Obama and the TPP

Throughout the course of the presidential primary season, opposition to the Transpacific Partnership (TPP) free-trade agreement has been building as more and more voters realize the scope and impact of this landmark accord.

Put very simply the TPP is a global agreement to remove tariffs on goods imported and exported from the country’s that participate in it. It will allow multinational companies to move their factories to Third World countries in order to pay next to nothing for wages, ignore environmental side-effects in production, and then export their lower-standard (and possibly harmful) products back to the countries they abandoned without penalty.

The only people that benefit from this agreement are companies run in Third World nations. That’s why countries like Mexico, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei want to participate in the TPP with us—they get everything while the U.S. gets nothing!

Described as “NAFTA on steroids” by some political analysts, the TPP has been relentlessly pushed by President Obama, as well other politicians such as GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan, ever since it was negotiated by ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who called it “the gold standard in free-trade agreements” in 2012.

Along with Obamacare, the president appears to see the agreement as one of his potential “legacy” achievements in office that he’ll be able to point to after he leaves. Whether Obama stands to receive undisclosed “benefits” for supporting the pact has not been discussed.

Like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) before it, which was signed into law by former President Bill Clinton, the TPP is less an agreement than it is an end-run around regulatory bodies by corporations seeking to circumvent lawful processes designed to rein in their international operations.

The TPP encourages a “race to the bottom” by allowing countries to compete for the lowest possible labor costs and quality standards while forcing nations who previously did not tolerate such standards to accept them in the name of “opening up their markets to greater trade” and giving their workforces access to “greater export markets” in which to sell their goods.

In the meantime, jobs — especially production-intensive and manufacturing jobs in developed nations where labor costs are higher— are lost as companies seek a new “lowest bottom,” closing their plants and laying off workers left and right. Wages fall and product quality drops while a handful of company bosses and their political cronies get rich.

The TPP gives multinational firms the right to actually sue governments in corporate tribunals if laws passed by their Democratic legislatures negatively affect companies’ profits. Who ends up paying for punitive damages, despite the fact that judgments cannot be delivered in courts of law? Tax-paying citizens.

Many people say that Hillary Clinton actually had her hands in drafting the TPP personally while the agreement was being formulated by countries in planning sessions between 2010 and 2013. Certainly, as Secretary of State, she was the government’s “owner” of the TPP and helped negotiate it, according to top Obama advisors David Axelrod and Susan Rice.

Clinton also has been a tireless supporter of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the upcoming American-European version of the TPP that the Obama administration would also like to see passed as soon as legislative approval for the TPP is complete.

Other free-trade agreements drafted concurrently with the TPP include the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), both of which the Obama administration would additionally like to see progressed if the TPP is passed as Obama is hoping for while his last term in office rapidly winds to an end.

As a canny politician, Obama knows that despite significant and growing opposition to the TPP, there’s a chance to ram it through the “lame-duck” session of Congress that takes place after the November elections. This is traditionally a window of opportunity for unpopular politicians to enact whatever bills they want.

These lame-duck Congress members have no fear of retribution from their constituents because they are on their way out of Congress. They either retired or lost their re-election bids so what else do they have to lose? Many are also seeking lobbying jobs helping the very corporations whose agendas they’re in a position to hinder or advance as members of Congress.

Obama certainly has not backed down on the TPP despite growing rancor about it amongst the nation’s voters and political commentators. It’s now widely recognized that contrary to Bill and Hillary Clinton’s promises in the wake of NAFTA’s passage, that legislation cost the U.S. one-third of the country’s manufacturing jobs since the early 1990s, and those numbers haven’t stopped going in the same negative direction since then.

Despite enormous pressure exerted by Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders for his party to include opposition to the TPP in its political platform at the Democratic national convention in July, the party refused to do so.

This led many people to speculate that despite Hillary Clinton’s newfound public opposition to the TPP (she flip-flopped on it in 2015), she may not hinder its passage if she wins the presidency — if things even get to that point. That’s because currently, if Obama gets his way, the TPP could become law before Hillary even enters office.

In fact, that’s the way things are looking at the moment — that Hillary and Obama are playing “good cop, bad cop” with the TPP. So while Hillary is talking the talk about how it will cost America jobs and how she will do everything in her power to “stop” the agreement, Obama is doing the dirty work of lining up lame-duck Senators and other Congress members to pass it in a late November lame-duck session before the clock runs out on the 114th Congress.

Once the TPP is passed, it will be nearly impossible to undo due to draconian terms and provisions the legislation has within it. Obama already greased the wheels for the TPP with the passage of the fast-track Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) bill in 2015, which gives Congress just 90 days to vote yes or no on the TPP, with none of the legislative wheeling and dealing or amendments to the agreement allowed once minimally sanctioned debate has started on its passage.

This means that traditional means of adding “poison pill” riders or caveats to the agreement, which normally would slow down or prevent approval, will not be permitted. The TPA even lowers the threshold for approving the TPP in the Senate from a 67-vote majority (normal for all treaty ratifications) to a razor-thin 51 votes.

To be sure, before the election, Hillary Clinton will ceaselessly repeat her opposition to the TPP in speeches and to the media. But her talk doesn’t matter if the agreement is passed before she enters office.

Even if it isn’t, it’s all too easy to see a scenario in which the former crafter of the agreement “compromises” on its passage by “working with Congress” to eliminate one or two superfluous provisions while upholding the rest.

Then, after it passes, due to the difficulty or impossibility of repealing the agreement, she can shrug her shoulders and say “Well, I tried [to blunt its effects]…” in efforts to placate voters. If that doesn’t work, she could always attempt to distract the country with a new war or counterterrorism activities.

On a recent broadcast of CNN, Obama-friendly interviewer Fareed Zakaria asked the president if he thought the chances of the TPP’s passage had been dimmed. “I don’t think that’s correct,” the president declared.

“The politics of trade have always been complicated… It was said that we couldn’t get the authority to even get a trade deal done and we got it done. And I remain confident that we can get TPP passed.”

For the Clinton campaign’s part, a spokesman did not respond to a question about whether the candidate would call on Democratic members of Congress to fight lame-duck passage of the deal. In a recent speech at the Cato Institute, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman stated he was feeling “very confident” the votes to pass the TPP in a lame-duck Congressional session were there.

Given all this, it’s clear that the clock is ticking, and it’s high time that voters (and GOP candidate Donald Trump) ratchet up the pressure on Clinton and Congress to fight the TPP using every means at their disposal.


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