Student thoughts: Trans-Pacific Partnership greatest modern threat to Democracy

Juan Salamanca / Contributing writer

opinion@fiusm.com



The unacknowledged moral crisis of the American left has reached a tipping point.
While the wedding bells chimed and the streets filled with howls of protest over antiquated battle flags, the President of the United States was hard at work.

His signature project of the last term, the Affordable Care Act, left him with  battle scars from fighting public opinion and legislative insolence. This time was different; the white hot spotlight on the stage of the presidency had finally been focused on other matters. He could work in the shadows this time, his well-publicized preference.

This project, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the massive trade deal where of its 29 draft chapters, only five deal with trade, is shrouded in the vast and oily shadows of Federal secrecy. The sweeping treaty which affects 40% of global trade and outrageously huge swaths of domestic policies of the member nations – matters such as pharmaceutical regulations, environmental policy, financial and investment regulations and patent law – is hidden from the eyes of the public except for the Senate, who are voting on the bill.

The administration claims that the transparency of the treaty is sufficient, and its supporters argue that senators who wish to scrutinize the treaty can go read it. However, even if a US senator who desires to read it got into the soundproof and secure room below the capital where the document resides, they could only bring in aides with the appropriate security clearance (leaving no possibility of bringing in lawyers or industry experts to help interpret) and they could not take notes and bring them back to their offices for further study. In the best of circumstances, any senator voting on the bill, barring those with prior intimate knowledge of the legislation, would be basing their decision entirely on their (flawed, human) recollection of a document they do not fully understand.

The liberal who falls back to the tried-and-true “Republican obstructionist” defense for the President finds themselves as strange bedfellows with the likes of Sen. McConnell (R-KY) and most congressional Republicans. Together, with President Hope-and-Change and corporate America, they stand against unions, environmental groups and the progressive wing of the Democratic party on TPP.

You might notice that throughout this article, there is little discussion on what it is the TPP actually does. In that lies the rub of the issue; neither you nor your senator know what’s in it, but General Electric, PHRMA, Cargill, Wal-Mart and more have privileged access to its contents on “advisory” terms. The 500 corporate representatives “advising” the government have exclusive access to the documents and can even request one-on-one time with negotiators. It’s not quite a secret cabal of  multinational corporations in total command of the government, but honestly, it’s pretty close.

What we do know about the Trans-Pacific Partnership is terrifying. It would forbid the government from banning toxic financial products, placing capital controls, taxing capital gains, and having Glass-Steagall-like firewalls (sound familiar to anyone alive in 2008?), and all member nations would have to comply. The deregulated swashbuckling model of casino capitalism the world put on a moratorium after it nearly destroyed the global economy during the financial crisis would be revived by the stroke of the President’s pen.

The Investor-State Dispute Settlement section expands upon the “right” given to foreign firms to appeal to a secretive and extrajudicial tribunal of highly-paid corporate lawyers for damages whenever a government passes a law that hurts profit, such as environmental protections or laws that discourage tobacco consumption, for compensation. ISDS practices, as it is now, has been forcing governments like Germany to pay billions of dollars out in damages. TPP expands ISDS tribunal authority to include not just capital committed by a given firm in a foreign nation, but the “expectation of gain or profit.” In other words, money that hasn’t even been made yet.

A corporate lawyer sitting on a TPP ISDS tribunal will be able to decide the damages for whatever hapless government does something to hurt corporate profits, like implementing single-payer health care. The jurisprudence of the post-TPP world is one where capitalization is elevated to the sanctity of the Bill of Rights, and that if a government ever attempts to -god forbid – improve the public welfare of its citizenry, that government must materially compensate the capitalist for their immaterial expectation and calculation of profit.

Despite the bordering-on-biblical implications of this bill, you will not see huge student movements protesting it. You won’t see a hashtag about it trending on Twitter or Facebook. BuzzFeed won’t make a listicle about it. No major TV network, even the liberal ones, would ever run an investigative special on it. For many people reading this article, it will be their first exposure to TPP.

The reason for this is the dirty little secret of American liberalism in the 21st century: the movement has been co-opted by “centrists,” a polite way of saying right-wing reactionaries. Beginning with the “New Democrats” of the Clinton administration, these liberals advocated a market-oriented approach to social policy with a neoliberal foreign policy made up of a combination of “humanitarian” intervention, free-trade advocacy and the active spread of liberal democracy. As liberal intellectuals argued that the Western-style liberal democracy was the last form of human government, free-market fundamentalism became fashionable. The fall of the Soviet Union proved that the current order is natural, inevitable and superior.

As those ideas proliferated through mass culture, the ethic of the Democratic program of government intervention in the economy shifted from combating market injustice and failure to perpetual expansion of the markets in the form of free-trade agreements, quantitative easing and the backhanded imposition of austerity through “welfare reform.” The New Democrat ideology turned social justice into a brand, a commodity to be sold on markets, advocating the synthesis of the cash nexus, multiculturalism and feminism. Thus, in a quest to correct the injustices of the system without radically reforming it, it became an authoritarian witch hunt; instead of addressing the problems inherent to the system, it simply repressed its symbolism. Rather than forcing it to engage in honest introspection about whiteness, the Charleston shooting sparked a media circus about the confederate flag in the US. The liberal movement is ready to coronate Hillary Clinton with the presidency, imposing her election as the primary project of feminism, while ignoring that her past support for warfare, management of an arms dealing scheme with repressive and violent regimes, push for and ultimate management of the murderous humanitarian intervention in Libya that has escalated the situation to a three-way civil war and rampant advocacy of free-trade makes her the candidate of the American military-industrial complex; a dragon of the American empire.

To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, the preservation of liberty requires constant vigilance, and for too long the most capable guardians of freedom in America have unwittingly ceded its politics to the reactionary right-wing. Acceptance of this faustian bargain with neoliberalism, the endgame of Obama’s TPP project, is the irreversible path of our collective suicide. Our ecosystems will collapse all around us as industries destroy the environment with impunity. We will be helpless to stop it because corporations will extort concessions out of our governments justified by its selfish, cultish worship of capitalization and endless growth. The most remotely attentive observer would realize we are effectively codifying the excesses of capitalism as the law of the land.

The central question of this summer’s “Mad Max: Fury Road” surrounding its apocalyptic wasteland was “Who killed the world?” Unless we take action, we will know the answer all too soon.


 

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