Obama & McConnell Pledge Cooperation; Will Fast-Tracking Secretive TPP Trade Deal Top Their Agenda? From article, ...the TPP, unfortunately, is really a delivery mechanism for a lot of the things McConnell and the Republicans like. So, for instance, it would increase the duration of patents for Big Pharma and, as a result, give them windfall profits but increase our medicine prices. It could roll back financial regulation on big banks. It could limit Internet freedom, sort of sneak through the back door the Stop Online Piracy Act, SOPA. And—they love this—it would give special privileges and rights for foreign corporations to skirt around our courts and sue the U.S. government to raid our treasury over any environmental, consumer health law that they think undermine their expected future profits, the so-called investor-state enforcement system. Plus, it would have the NAFTA-style rules that make it easier to offshore jobs, making it easier to relocate to low-wage countries. So, the sort of grotesque question is: Why does President Obama like the TPP? It’s pretty clear why McConnell likes it. It was negotiated with the assistance of 600 corporate advisers, official corporate trade advisers in the U.S. The agreement has been the initiative of the Obama administration. It was started by Bush, but instead of turning it around and making it something different, the Obama folks picked it up and, frankly, have made it even more extreme. So, the question really, in a way, is, the Democratic Congress—the Democrats in Congress and the public, including a lot of tea party conservatives, have plenty not to like. Oh, I forgot about the part of TPP where it bans Buy America, Buy Local. Really bad agreement, 29 chapters, only a few of them about trade, so it’s really a sneak attack branded as a trade agreement. And the key to that, probably, is right now a fight between the U.S. and Japan in agriculture. So there’s a little weird twist there, where the Republicans in Congress have said that either Japan has to get rid of all of its tariffs on agriculture products or it should be thrown out of the agreement. In a weird way, it’s not clear to me that the Republicans taking over makes it actually easier for Obama to make that deal, given they’re the ones who have been particularly harsh about that issue. But there is this big negotiation coming up in China in a week. And this was supposed to be the deadline to finish TPP, which, with any luck and a lot of citizen activism in all the countries, is not going to happen again. NERMEEN SHAIKH: And you actually make the point, Lori Wallach, that even the fast track is not likely to go any quicker through Congress as a result of this Republican win. Could you explain why that is? LORI WALLACH: So, a lot of people who might read the mainstream media have seen all of these stories saying, oh, the thing that’s going to happen really quickly is Congress is going to delegate its trade authority, its constitutional exclusive control over trade, to the president through this old Nixon-era, very extreme procedure, rarely used, called fast track. And that’s a procedure that basically gives Congress’s authority over trade to the president. Congress ends up handcuffed, and an agreement gets negotiated, signed before the Congress ever approves it, and then the president gets to write legislation. It’s not subject to committee amendment, and it gets a guaranteed 90-day vote with no amendments. Couldn’t we wish that we had that kind of procedure for legislation we like? So that procedure has only been used 16 times in the history of the country, but it was used for NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. democracynow.org/2014/11/6/obama_mcconnell_pledge_cooperation_will_fast
Posted on: Thu, 06 Nov 2014 18:26:28 +0000
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