TPP: It's The Company's world. They just let you live in it.
by Tom Sullivan
Credit Mary Shelley with the "creation gone wrong" trope. Or perhaps Genesis. Yet, the evil mega-corporation is as much a staple of popular fiction as the radiation-spawned monstrosities and failed experiments we grew up with at matinees as kids. Omni Consumer Products (OCP) from Robocop, for example, Ridley Scott's Tyrell Corporation from Blade Runner, or the Weyland-Yutani Corporation ("The Company") from his Alien films. All fictional. But like those, it seems the real beasties are neither biological nor technological, but legal.
Enter TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The full text was released yesterday, but as a series of PDFs. The Washington Post has made the full agreement searchable. (Note: some English spellings are internationalized.) At Vox, Timothy Lee explains that it may take a month to examine and sort out its impact:
But the agreement is also a lot more than a trade deal. It has more than two dozen chapters that cover everything from tariffs to the handling of international investment disputes. The reason these deals have gotten so complex is that people realized that they were a good vehicle for creating binding international agreements.
Modern trade deals include a dispute settlement process that helps ensure countries keep the commitments they make under trade deals. If one country fails to keep its commitment, another country can file a complaint that's heard by an impartial tribunal. If the complaining country prevails, it can impose retaliatory tariffs on the loser.
Following on the heels of last week's New York Times three-part series on how arbitration agreements have essentially privatized the courts to the benefit of corporations and to the harm of consumers, one wonders how much more extra-judicial authority TPP may be handing our budding Weyland-Yutanis in shifting power from the people to the plutocrats. How much of the thousands of pages is fine print?
“The text that I’ve read so far includes annexes and exclusions up the wazoo,” said Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.), a member on the House Ways and Means committee. “You think you’ve seen it all? You have not. Exclusions to rules by each country. Bilateral deals with Japan, and more than 50 two-way side letters.”
Whom do you figure that complexity favors? Workers?
Cathy Feingold, director of international affairs with the AFL-CIO, said the structure of Cafta left little incentive for the Guatemalan government to monitor and improve labor standards. It allowed Guatemala to start reaping the rewards of the trade pact without first showing evidence it was complying with the deal’s labor standards.
Critics say TPP commits the same error. Without immediately demanding that countries comply with its labor provisions, it extends benefits to countries like Malaysia, where a recent report found nearly a third of all migrant workers in the nation’s booming electronics industry are working under forced labor conditions, and to Vietnam, which bans all unions that are independent of a top-down labor federation tied to the Communist Party dictatorship.
As the International Business Times graphically points out, citing past trade agreements, it is one thing for trade pacts to legalize unions. It another to protect them. Compliance with “labor provisions in most partner countries is generally not monitored or enforced systematically.”
Count me skeptical. "Trust us" counts for doodly squat.