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fast track
The Corporate-Friendly Trade Deals Threatening Ordinary People in 2016
"If we continue this work and build our movement we will build a new model of trade that puts the interests of communities and the environment before the interests of multinational corporations," Solomon wrote this month.
"Our short-term work is to stop harmful trade agreements," she said. "Our long-term work is to continue to build our movement so strong and fierce that it becomes unthinkable for governments to allow trade rules to undermine environmental and public interest policies because the backlash would be too severe."
Here are the deals you need to know to be part of the fight in the coming year:
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) -- U.S. and 11 Pacific Rim countries
It was a "great day for corporate America" when the U.S. Senate passed Fast Track, or Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), in June, effectively surrendering legislators' ability to fully debate or even amend trade agreements like the TPP that have been negotiated entirely in secret. And when the text of the deal was finally released this fall, it confirmed the worst fears of environmentalists, public health advocates, and digital rights activists: the TPP, they said, was "worse than anything we could've imagined."
Thanks to Fast Track, President Barack Obama will be able to unilaterally sign the TPP for the U.S. after February 4, 2016. But it's not a done deal yet.
As Electronic Frontier Foundation's Maira Sutton explained earlier this month:
Both congressional houses must ratify the agreement in the form of approving "implementing legislation" that the White House will submit to lawmakers. This submission will happen after the President's signature, likely sometime in April or May. Once that happens, the House has 60 days from the bill's introduction to hold a vote on it and the Senate gets another 30 days, so 90 days in total, to approve or reject it. Since this second timeline only begins when the White House decides that they're ready for it, it all rests on whether the executive branch believes that it has the votes to get it through both houses. That's why it's critical that we call on our lawmakers to come out against this agreement: because that's how we can stop it.
"If we want to ensure that laws don't just uphold powerful private interests, but are designed and implemented with the public's best interests in mind," Sutton wrote, "then we must stop the TPP--for the sake of the Internet, our rights, and our future."
And the 2016 elections could prove helpful to those who oppose the corporate-friendly pact. The Japan Timesreported Thursday that the pact "looks increasingly unlikely to be implemented before U.S. President Barack Obama's tenure ends due to opposition among leading presidential candidates and some industries."
TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) -- U.S. and European Union
October saw hundreds of thousands of Europeans pour into the streets of Brussels to voice their opposition to the TTIP, which would cover more than 40 percent of global GDP. And push back against the so-called trade deal, which would have negative implications for everything from human rights and global climate goals to democracy and food safety, goes much deeper than that. As of October, more than three million people had signed a petition demanding an end to the TTIP negotiations--showing, as Global Justice Now director Nick Dearden said, "that the EU does not have the public mandate to continue this deal."
Indeed, there appears to be brewing discontent across the continent, with the president of the German Bundestag, or parliament, in late-October threatening to vote against the TTIP due to its lack of transparency and democratic legitimacy. That statement came on the heels of remarks made by a French trade minister in September, who said "France is considering all options including an outright termination of negotiations" due to TTIP talks appearing to favor American interests.
As American Prospect co-founder and editor Robert Kuttner posited in an op-ed earlier this year, both the TTIP and TPP could be "on the verge of collapse from their own contradictory goals and incoherent logic."
Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) -- 32 countries in Europe; 7 in Asia; 5 in North America (including U.S.); 3 in South America; 2 in Oceania; and 1 in Africa
TISA may be the least well-known of the so-called Big Three "strategic neoliberal trade deals being advanced by the Obama administration," as WikiLeaks puts it--but its dangers loom just as large.
Leaks in 2015 exposed how the pact "favors privatization over public services, limits governmental action on issues ranging from safety to the environment using trade as a smokescreen to limit citizen rights," Larry Cohen, president of Communications Workers of America, said in June. Our World is Not For Sale, a group that has been working against TISA since 2013, described the deal in July as "a developed countries' corporate wish lists for services which seeks to bypass resistance from the global South to this agenda inside the WTO, and to secure an agreement on services without confronting the continued inequities on agriculture, intellectual property, cotton subsidies, and many other issues."
