I have always believed that with very few exceptions, the public’s business should be transacted in public. The very few exceptions are when doing so would result in damage to the public. For instance, if a public body is wanting to acquire land for a park, the owners could unreasonably jack up the price, thus hurting the public. Decisions combating terrorism need to be determined in secret, in order to thwart terrorists and maintain public safety. However, the negotiations of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement are being done in great secrecy.
That is no surprise. During the confirmation process, Michael From, President Obama’s nominee for the position United States Trade Representative, refused to commit to the standards of transparency set by the George W. Bush Administration. These hearings brought out that From had $90,000 stashed away in a Cayman Island Fund and that, after leaving the Treasury Department at the end of the Clinton Administration to become President and CEO of Citigroup Insurance, he was rewarded with $7.4 million from 2008-2009. At the end of the confirmation process, four Senators voted not to confirm: Carl Levin (D, MI), Joe Manchin (D, WV), Bernard Sanders (I, VT), and Elizabeth Warren (D, MA).
Why this obsession with secrecy, for what is supposed to be a trade deal?
Perhaps the answer is, because it is only 20% trade deal and 80% “other!” Thanks to Wiki-Leaks, we do know something. In a recent Op/Ed piece in the New York Times, January 30, 2015, Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Laureate in economics and Professor at Columbia University, warned that the TPP agreement could have a disastrous effect on our health care system. This is because they are negotiating intellectual property rights.
This isn’t just about illegal music downloads and pirated movies. Unfortunately, it is about big pharmaceutical companies, who want to block cheap generic drugs from being sold. Professor Stiglitz points out that, if they get their way, the health care cost to consumers and governments will really skyrocket. These companies are owned and controlled by the billionaire class, the wealthy 1%. It is another example of Robin Hood in reverse: “rob the poor, and give to the rich.” The poor [and] the middle class[es] can’t do this by trade treaty, but the 1% can, just as they have in the past.
Prof. Stiglitz notes that provisions in trade agreements are very difficult to repeal or change, unlike domestic laws. He points out that the “big pharma companies” claim they need the money for research, but–in fact–[they] spend more money on advertising than they do [on] research. Most of the new drugs discovered are the result of research funded by our Government through the National Institute of Health.
Other critics cite TPP as being another NAFTA and CAFTA. They have every reason to be leery. NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) is 20 years old. It was billed as a treaty to boost the economies of the U. S., Canada, and Mexico and lift people out of poverty. A noble goal. Tragically, it did the exact opposite. Subsistence corn farmers in Mexico could not compete with U. S. subsidized corn and were put out of business by the millions. They migrated to the U. S. Our fault, not theirs.
Twenty years after NAFTA, there is as much poverty in Mexico as before. Christopher Wilson and Geraldo Silva did a study for Mexico’s National Council for the Evaluation of Social Policy. The following is from their study. The poverty rate in Mexico for the year 1994 was 52.4% of the population. NAFTA was adopted in 1995. The latest poverty statistics are for 2012, 17 years after NAFTA, and they are 52.3% of the population. Because Mexico’s population has grown, there actually are more poor Mexicans than before NAFTA. NAFTA did not live up to its promise.
CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, was supposed to be an improvement over NAFTA. Supposedly, we had learned from our NAFTA mistakes and corrected them in the CAFTA agreement. I’ve read both agreements. CAFTA follows the NAFTA, and if there were any improvement, I couldn’t find it.
The AFL-CIO sent a delegation to Honduras–the “murder capital of the world”–because they believed that it was worse off than the other two CAFTA countries, El Salvador and Guatemala. Their report found that people there were worse off after the coup d’etat of June 2009, in which President Manuel Zelaya was deposed by the military. He had introduced some mild reforms to help reduce poverty. The coup leaders installed a puppet government and repressed any dissent.
The architecture of CAFTA remained intact. It required deregulation and investor protections. Part of the report, titled “Trade, Violence, and Migration: The Broken Promises to Honduran Workers,” reads as follows.
- Today, Honduras is the most unequal country in Latin America. Poverty among Hondurans rose approximately 4.5 percentage points from 2006 to 2013, from 60 to 64.5%.
- The percentage of those working full-time and receiving less than minimum wage also went up, from 29.6% in 2006 to 43.6% in 2012. Underemployment rose from 5% to 10.5%, and unemployment rose from 3 to 3.6% during that time.
- The delegation learned from workers that the current basic food basket (canasta basica) cost workers $482.04 (10,064.99 lempiras), but the minimum wage for workers in the Maquiladora [manufacturing] sector is only $257.69 (5,380.70 lempiras.)
Low minimum wages, unpaid overtime, and a failure to enforce labor laws have resulted in a model that has benefited multinational corporations and continued to fail workers and their families
Apparently CAFTA is no better than NAFTA. So what reason do we have to believe TPP will be an improvement? Perhaps we should fix existing trade agreements before ratifying any more of them.