The following summary, of key overview framing tricks, and rebuttal truths, may assist us all to prepare for the oncoming flood of:
• details on the TPP's screwing of workers AND CONSUMERS in favor of globalizing capital, and
• rationalizations and distractions that are designed to filibuster serious thinking, while running out the clock, on the TPP's artificial deadline for Congress's up-or-down vote.
A good principle of defense (and attack) is to remember (these blockquotes contain my paraphrasing of relevant arguments):
Cherry-picked frames deployed in support of TPP are artificially narrow rhetorical tricks.
For example:
Trick #1. "US choices are constrained by a globalizing economy"
Truth: US and its donor-class are the biggest influence over the global economy. Pressure on the US from the global economy results from choices of US elites to encourage it and exploit it.
Trick #2. "Globalized supply chains will locate each link in the most efficient location"
Truth: Only if
"most efficient" mainly means
"lowest cost to supply-chain operator", and
"highest portion of value-added captured by supply-chain operator", both resulting from
"highest bargaining power of supply-chain operator against local workers and governments".
Trick #3. "Efficiency of globalized supply chains is a public good"
Truth: Except that this "good" is not shared with the "public" if every public demand for a share of this good can be rebuffed through the threat of the supply-chain operator relocating to a place where the public is less demanding.
Trick #4. "Opposition to TPP reflects "zero-sum" thinking about economic value, ignoring potential for "bigger pie" "
Truth: Promotion of TPP reflects rational (although immoral) thinking that political power is "zero-sum", mainly pie-cutting, and easily self-perpetuating, and is thus the most reliable way to protect monied players from the potential uncertainties of genuine economic competition.
Do you doubt the following?
Every country's internal dynamics are vulnerable to a feedback loop in which
(i) money buys power, while
(ii) power protects and reinforces concentration of money.
To globalize this feedback loop is to deepen it.
If not, then how can you believe that corporate interests, who have dominated the TPP's drafting process, had the goal of weakening that feedback loop in their home countries (to the extent that they still feel they have a home)?
The above should remind us all of the useful thought that:
"Once you realize how much they've been lying about,
you realize they've been lying about everything"
Link to Public Citizen's preliminary summary of:
Worse anti-public-interest provisions relative to past U.S. trade pacts
• The TPP Intellectual Property Chapter would roll back the “May 2007” reforms for access to medicines.
• The TPP Environment Chapter would roll back the “May 2007” reforms by eliminating most of the seven Multilateral Environmental Agreements that past pacts have enforced.
• The TPP Investment Chapter would expand the scope of policies that can be challenged and the basis for such challenges, including for the first time ever allowing investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) enforcement of World Trade Organization intellectual property terms and new challenges to financial regulations.
• With Japanese, Australian and other firms newly empowered to launch ISDS attacks against the United States, the TPP would double U.S. ISDS exposure with more than 9,200 additional subsidiaries operating here of corporations from TPP nations newly empowered to launch ISDS cases against the U.S. government. (About 9,500 U.S. subsidiaries have ISDS rights under ALL existing U.S. investor-state-enforced pacts.)
• The TPP E-Commerce chapter wouldundermine consumer privacy protections for sensitive personal health, financial and other data when it crosses borders by exposing such policies to challenge as a violation of the TPP limits on regulation of data flows.
• TPP “Sanitary and Phytosanitary” chapter terms would impose new limits on imported food safety relative to past pacts. This includes new challenges to U.S. border inspection systems that can be launched based on extremely subjective requirements that inspections must “limited to what is reasonable and necessary” as determine by a TPP tribunal. New language that replicates the industry demand for a so-called Rapid Response Mechanism that requires border inspectors to notify exporters for every food safety check that finds a problem and give the exporter the right to bring a challenge to that port inspection determinations – meaning new rights to bring a trade challenge to individual border inspection decisions (including, potentially, laboratory or other testing) that second-guesses U.S. inspectors and creates a chilling effect that would deter rigorous oversight of imported foods.