In 2016, we can only hope that people power will pressure more countries to follow the lead of Uruguay, which in September decided to end its involvement in TISA negotiations. In doing so, Friends of the Earth activists Viviana Barreto and Sam Cossar-Gilbert wrote at Common Dreams, "Uruguay has created a blueprint of how to beat these corporate-driven agreements. A strong coalition of trade unions, environmentalists and farmers working together on an effective public campaign were able to take on the interests of the world's biggest companies and win."
Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) -- Canada and Europe
"What's exciting about CETA," Council of Canadians trade campaigner Sujata Dey wrote earlier this month, "is that Europeans actually have the power to defeat it."
As Common Dreams reported in October, the Canada-EU deal would create "a parallel legal system for corporations" that could make "regulations in sensitive public service sectors such as education, water, health, social welfare, and pensions prone to all kinds of investor attacks."
"What is at stake in trade agreements such as TTIP and CETA is our right to vital services, and more, it is about our ability to steer services of all kinds to the benefit of society at large," the Brussels-based Corporate Europe Observatory declared at the time. "If left to their own course, trade negotiations will eventually make it impossible to implement decisions for the common good."
According to Council of Canadians, it is expected that CETA will go before the European Parliament for ratification votes either in late 2016 or early 2017. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has already instructed trade minister Chrystia Freeland "to implement" CETA.
We Threw a Wrench in the White House's TPP Fast Track Plan
By the time the debate on Fast Track (officially called the Trade Promotion Authority) came to a head this past Summer, we had already been organizing to oppose it for months. We knew that if we wanted to stop the TPP, killing the Fast Track bill was our best chance to prevent the undemocratic process from worsening.
When TPP's supporters in Congress began to roll out the Fast Track bill, they weren't expecting it to be as controversial as it was. We sent hundreds of thousands of calls, emails, and petition signatures against the bill. We met with lawmakers and carried with us the letters of opposition from businesses and other interest groups against the TPP to clarify that a vote for Fast Track would essentially be a vote supporting a toxic deal for Internet freedom and user rights.
This made it difficult for the White House to get the support it needed to pass the bill, putting TPP itself at a standstill. Since the TPP wouldn't have been able to pass in the U.S. without Fast Track, the countries weren't willing to put their chips on the table until they knew how the trade bill would shake out in the United States. Additionally, TPP's delay meant the spotlight would be put on ratification of the deal during the U.S. presidential election. It would raise significant questions about its support under Canada's new government. This shifting political dynamic across the TPP countries was exactly what the U.S. Trade Representative wanted to avoid by passing Fast Track in early 2015. Of course, Fast Track ultimately did pass in Congress after some wild congressional maneuvers, but we had already damaged the White House's precious timeline.
By bringing the public's attention to the failures of transparency and oversight with the Fast Track process, we were also able to help bring about some minor procedural improvements. Most notably, it stipulated some timelines for how and when the text would be released: for example, it had to be released online in full within 30 days of the President announcing his intent to sign the deal. It would have been better if the bill hadn't passed at all, but these mandates are useful in constraining how the U.S. Trade Representative rolls forward with TPP's passage, and that gives us an advantage in how we strategize our fight to stop it.
So, with the elections looming in the U.S. and Canada, trade negotiators were now under pressure to conclude the deal. And they ultimately managed to finish it on October 5. A month later, when they released the final official text, we, at long last, were able to dig into the details of the TPP and confirm that it carried Hollywood's wish list of restrictive copyright rules, including a few other rotten bad digital policy provisions that we had never been able to see before. We've analyzed the TPP to explain in concrete terms how it would impact all kinds of people's digital rights, from students, journalists, and free software users, and even how it will affect our digital security.
We are still in the midst of this fight to stop the TPP. President Obama and the other leaders of TPP countries are likely to meet in February to sign the completed deal. That's why EFF joined dozens of other groups to protest the deal in the streets of Washington D.C. But what we'll really need to do is to take advantage of these shifting political landscapes and drive a wedge into the deal's ratification in all the TPP countries. Our strategy is to focus on stopping this deal in the U.S. because that will effectively also defeat it in the 11 other countries--that's also where we have our best shot to kill this thing for good.
If you're in the United States, urge your lawmakers to call a hearing on the contents of the TPP that will impact your digital rights, and, more importantly, to vote this deal down when it comes to them for ratification:
Tell Congress to vote no on the TPP.
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