of global corporations to source wherever they can at the lowest cost.”

As Zaid Jilani wrote in The Intercept, the deal isn’t about lowering tariffs and other common trade barriers. Rather, “The TPP is more focused on crafting regulatory regimes that benefit certain industries.” Trade barriers have already been lowered many, many times since World War II. The average tariff for the U.S. on all products was 1.4% in 2014. For manufactured products, it was 2.76%. Of the TPP’s thirty chapters, only six deal with traditional trade issues. If they say it’s about lowering walls, they’re either deluded or lying. The TPP lifts Wall Street reforms. It hands power to corporations, it challenges the neutral net, hacks away at human rights, keeps the cost of medicines high and blocks generics from the market, shoves unhealthy food into our country, and gives the 1% even more power to send their shops abroad.

The fact is, the TPP, like NAFTA, is an investor rights agreement. There are lessons not taught in schools, and one of them is how investor rights agreements come into the world.

You see, when a transnational corporation loves a corrupt state very much, the corporation buys the legislators of the state. But the fun’s just getting started! Once the transnational corporation and the corrupt state are, as the kids say, “serious,” they want others to join in the fun. So they get together with other, similar couples: a super-gross icky pileup of corporate interests and states giving each other shoulder rubs and meaningful winks. Then they go to a private room where there’s a kind of “special hugging” that citizens aren’t allowed to see. The public is blacklisted from this repulsive display. After all, their interests would interfere in the flirtation. Eighty-four months later, TPP arrives. It’s exactly the offspring the parents were hoping for: protectionism for massive companies, monopoly pricing, huge costs to the customers.

So the word “free” isn’t accurate. Neither is the word “trade.” What the TPP and NAFTA call “trade” actually refers to the convoluted shell game that happens inside our economy, the process by which some video game company codes its software in Boston, has the console made in Brazil, and sends the goods back to a Target in Knoxville. Is this trade? Me going to Sam’s outside of Lubbock, Texas, buying muscle milk from Sweden, and slinging it to junior high students out of my car trunk in moist Denton, Texas – that isn’t international trade. It’s material for a heroic ballad, maybe a Lifetime movie, but Adam Smith it is not.

It gets better. The TPP’s investor rights agreements allow corporations to sue stiff-necked governments who get in their way. The legal device is called Investor-State Dispute Settlement, or ISDS. Any time environmental laws or other trifling regulations get in the way of multinational action, these can be brushed aside by the endlessly funded attorneys of the endlessly hungry maw of big business. The Powers That Be know it too, because they exempted tobacco companies from using this process. As journalist Eric Levitz writes, “If ISDS posed no risk to reasonable public-health regulations, there would be no need to deny tobacco companies the right to challenge smoking laws before an arbitration panel.”

The Atlantic suggested the following thought experiment: Suppose in January 2017, the mayor of San Francisco raises the minimum wage to the ramen-friendly price of $16. The hike is not in violation of Fed or State law. But a month later, a Vietnamese restaurant company who owns fifteen eateries in the Bay sues the government, because their rights under the investor protection section of the TPP has been violated. The suit does not go before American courts, but is heard before three private arbitrators: one chosen by the foreign country, one chosen by the American government, one chosen by the agreement of both. The U.S. Government plays the defense. The city can only join in if the U.S. allows it. This is ISDS, and it is our future. Our Constitution and laws will be the kept cattle of multinational actors. Monsanto will have veto over your farming, and British Petroleum will pick and choose what birds can live and die.

The TPP, even by our standards of our tranquilizer-guzzling master class, is one miracle swindle. It’s hard to beat an idea that sets up practically a new legal system. “If you thought Wal-Mart consuming every piece of American life — beginning with the small towns, and clambering upwards through hardware stores, supermarkets, and, eventually, who knows, probably your child’s schooling — was a good idea, then by all means, work for the TPP. And then you might drink paint thinner, to put a killer finish to your day. Paint thinner will be a real save for the consumer if TPP passes, I’m sure.

If Thomas Friedman had glands which experienced desire, TPP would push him into an ecstasy stroke. The Nation called it “NAFTA on steroids,” which is unfair to ‘roids and all they have done for the bro coalition. Joseph Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize in 2001, has spoken against the TPP, pointing out the very obvious fact that the deal is important because “they’ve tried to get it passed without anyone knowing about it … and that should make you suspicious,” adding “The people that are in favor [of TPP] are the people in Wall Street.” Who are these “people in favor?” Who are these noble steeds that we are riding to our golden future of moon cities and champagne? Who is leading the chorus of free trade kumbaya-singers?

THE WHO, or SCENT OF A FROMAN

That would be Michael Froman, the seventeenth United States Trade Rep, and Barack Obama’s classmate at Harvard Law. Froman, no relation to the sausage king of Chicago, worked for Citigroup Management Corp from 1999-2009. You may recall something of importance related to banks happened in 2008. Froman got there by following Robert Rubin (Harvard, 1960), Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, Mr. Goldman Sachs himself, the man who loosened the reins on the financial industry. Rubin also gave us the gift of Larry Summers (Ph.D, Harvard, 1982), his successor as Treasury Secretary, the economist equivalent of a medieval rat plague. Why all of these gentlemen from Cambridge huddled so close, I cannot say. I can only guess at some deep college experience that bonded them all together. It would take a very active imagination to suggest they had all participated in a kind of romantic tryst, or some secret society-sanctioned drifter murder. I possess such an imagination.

