When global justice groups wanted to halt expansion of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1999, they organized massive demonstrations in Seattle, where the official ministerial conference was being held.
Tens of thousands of people filled the streets. Groups held rallies, marches, and teach-ins, conducted civil disobedience, and in many cases faced attacks by police. With delegates unable to even reach the convention hall, the opening ceremony was cancelled, and the talks eventually fell apart. The “Battle of Seattle” not only succeeded in derailing the Millennial Round of negotiations, it also turned opposition to corporate globalization into international headline news.
Fifteen years later, the “movement of movements” has another opportunity to strike a dramatic blow to neoliberalism — this time by stopping the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The TPP is a deal the United States is negotiating with 11 countries in the Asia-Pacific region (Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam) allegedly to boost “free trade.”
However, the pact goes far beyond traditional trade issues, to affect banking regulations, environmental protections, access to medicines, use of the internet, and much more. Most notably, the deal would undermine countries’ ability to make sovereign decisions and instead offer protections to transnational corporate investors. And full information about the TPP is not even available — the level of transparency is so low that all public access to the text has come from leaks.
The TPP is a corporate power grab clearly worthy of Seattle-caliber mobilization. But the fight against this reprehensible deal requires different types of tactics. And the place to start is by derailing “Fast Track,” the mechanism that would allow TPP approval to rush through the U.S. Congress with little debate and no amendments.
An End Run Around Popular Influence
Social movements’ success in Seattle has been enduring. Despite unfortunate recent “progress” in arcane areas such as trade facilitation, the WTO stalemate that took root in Seattle has on the whole been a lasting one, frustrating neoliberal expansion for a decade and a half.
In many ways, the TPP is an end-run around that peoples’ movement victory by corporations and their allies. Rather than continue facing the WTO’s ostensibly consensus-based decision-making process, transnational corporations are today using their proxy — the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative — to cherry-pick those countries most willing to play ball with their agenda. They’re pushing those governments to approve an omnibus package of corporate dream policies on energy, finance, intellectual property, agriculture, and more, which they’ve disguised as a trade deal. And since the TPP is a “docking agreement” — meaning that other countries can join over time — they can then pressure other nations, from China on down, to sign on once the rules have already been set.
In negotiating the TPP, U.S. president Barack Obama has not only faced the challenge of getting 11 countries into line with the proposal. He’s also had to overcome significant domestic opposition, including from members of his own party.
At a Business Roundtable meeting of CEOs in December, President Obama said, “Part of the argument I am making to Democrats is: ‘don’t fight the last war.’” He went on to say that conditions for the practices critics object to — like outsourcing production to countries with poor labor and environmental standards — already exist. In contrast, he said, the TPP will be “forcing some countries to boost their labor standards, boost their environmental standards, boost transparency, reduce corruption, increase intellectual property protection. And so all that is good for us.”
With these words, Obama implied that the TPP will differ from previous trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the DR-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA), and the WTO, which were negotiated under previous presidents and have had disastrous results for workers and the environment. But it just takes a look at leaked TPP texts packed with similar (and, in many instances, worse) provisions as those previous pacts — or a look at the record of President Obama’s own trade deals with Colombia and South Korea — to know that he’s blowing smoke.
What Past Experience Tells Us About Trade Agreements
Look, for example, at the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, which took effect in March 2012. President Obama claimed it would support 70,000 American jobs through increased exports. Instead, U.S. exports to South Korea are down under the pact, the bilateral trade deficit has skyrocketed, and, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the United States has already lost a net 60,000 jobs as a result.
And then there’s Colombia. The Colombia Free Trade Agreement was supposed to protect the rights of Colombian workers, who are routinely murdered if they dare advocate for better working conditions. But a recent Government Accountability Office report found that “threats of violence against unionists have been increasing,” and “of the 100 unionist murders that have occurred since 2011, Colombia’s Prosecutor General’s Office has obtained only one conviction.”
Will conditions be better for countries entering into the TPP? A recent Department of Labor report found that forced and child labor still infect export industries in a number of TPP countries, including apparel in Vietnam, agriculture in Mexico, and electronics in Malaysia. And despite Obama’s words to the contrary, the TPP would hardly correct that. A new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report finds that the labor provisions in recent free trade agreements, including those passed under Obama’s watch, have been inadequate for addressing labor rights abuses.