Everybody’s going crazy over the TPP. It’s all over the news with Obama calling Elizabeth Warren wrong, and holding out against everyone who thinks that we need to move slowly or not at all.
Democrats are fighting the President over what’s in it and Mitch McConnell, the politician who abandoned his duty to work for America so he could fail in his attempts to keep Obama from being elected has now decided that he loves the Black Guy in the White House and is fighting to help Obama get the TPP passed.
So let’s talk about what the TPP can do for us, and what it can do to us.
The TPP is necessary, but probably not the TPP that is now on the table. Elizabeth Warren was right to make the noise that she did. Obama is right to want the agreement to pass because it is necessary for us to be involved in Asia in a significant way. Asia is the biggest market in the world now and it will continue to expand in the next century and if we leave that market to be dominated by China or to be left free to wildly engage in rogue trading, we will definitely be the big losers. There are, however, a lot of things that must be dealt with in order to make the treaty work for us, and it seems that many of them have not been dealt with, as yet.
Those against the treaty hold that no one knows what’s in it. This is completely false. All kinds of people know what’s in it. Don’ t forget this treaty was written mostly by corporate leaders and they have a huge stake in it. They all know what’s in it. So does any congressman. Not only can they get a copy of the treaty they can also get someone from the trade office to explain it to them when the words get past two syllables.
The one place where the President is absolutely right is in wanting congress to fast track it. What this means is that congress will not have any say in the treaty as it is being formed. It will, however, have the power to accept or reject the finished treaty and it will have plenty of time to study the final product as soon as it is complete. This power should be a strong influence on those negotiating the treaty because they all know what congress wants in it, and they won’t present anything to congress that they think won’t pass.
There are 535 members of congress, at least half of them dumb as a post, but all of them equipped with a mouth and an opinion. If they are allowed to have input in the treaty as it is being put together, there will be nothing but chaos. There are strong opinions on all aspects of the treaty. It is something that we must be involved in. On the other hand, this treaty like most trade treaties that invariably favor commerce at all costs, will have to be tightened down to protect the environment from the plunderers for profit and there must be some financial controls, that it is currently rumored, do not, as yet, exist.
This means that American labor must be protected, as much as possible. Trade treaties going all the way back to the early 19th century have hurt American labor because they have promoted corporate giant’s proclivity to set up shop in foreign countries with cheap labor that compete unfairly, with our own manufacturing and they have allowed foreign competitors to steal our ideas and make them cheaper.
Patent protection is the key to building a new economy. We are still the most inventive, the most entrepreneurial and the most creative nation in the world but we cannot allow other countries to poach our inventiveness, steal jobs from our workers and the creativity of our inventors by ignoring our patent and copyright processes and selling knockoffs on the cheap because they can make them, using virtual slave labor.
We must include language in the treaty that forces foreign manufacturing to treat their labor fairly in order for our labor and our goods to be able to compete fairly in the global marketplace. We have gone to war, ostensibly to protect the human rights of peoples around the world. This is a chance to protect those rights without a war and at the same time to protect our own work force.
We aren’t going to get back the jobs that have gone overseas, no matter what this treaty or anyone who promotes it says, but we can surely protect the new economy that we can build in this country from being plundered by low cost foreign wages that can only be paid in countries where workers are treated like slaves. This country is perfectly capable of creating a new work model that will suit our labor force and will enable that labor force to live the American dream but in order to do that we must be able to enforce things like patent and copyright laws that are currently being ignored in China and throughout the third world, or even more important, like currency controls that keep other countries from shorting their currency values so that they can constantly undercut American trade.
We must include language that has to do with environmental security. Corporations that are currently laying waste to Third World countries that are trying desperately to climb the economic ladder, will, in their quest for higher profits, ignore environmental problems that will cause extensive harm to the planet and which will subsequently allow them to compete unfairly with American businesses that must comply with environmental restrictions.
Most important, though, we must have language that deals with the problems of copyright and currency control or there is no use doing this treaty at all.
If we can get items into the agreement that deal with all of the above, it will be good for the corporations and for the people but getting that all done is a real long shot. Corporate greed will not go away simply because we want it to, and the treaty is certainly important enough that we do not want it to fall apart, but we must have the guts to hold out for what we need to protect our country.
If we don’t have protections against these practices in the TPP it will be useless, in fact it will be destructive to our economy and any trade gleaned by it will be wholly insufficient to make up for the loss of work by our labor force.
Bibi Netanyahu, famous leader of Israel’s fascist element stated recently that no treaty is better than a bad treaty. Of course the treaty he was talking about was already better than anything he could justly expect, but this treaty can be as important to us as the Iran Nuclear Treaty is to Israel, juts in a different area. This treaty is already broad enough and covers enough diverse areas that there has to be enough space for give and take that would eventually make it acceptable to all parties and to have enough teeth to protect all nations and their populations.