Summers and Rubin, Rubin and Summers. Looking back over the last thirty years, it’s hard to find a financial tragedy that these two men didn’t have some hand in. And Froman was their Jesse Pinkman. Seriously. To read Summers’ Wikipedia page is to learn what Satan would have spent his time doing in the Nineties and Oughts: fighting against the Kyoto Accord, supporting the gangsterization of Russia, keeping a hand in Korea’s economic crisis, agreeing with Paul Wolfowitz in Indonesia, teaming up with Enron exec Ken Lay and Randian turtle Alan Greenspan to deregulate California during the energy crisis, rolling back Glass-Steagall. Summers is a father of the financial crisis, a hater of hip-hop and Cornel West, and a noted sexist buffoon. He was the biggest jackass to ever run an Ivy League school, and that’s a crowded field. Summers earned millions speaking at JP Morgan Chase and every other criminal conspiracy operating on the Street. Henry Kissinger likes him.

In any country that fully embraced the Rubin and Summers system of economic piracy, those two men would have been hunted down by Blackwater, their various prize organs privatized and sold off in pieces to the highest bidder. In our universe, however, they stayed intact. Froman, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, learned well, and soon followed up his old boss’ business of shafting the public. In 2004, Froman hopped aboard his college buddy Obama’s Senate campaign, introducing Barack to Rubin. During his hearing to be Grand Trade Poobah, it came out that he had packed a little less than half a million socked away in the highly legitimate Cayman Islands, home of financial creepiness and mafia accounts since time immemorial.

Good people, all around.

The Serious Press are aware that the TPP is loathed by large portions of the populace. They already know. But they weigh objections to the TPP by the same standard I consider people who complain about Daniel Day-Lewis: yeah, it’s not to everybody’s taste, but British intensity is different from serial killer focus, and whatever, he just needs to be presented the right way.

But understanding our era’s greatest actor is very different from tolerating the gargantuan interlocking hell-scape of modern neoliberalism, and the media ought to know better. Serious People who get interviewed in the Serious Press admit that, well, yes, there might be, sigh, regrettable disagreement with free trade, but of course, ah ha ha, we must plunge ahead, no looking back. For these thinkers, globalization and “free trade” are as natural as a forest fire, as moral-merciful as a madman with a long sword in a crowded room. As an ideology, neoliberalism’s creepiest, most frustrating feature is how it assumes there is no alternative.

Froman has tried defending the TPP in public. He said, in a Wall Street Journal interview, “The agreement itself is very good on intellectual-property rights, on copyright, on trademark and, on pharmaceuticals, very importantly, on enforcement.” Of course it is, Mike!

Froman kept digging:

“What we’ve seen more recently is a real sense of anger out there after 15 years of wage stagnation, which is only beginning to turn up now, after widening income inequality, of feeling like the system wasn’t working for everybody.”

Uh-huh.

”…The fact is you don’t get a vote on automation, on whether there’s going to be a new generation of computers or robots that might replace your job. You don’t really get to vote on globalization. … You do get a vote on trade agreements. So trade agreements become the vessel into which people pour their very legitimate concerns about job security, wage stagnation and income inequality.”

So much for lip service. Why is this kind of thought so unsettling?

THE WHY

The realization came to me in a Washington Post article titled “Everything you need to know about the Trans Pacific Partnership,” Lydia DePillis wrote:

“9. Why has the TPP been so secretive? Is that normal?

Trade negotiations are usually conducted in private, on the theory that parties won’t be able to have a meaningful dialogue if their positions are disclosed to the public.”

Let us stop and think about that sentence for a moment. I don’t mean just you, the Reader. I mean me, the writer, and the editors of Paste reading this for review; I want every single one of us to pause and consider that incredible statement.

“Trade negotiations are usually conducted in private, on the theory that parties won’t be able to have a meaningful dialogue if their positions are disclosed to the public.”

Froman is an official of the United States government, chosen by the democratically-elected Executive, Barack Obama. The pro-TPP arguments are sold on the basis of making life better for Americans. The TPP, to be ratified, must be passed by the people’s legislature, Congress.

Now, I am not faulting Ms. DePillis in the least. I think she is merely reporting what is common belief among the free trade set, what Froman and friends think. What raises the armhair is the earnest decency of the statement.

Imagine the mindset that encourages this thinking. The words and phrasing don’t matter themselves. The surface idea itself is banal: “Let the pros do the work.” But what it implies is telling.

G.K. Chesterton, in an essay titled “In Topsy-Turvy Land,” writes about a poster he saw in Fleet Street (London’s publishing district) with the words “Should Shop Assistants Marry?” Chesterton, puzzled, considers various meanings for the sign: Are shop assistants the kind of people who are too good for marriage? Are shop assistants too vile for marriage? Then he writes:

“But I suppose that is not what the purple poster meant. We must face, I fear, the full insanity of what it does mean. It does really mean that a section of the human race is asking whether the primary relations of the two human sexes are particularly good for modern shops. … If this is not topsy-turvy I cannot imagine what would be. We ask whether the universal institution will improve our (please God) temporary institution. Yet I have known many such questions. For instance, I have known a man ask seriously, ‘Does Democracy help the Empire?’ Which is like saying, ‘Is art favourable to frescoes?’”

Chesterton suggests follow-up queries: Do feet improve boots? Do people spoil a town? Shall we take brides with our wedding rings?

Simple Chesterton! We have advanced beyond his time: Froman, and all the members of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, do not even consider taking brides with wedding rings. The gold ring is the whole point, the only point. The people are irrelevant to the process. “The parties” come first in DePillis’ sentence. A “meaningful dialogue” can only happen without the mob, you see. The public are the afterthought, an encumbrance, something to get around, the dead body at a wake. The Trans-Pacific Partnership mindset is not merely the mistake of putting the cart before the horse, or even asking if the horse is worth the cart, but denying the horse exists at all.