Get Ready Now for the Fast-Track Fight

[marmar]

Get Ready Now for the Fast-Track Fight

Wednesday, 24 December 2014 11:18
By Dave Johnson, Campaign for America's Future | Op-Ed


As soon as the new Congress is sworn in next year, the fight over Fast Track will begin. Start preparing now.

David Cay Johnston, explains in “Full Speed Ahead On Secretive Trade Deal”: (Note the ‘t’ in his last name. I am David C JohnSON.)

Early next year, after the 114th Congress begins meeting, a new Washington coalition will move quickly to approve the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a 12-nation trade agreement that will destroy American jobs, restrict individual liberty and burden American taxpayers. Oh, and it will do so without any real debate.

… The agreement would even let foreign companies seek damages if U.S. or state rules threaten their profits. Plaintiff companies would not have to sustain damages to collect damages from American taxpayers. They would only need to show a threat to their profits, leaks from the trade talks have revealed. Under previous trade deals, American taxpayers already have paid $3 billion in damages, with $14 billion in claims still in litigation.

Johnston explains that this will be pushed using Fast Track:

Fast track = little debate

Don’t expect a vigorous congressional debate exploring the agreement and its implications, especially for workers, before it becomes the law of the land.

Obama wants Congress to fast-track the agreement, which would mean perfunctory congressional hearings followed by an up-or-down vote within 90 days, no amendments allowed. That congressional Republicans favor fast-tracking has an “Alice in Wonderland” quality, given GOP attacks on his supposed dictatorial use of executive orders. (He has issued far fewer executive orders per year than any other president in the last century.)

Secrecy and fast track are not how democracy is supposed to work. They are also a glaring contradiction of candidate Obama’s transparency promises in 2008.

.......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/28195-get-ready-now-for-the-fast-track-fight

[global1]

1. Has President Obama Ever Explained His Support For TPP?....

I can't believe that he'd sell us down the river. I got to think he has a good reason to support this and that this country would benefit in some way from it's passage.

Has he ever spoken at length on this?

[pampango]

3. Just that he thinks trade rules that include labor rights and environmental standards is a better

way to improve US competitiveness and help workers and the environment.

Likely components of the administration's economic policy towards China

The first will likely be more complaints about Chinese subsidies and trade practices filed with the WTO, given the president’s campaign promises and his record during his first term. Washington has been relatively successful with such cases in the past, and pursuing multilateral dispute settlements has the added advantage of avoiding a direct bilateral confrontation with China.

The second will be the pursuit of trade agreements that notably do not include China. The most important of these is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade agreement among a growing list of nations bordering the Pacific. It is the Obama administration’s avowed aim to construct a TPP with standards so high — especially rules regarding labor rights, environmental protection and behavior by state-owned enterprises — that China could never join without transforming its economic system. This stance in part reflects the fact that two-thirds (67%) of the U.S. public believe China practices unfair trade, according to a 2012 survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

The likely 2013 launch of a U.S.-European Union trade negotiation — effectively a Trans-Atlantic Partnership, a bookend for the TPP — primarily reflects majority (58%) sentiment in the United States that increased trade with Europe would be a good thing for the United States. But it can also be seen as an attempt to establish U.S.-European, rather than Chinese, technical and regulatory standards as global business norms.

http://www.pewglobal.org/2012/12/10/u-s-china-economic-relations-in-the-wake-of-the-u-s-election/

He seems to think that the countries in the WTO (practically everyone) has been unwilling or unable to incorporate enforceable human/labor rights and environmental standards into trade rules so that creating trade agreements that go beyond WTO rules is the way to go.

[Populist_Prole]

2. Excellent post. Thanks

The whole concept of "fast track" is so insidiously awful I can't see how it can exist in a democracy.

[msongs]

4. the entire TPP should be posted on the internet 1 month in advance of any vote but

our transparency loving president and his crowd will probably not do this

[countryjake]

5. K&R!

[nationalize the fed]

6. ^

President Obama, Wall Street Financiers, Corporate CEOs And Members Of Congress Meet Together To Plan Strategy To Sell And Pass Free-Trade Agreements

Richard A. McCormack December 17, 2014

The country's top executives from Wall Street and corporate America are working directly with President Obama and members of his cabinet and appointees on passing a free-trade agenda that is unpopular among the president's natural constituents of democrats, labor unions, environmental and consumer groups and the American public as a whole.

Obama, his staff and members of Congress met directly with CEOs of major multinational corporations in Washington, D.C., on December 11 to discuss the "ground game" -- as his aides described it -- needed to persuade Americans on the benefits of free trade and to lobby Congress on passage of Trade Promotion Authority [TPA] and the Trans-Pacific Partnership [TPP] next year...

...Obama gave up on representing the interests of American workers early on, Scott argues, when University of Chicago economist and 2008 Obama campaign advisor Austan Goolsbee was "secretly" telling the Canadian embassy that Obama's statement about renegotiating NAFTA was meant to dupe working-class voters in the Midwestern states to vote for him. After being elected, Obama named Robert Rubin of Citigroup and architect of President Clinton's trade policy in the 1990s as head of his team of economic advisors. Joining Rubin was Jason Furman, now Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors and another former Clintonite. Furman had just written a paper about how Walmart's import model based on outsourcing production was beneficial to lower-class Americans, saving them thousands of dollars a year in cheap goods...

...When looking at the overall trade numbers, Scott notes that imports of goods to the United States were $2.3 trillion in 2013, and exports were $1.6 trillion. This massive and persistent imbalance has led to the direct loss of millions of American jobs, "but the beneficiaries of those imports make a lot of money and they speak loud with large wallets and they have a lot of influence in Washington," said Scott. "Obama has sold out to the highest bidder to keep his party in power and that means cow-towing to Wall Street because that is where all of the power is in this country."..

http://www.manufacturingnews.com/news/2014/President-And-CEOs-Meet%20To-Pass-TPA-And-TPP-1217141.html

"The Ground Game" LOL

Soon, "Candidates" will begin the process of lying to the dumbed down, barely aware "citizens" for 2 years. It's painful to watch. But if people don't do anything about it maybe they deserve what they get. The latest giveaway RE: Derivatives should be a clue.

TPP is a DONE DEAL. Get used to it.

And what of a nation that trades sovereignty for cheap labor? Does anyone think this will go over well with future generations?