I joined a conference call yesterday that talked about the upcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement and the "Fast Track" process that the big corporations are trying to push on Congress to smooth the way for them to push this "trade' deal through.
The call was hosted by Lori Wallach of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. Also on the call were:
U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.)
U.S. Representative Louise Slaughter (D-NY)
Leo Gerard, President, United Steelworkers (USW)
Larry Cohen, President, Communication Workers of America (CWA)
James Hoffa, President, Intl Brotherhood of Teamsters
Michael Brune, Executive Director, Sierra Club
This was an involved, comprehensive discussion with a lot of information, and I will write more about the issues covered in future posts. But there was one statement that I think just nails the key point about the results of previous agreements that our country has managed to get itself into. It was made by USW's Leo Gerard and I'll let his words make the point:
"In all the trade deals we've done since 1994, for those of you on the call from the press and friends in the political process, I think these are important numbers you should take a very close look at: in the period of time from 1994 to October 2013, America has accumulated an overall trade deficit of $8.3 trillion. And, if you subtract goods and services where we've been able to export certain services like accounting and stuff like that - that we have a slight surplus in - if you subtract that, the deficit in manufactured goods is over $10 trillion.
This should be the deficit that we're looking at, rather than the one that keeps getting thrown up by some Democrats and rightwing Republicans.
And then if you go through this deal, before you look at this deal you have to look at all of the previous deals and ask "which one of these that we've done has resulted in net job gains and net trade surplus for America?" And you know what the answer is? None.
So in this deal, they're looking at what are we going to do about state-owned enterprises that we're supposed to compete with? We've got workers that can compete with any company, but they can't compete with countries. What are they going to do about rules of origin? Put things in perspective: for example in NAFTA, to be country of origin you need 62.5% domestic content. The U.S.-Australia deal went 50%. The U.S.-South Korea deal went to 35%. Where will this one take us? We're supposed to compete with countries that are getting their parts from China, Vietnam, Brunei, and exporting materials to here, when if they have 35% of material from their country they're called 'a domestic product'? That's crazy."
Later in the call Leo said, “The politicians keep telling us the same song and dance that turns out not to be the truth. We’ve lost five million manufacturing jobs. The public gets it, and the politicians don’t.”
What This Says
Leo nailed the key point about the trade deals we have gotten ourselves into. We have not yet found ourselves in a good, balanced trade deal that helps the country instead of just a few billionaires. In all of the trade deals we have made, the country has lost money and has lost jobs.
And why is this? Because these deals are not being negotiated to help the country, they are being negotiated to help a few giant corporations and the billionaires these corporations represent. The process leads to deals that dramatically enrich the 1% while they kill off the economic participation of the rest of us in our economy.
The trade deals we have entered into allow companies to move jobs and factories to countries with low democracy and therefore low wages and little if any environmental protection. So things made there cost less than things made here. This undermines our country and our democracy -- but it enriches the few who own and/or run these giant corporations. Because it opens them up to move jobs wherever they want our unions are broken, unemployment is kept high (on purpose) and employers can threaten the remaining workers with moving their jobs, too, if they don't accept cuts.
You can listen to the audio recording of this call: http://www.conferenceplayback.com/stream/98120468/48264901.mp3
And now for your entertainment: All our trade deal are belong to them.
[fve]http://youtu.be/8fvTxv46ano[/fve]
