The Price of Free Trade

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

18 April 15

ALSO SEE: Worldwide Protests Planned Against TTIP, TPP

ALSO SEE: Sony Emails Show Industry Execs Pushing for TPP

enator Bernie Sanders, who may or may not be running for president, was on with Thom Hartmann for their usual Friday chat. Right at the moment, Sanders is standing atop the battlements against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the secretive intercontinental job-suck for which the skids are being greased in the Congress even as we speak. The most remarkable thing to me about this oncoming car-bomb to the economy is the fact that the Congress is being asked to give the president fast-track authority on a massive agreement that only members of Congress can read, but that none of them can discuss. Sanders told Hartmann that he could read the proposed agreement, but he had to go into a secret room to do so. This, he rightly argues, is a completely crazy way to make public policy.

The reason they put a gag rule on the delegates of the Constitutional Convention was because they didn't want the country to fall apart, and because they didn't want the convention to last 300 years and come to no real conclusion even by then. And even then, there was a strong strain of opposition to secret agreements deep in the American political soul. To name only one person who had no use for what came out of secret conventions, Mercy Otis Warren, one of my favorite American polemicists, went fairly well up the wall.

It has been observed by a zealous advocate for the new system, that most governments are the result of fraud or violence, and this with design to recommend its acceptance — but has not almost every step towards its fabrication been fraudulent in the extreme? Did not the prohibition strictly enjoined by the general Convention, that no member should make any communication to his Constituents, or to gentlemen of consideration and abilities in the other States, bear evident marks of fraudulent designs?

And that was the U.S. Constitution, not an agreement between international corporations about how to divvy up obsolete concepts like national sovereignity and a viable middle class. Sanders is as exercised about TPP as Mercy was over what those crafty bastards in Philadelphia had produced.

"It is incomprehensible to me that the leaders of major corporate interests who stand to gain enormous financial benefits from this agreement are actively involved in the writing of the TPP while, at the same time, the elected officials of this country, representing the American people, have little or no knowledge as to what is in it," Sanders said in a letter (pdf) sent Monday to U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman. "Members of Congress must have the opportunity to read what is in the TPP and closely analyze the potential impact this free trade agreement would have on the American people long before the Senate votes to give the President fast track trade promotion authority."

The president's insistence on using this procedure to commit the country to what recent history tells us will be illusory benefits and concrete consequences to the domestic economy is a real brown spot on the old apple. And his comments on fast-track are nothing but the magic jargon-spells that we've heard from a couple of generations of free-trade hustlers.

President Obama embraced the legislation immediately, proclaiming "it would level the playing field, give our workers a fair shot, and for the first time, include strong fully enforceable protections for workers' rights, the environment and a free and open Internet." "Today," he added, "we have the opportunity to open even more new markets to goods and services backed by three proud words: Made in America."

Except for the fact that every "concession" that has been made to congresscritters worried about this beast has been made to soften blows that its partisans insist aren't part of the deal.

To further sweeten the deal for Democrats, the package includes expanding trade adjustment assistance — aid to workers whose jobs are displaced by global trade — to service workers, not just manufacturing workers. Mr. Wyden also insisted on a four-year extension of a tax credit to help displaced workers purchase health insurance.

Mercy Otis Warren wouldn't have bought this, and neither do I.