Anti-TPP demonstrators outside Malaysia’s parliament on July 16, 2013, urging their nation to postpone its participation in the trade deal.
Bipartisanship and “free trade” are two of corporate media’s favorite things. So when the Washington Post editorial (11/6/14) expressed the media consensus—“Now that Republicans have gained control of Congress, no policy area is riper for bipartisan action than trade”—you can believe they were happy to do it.
The elite media thinking is that the consolidation of Republican power in Congress will provide momentum on issues where the White House and Republicans largely agree, and that one of these is trade policy: In particular, the mammoth Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP. (See Extra!, 3/14.) The Associated Press (11/10/14) told readers it “could lead to rare consensus with congressional Republicans.”
Underneath the suggestion that we will see bipartisan effort to pass TPP, of course, is the implication that that’s good news. But is it? And is it even true? CounterSpin’s Janine Jackson (11/14/14) talked about that with Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch and author of, most recently, The Rise and Fall of Fast Track Trade Authority.
CounterSpin: That AP piece refers to the “stubborn logjams that have held up an agreement on a trans-Pacific trade deal.” Part of those “logjams” in this country is the fact that it’s understood that to pass it, the president needs “fast track authority.” Is fast track what you see as the weak spot in this whole idea that we’re going to see a combination of media’s favorite things: so-called free trade and bipartisanship?
Lori Wallach: I think that the media have overplayed the likelihood that the Obama trade agenda, which is also the corporate trade agenda, which is some of the Republican’s trade agenda, is going to have an easy time in this Congress. It is the case that the Obama administration has gotten to that place in the negotiations of the Trans-Pacific Partnership where they’re starting to get to a mindset to make any deal just so Obama gets credit for it. And they’re abandoning a lot of the positions that they have held to through all the years of negotiations, including some that are important and good for most of us, and some that are bad, that they should abandon. However, the likelihood is that they’re really pushing for an agreement on TPP in the next six months. And they just missed another big deadline, so the window is closing on them, which gets us to this fast track business.
Fast track doesn’t just guarantee that the agreement gets an actual yes-or-no vote in 90 days, with limited debate and no amendments. It also lets the president sign and enter into an agreement like TPP before Congress approves it. And so part of what President Obama is trying to get Congress to do is more or less give him a blank check. That would be bad news, but actually there’s an interesting trans-partisan antipathy to fast track that could end up saving us all on TPP.
CS: It’s hard to picture these Republicans wanting to give that kind of authority to Barack Obama, of all people, who they think has too much power just being president.
LW: That is the hitch, because literally there are right now six Democratic votes in the House of Representatives in favor of the old fast track, which does not help the Republicans, given they’ve got a chunk of their members who either, because of what you said, don’t want to give Obama more power, or some of the strict constructionist constitutionalists think the delegation is just not constitutional; they don’t want to delegate that authority.
CS: For elite media, an idea that both the two dominant parties and corporate executives agree on is an idea that is beyond rational challenge. But on TPP, as on other issues, the masses of the public seem to feel differently. So just to be clear: fear of the Trans-Pacific Partnership is not craziness or ignorance, is it?
Lori Wallach: “The more they hear about TPP in particular, and the countries with which they as workers would have to be competing, the less they like the idea.
LW: What’s very interesting is when you talk about bipartisan consensus on trade, there is precisely what you said: elite consensus of Democratic and Republican elites, although, interestingly, a lot of the senior Democratic congressional leaders are against it. But President Obama, [House Speaker John] Boehner and [incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell, and Wall Street, corporate America, Chamber of Commerce and K Street lobbyists are for it.
But the polling actually shows that there is a majority of Americans—Democrats, independents, Republicans—who don’t want any more of an old-style trade agreement. The more they hear about TPP in particular, and the countries with which they as workers would have to be competing, the less they like the idea.
And so, interestingly, if we can force a public debate, as compared to a quiet, secretive one, or no debate, and we can make this fight about who gets to decide the future of the policies in our country—is it going to be Congress and the checks and balances in the Constitution, or is it going to be authority chucked away to whomever is president (because this would be eight years of this extraordinary authority?)—that’s a fight we can win.
CS: We’ve talked about how, even though they are called trade pacts, very little of these documents address actual trade. They involve handing over a lot of power to corporations, vis-à-vis the public. It sort of seems that if media would keep corporations at the center of the story, as constructors, as actors in making the TPP, rather than presenting them as one of several sectors that would be affected by whatever happens, it seems like that would help people understand the nature of this pact maybe a little more clearly. What do you think?
LW: I think that’s right, and frankly I almost needed CPR when the Washington Post [2/28/14] finally, six months ago, did an infographic in a story on the 600 official corporate trade advisers who have dictated these policies, with the 15 unions and two environmental groups mixed in.
I think also, for the mainstream press, the way into this story is basically all the different ways that aren’t about trade, that they’re already covering, that aren’t taboo for them to cover, that damage would be done to: a lot of coverage, for instance, on financial re-regulation, except part of TPP would roll back those improvements and would explicitly forbid the use of speculation taxes or capital controls to avoid financial crises. Or a lot of coverage on the tax incentives that promote the offshoring of jobs, except the TPP includes an entire provision chapter—lots of provisions—that actually incentivize offshoring by effectively lowering the risk premium, getting rid of the potential threats of costs for offshoring.
Or the mainstream media constantly covering food safety issues, except the TPP would roll back some of the big improvements of the Food Safety Modernization Act passed a couple of years ago, with respect to us having to take imported food that doesn’t meet our safety standards. Or there’s been a considerable amount of coverage about medicine prices, except in several different chapters, TPP provisions would basically give new monopolies to the pharmaceutical companies and let them jack up medicine prices and take away a lot of policy tools that not just the Obama administration, but governments in other countries, have used to try and contain healthcare costs.
And then there’s the sneaky aspects of the copyright provisions of TPP that would sneak through pieces of ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting [Trade Agreement], or SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, the stuff that undermines Internet freedom, that have to do with, for instance, Internet Service Provider liability for what you do as a user, when you’re not doing commercial large-scale copyright violations: I pay a dollar for a recipe and then I send it to you after you’ve had dinner at my house because you asked me for it, and that’s a violation. Am I going to get knocked off; are they allowed to spy on me for that?
