A movement of movements is re-uniting across the globe to say “ENOUGH!” to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—an international proposal being pushed by the Obama administration at the behest of big corporations that would spread NAFTA-style trade and investment rules throughout the Pacific Rim.
“It’s impossible to overstate how devastating NAFTA has been to working people and family farmers over the past twenty years,” said Manuel Perez Rocha, of the Mexican Action Network on Free Trade and associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. “Leaked documents suggest the TPP would actually go beyond NAFTA in the power it hands to transnational corporations. Thankfully, a transnational movement is rising to stop it.”
The TPP is currently under negotiation between the United States, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam, but it is also being specifically written as a “docking agreement,” meaning that other countries will be pressured to “dock on” or join over time. A free trade agreement with the eleven countries currently at the table would be the largest free trade agreement in U.S. history, but it is explicitly discussed as a first step towards an even larger free trade area of the Asia Pacific.
After having completed 15 major rounds of negotiations over a period of years, negotiators from each country still refuse to tell the public what they’ve been proposing in our names. Meanwhile, U.S. negotiators have granted approximately 600 corporate lobbyists special “cleared advisor” status that grants them access to the texts, including lobbyists from companies like Walmart, Cargill and Chevron.
Despite the secrecy, a number of leaked texts have been published at citizenstrade.org, and the things corporations are demanding are out in the open. The leaked texts and public testimony from a range of corporate interests show: a number of manufacturers, brands and retailers want to use the TPP to offshore jobs to countries like Vietnam where workers are paid less than even Chinese sweatshop workers; pharmaceutical giants want to use the TPP to extend the length of medicine patents; Big Oil and Gas want to use the TPP to block future climate regulations; Wall Street wants the TPP to prohibit commonsense financial regulations; and agricultural middlemen want to dump subsidized grains on additional countries, consolidating global food supplies into fewer and fewer hands.
On December 1, a coalition of trade justice activists from the U.S., Mexico and Canada announced a goal of collecting 1,000 organizational signatures on a “North American Unity Statement Opposing NAFTA Expansion through the Trans-Pacific Partnership.” Groups can read it and sign-on at TPPxBorder.org.
“We’re calling on social justice organizations throughout Canada, Mexico and the United States to sign onto the Unity Statement, first, in recognition of the threat the TPP poses to their members, and, second, in recognition that it will take all of us coming together across geographic and issue-area borders in order to win,” said Stuart Trew, trade campaigner for the Council of Canadians.
Organizers point out that, by working together, similar corporate power grabs from the World Trade Organization’s Millennial Round to the Free Trade Area of the Americas have been defeated.
For more information, contact Arthur Stamoulis, Citizens Trade Campaign at (202) 494-8826
