When Corporations Rule the World

AFL-CIO says it will withhold contributions to congressional Democrats to pressure them to vote no on fast-track authority.

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LORI WALLACH, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch: Well, fast-tracking the TPP would make it easier to offshore our jobs and would put downward pressure, enormous downward pressure, on Americans’ wages, because it would throw American workers into competition with workers in Vietnam who are paid less than 60 cents an hour and have no labor rights to organize, to better their situation. Plus, the TPP would empower another 25,000 foreign corporations to use the investor state tribunals, the corporate tribunals, to attack our laws. And then there would be another 25,000 U.S. corporations in the other TPP countries who could use investor state to attack their environmental and health and labor and safety laws. And if all that weren’t enough, Big Pharma would get new monopoly patent rights that would jack up medicine prices, cutting off affordable access. And there’s rollback of financial regulations put in place after the global financial crisis. And there’s a ban on "Buy Local," "buy domestic" policies. And it would undermine the policy space that we have to deal with the climate crisis—energy policies are covered. Basically, almost any progressive policy or goal would be undermined, rolled back.

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AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain why President Obama is pushing TPP forward and TPA, the fast-track authority, which means, again, that you can’t amend this agreement, you can only vote up or down?

LORI WALLACH: Well, I want to—actually, I want to take one step back before guessing why, because it’s hard to imagine. If you go to our website, TradeWatch.org, we’ve literally done a side-by-side of Obama’s policy goals as a president and everything fast-tracking the TPP would do to basically undermine everything that he has fought for, from lower medicine prices to re-regulating Wall Street, to more energy-efficient climate crisis-combating policies, to allegedly this middle-class economics agenda. The TPP and fast track are the antithesis.

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And it’s the government employee unions, it’s the service sector unions—all the unions that are affected by what happens when all of our good jobs are taken away and the tax base crashes. And you’ve got groups that have never been involved in a trade fight before, all the Internet freedom groups who realize the agreement would undermine the basic rights to an accessible, free Internet. There are issues about net neutrality that could be rolled back. It’s just overarchingly a delivery mechanism for a huge, broad corporate agenda.

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But one other thing about fast track folks need to know, which is—and this gets to the weird politics—you’ve got the president basically doing the bidding of all the big corporations and commercial interests that spent millions of dollars to make sure he wasn’t elected the first time and to try and not elect him the second time.

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Buy America and Buy American, two laws, the first one from 1934, requires you give a preference to a domestic company, so that when we’re spending our tax dollars, instead of offshoring our tax dollars, we’re reinvesting them in our communities to create jobs and also, by the way, to create innovation. So, like the CAFE standards, that are now normal, the fuel efficiency standards for cars, that was first a procurement condition; so the Renewable Portfolio Standards, the renewable energy standards that are now part of government procurement—that’s how you create a market using the government funds for a behavior you want the private sector to shift to.

Great policy tool, great job creator, super—except, under TPP, we’d have to give a waiver to that preference. Any company in any TPP country, so even ones that aren’t from those countries—Chinese state-owned enterprise firms in Vietnam—would have to be treated the same as a U.S. company and get all of those government contracts. [...] [And not just the US government. F]or instance, a lot of school districts have done rules that say, "Let’s buy local food from local farmers. Let’s not have a big multinational company ship our vegetables a thousand miles away when we have the ability from right here to produce and procure." Those would also be violations.

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Folks, if you have not called your representative and both of your senators and gotten them to commit to you in writing that they oppose fast track, if and when it comes for a vote, which could be as soon as the third week of April, if you have not done that, you must do that. Please do that. Write them snail mail, email, call. The switchboard at the Capitol can connect you. If you’re not sure who your representative is, all you need is your ZIP code. The Capitol switchboard—you should write this down and stick it on a yellow sticky on your fridge for all purposes—202-225-3121, 202-225-3121.

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