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Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

No fast track

Trans-Pacific Partnership puts corporations over people

Posted

Americans all understand the value of trade. But we agree with Eighth District Congressman Rick Nolan and his concern that the new Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, is a bad deal for America and the millions of its workers who have lost jobs over previous deals, such as NAFTA.

Nolan has joined a broad coalition of members of Congress from both parties who are seeking to block President Obama’s request for so-called fast track authority, which would force the Congress to accept the trade pact as its written, without any amendments. Congress granted similar authority to President Bill Clinton in the 1990s as he negotiated NAFTA, and the U.S. has suffered the economic effects ever since. Congress should not repeat its earlier mistake.

What’s worse, for all the talk of trade, this agreement mostly isn’t about trade at all. The U.S. already has very low import and export tariffs with many of the eleven other countries that are part of this pact. While much remains unknown about the specifics of the TPP, because it is being written in secret by government trade representatives and corporate lawyers, Wikileaks has obtained and published some chapters, and they suggest that the implications of the deal would be far-reaching— and not necessarily beneficial to consumers. And remember, that’s the usual justification for trade, that it will bring us lower prices for goods.

Yet the TPP could well do the opposite, and that’s why many corporate interests are pushing hard for the deal. According to news reports, most of the pact deals with protecting intellectual property— things like patents, computer software, music, movies, and books, as well as medicines and genetically-modified food products. By extending the time period for patents, drug manufacturers, for example, will be able to keep generic competition from driving down the price of medicines for many more years. That may be good for their investors, but for millions of Americans and others who need these medications, this deal would almost certainly mean higher prices.

The TPP would also prevent member countries from enforcing many local laws and ordinances that favor local purchasing, or that try to accomplish other worthy public goals, such as environmental protection. While many in Congress, including Rep. Nolan, have backed “Buy American” proposals, such provisions could be challenged by any of the member countries, and almost certainly would be in many instances.

The TPP, like the World Trade Organization, NAFTA, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade before it, is a continuation of the longstanding erosion of the ability of citizens to govern their own lives. It undermines the concept of local control, and even national sovereignty, solely to further the interests of multinational corporations and their investors.

Economic theory and history have both demonstrated how these so-called “trade” agreements undermine the rights of workers, environmental protections, and how they have contributed significantly to the increasing concentration of wealth, both in the U.S. and worldwide. Those aren’t trends most Americans would like to further.

We don’t need the Trans-Pacific Partnership and we certainly don’t need fast-track authority for President Obama. It’s time for such international agreements to begin the work of bettering life for average people, not corporations.