[P2P-F] Fwd: Act now re TPP and Fast Track (toxic to democracy)
Michel Bauwens
michel at p2pfoundation.net
Mon Jan 13 23:32:48 CET 2014
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tom Atlee <cii at igc.org>
Date: Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 12:52 AM
Subject: Act now re TPP and Fast Track (toxic to democracy)
To: Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net>
Tom Atlee's Co-Intelligence Journal . The Co-Intelligence Symbol . What
this message is about: This month the US Congress could pass legislation th
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. The Co-Intelligence Symbol .
*What this message is about: This month the US Congress could pass
legislation that would make sure that complex trade agreements favored by
multinational corporations - like the TransPacific Partnership (TPP) -
would be pushed through Congress with little debate and little information
provided to the public. This so-called "fast-track" authority - and the
trade agreements it is designed to facilitate - would seriously undermine
what remains of US democracy. We invite you to act on this matter soon as
your conscience dictates.*
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Act now re TPP and Fast Track (toxic to
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The Dance of Creation and Protest
Dear friends,
In my blog post The rapid growth of serious responses to climate
disruption<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1389635125-8f73a2c2f56462d9077293209de3f813-aaef217?pa=19724593534>,
I mentioned the movement to protest the secretly negotiated Trans-Pacific
Partnership agreement (TPP) that could have profound impacts on democracy,
on public health and welfare, and on the fate of the planet.
This issue has now become urgent. On January 9, Senate Finance Committee
Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) and Rep. Camp (R-MI) introduced the Bipartisan
Congressional Trade Priorities Act of 2014 to promote the President's “fast
track” authority. This bill would facilitate passage of deeply flawed trade
agreements such as the TPP with little deliberation or even input from the
public and Congress. This issue is important right now because a vote on
this bill is expected before the end of the month.
"Fast track" means that the President would sign an international agreement
and then send it to Congress for a straight up-or-down vote within 3 months
with no room for amendments and a maximum of 20 hours of floor debate.
This hasty approach to trade agreements may have been a bit more reasonable
when it was first used in 1974 when trade pacts only involved traditional
trade issues like tariffs and quotas.
But today it just doesn't make democratic sense. It is promoted by the
corporations and investors who profit from these agreements - and by public
officials and media who they support or who share their monetized
worldview. But the lack of debate doesn't help the vast majority of us
because today's big trade pacts cover a broad range of issues that impact
us every day, including the environment, investment policy, labor,
government procurement, consumer protections and many more things. These
things need to be considered very carefully. It is therefore critical for
Congress to maintain its constitutional authority to oversee trade policy -
and for us in the grassroots to ensure that Congress approves only trade
pacts that protect communities, workers, consumers, and the environment
BEFORE such pacts get finalized.
TPP is an alarming case in point. It contains clauses allowing foreign
companies to directly sue national governments in private trade tribunals
to either nullify laws and policies that might reduce their corporate
profits or to suffer very steep financial penalties. This makes companies
more powerful than democratically elected governments. It would devastate
the ability of citizens and national, state, and local governments to pass
environmental, labor, and consumer protection laws that protect our
communities and our children.
To make matters worse, we're being blocked from discussing all this in an
intelligent, informed manner. Except for a few leaks from WikiLeaks and
others, most legislators, the public, and the press have no access to the
evolving content of this agreement. To a remarkable extent, that privilege
has been reserved for a select few trade representatives and corporations
who will benefit from the TPP, with the periodic negotiations continuing in
secret. A few Congresspeople on key committees have access to the draft
agreement in a guarded room where they cannot take notes and are forbidden
to communicate what they might read in its many hundreds of detailed,
complex pages. What's going on here?
Senator Elizabeth Warren says "I have heard the argument that transparency
would undermine the Trade Representative’s policy to complete the trade
agreement because public opposition would be significant. In other words,
if people knew what was going on, they would stop it. This argument is
exactly backwards. If transparency would lead to widespread public
opposition to a trade agreement, then that trade agreement should not be
the policy of the United States.” (I appreciate Sen. Warren's
straightforward articulation, rare in among politicians.)
It might be a different story if most trade agreements like TPP actually
enhanced the quality of life for citizens and our prospects for future
generations. But they don't. They are most often broadly damaging to all
ordinary people concerned and to the natural and social commons we share.
As a Popular Resistance newsletter notes, "The TPP is an issue that unites
the movement because it affects not just workers but the environment,
regulation of finance, Internet freedom, food safety, and healthcare and
gives corporations control of virtually every aspect of our lives."
If you find yourself concerned about the implications of all this, please
get better informed and take appropriate action soon.
Coheartedly,
Tom
= = = = =
*IMPORTANT PS*
THE BIGGER-PICTURE REASON FOR OPPOSING TPP AND FAST TRACK
The message above and the links below come largely from a progressive
populist perspective - protecting US jobs, democratic governance, and the
environment. However, many on the Right are also upset about TPP and Fast
Track, particularly because those initiatives involve a significant loss of
US sovereignty. On the other hand, some commentators favor TPP because,
while jobs are lost in the US, employment and middle class life in other
countries may improve. All these arguments are worth discussing. But none
of them addresses the most important and least discussed argument:
Society's urgent need for rapid transformation toward sustainability.
I believe that TPP represents a societal "tipping point" in our ability to
shift civilization from self-destruction to sustainability. Most
immediately it would gut our capacity to protect people and nature from
ruinous exploitation and to ameliorate runaway climate change. But that is
only one way that TPP - and most other proposals and arguments from both
the Left and the Right - fail to turn our civilizational TItanic from its
fatal course to collapse and possible extinction.
Truly addressing climate change - AND peak oil AND many other emerging
crises - requires that we shift our global economy away from consumption
(especially emissions-generating consumption) towards a low impact, high
quality way of life. This involves a shift from wasteful material
production and trade to enhancing people's ability to live healthy
enjoyable lives together without lots of stuff.
Part of that would include REDUCING employment - in ways that would
actually make life better. Imagine if we used technology not so much to
increase productivity for profit but to make employment one option among
many -- to "de-job" the economy into something more sustainable and
enjoyable. What if we applied our technological wizardry to do the
following:
▪▪ to take over more and more jobs (remember the old term "labor saving
devices"?) in a way that made 50% unemployment and a 20 hour work week
actually attractive norms, augmented by a lot of passion-driven small
entrepreneurship and simple living;
▪▪ to enable more do-it-yourself, collaborative, and local production -
from 3D printers and high-tech gardens to crowdsourced games and modular,
long-lasting designs for products;
▪▪ to encourage and enable bartering and sharing (especially locally) of
most physical resources - car shares, tool shares, book shares, garden
produce shares - so that we all don't need to produce, store, and transport
so much stuff in the first place; and
▪▪ to enable gifting, sharing, and co-creating more of what really makes
life good - learning, thinking, loving, appreciating, dreaming,
accomplishing, feeling secure, pursuing our personal interests and
passions, and just having fun together. These are exactly the kinds of
things that today we don't have much time for because we need to work and
shop and consume lots of "stuff" that actually doesn't make us so happy.
If our national and global economic policies were designed to move towards
THAT sort of economy, the loss of jobs in the US would become an asset,
while global trade could be about increasing the ability of people in
"developing" nations to have enough of the right kinds of stuff to reduce
struggle and suffering while not drawing them into the profit-driven,
anxiety-ridden, unsustainable consumption rat-race that Western
civilization desperately needs to recover from.
This brief description only hints at the tip of a vast sense of possibility
that is emerging among alternative economists and others (including us
here, see http://co-intelligence.org/Economics.html). Pursuing those
remarkable possibilities will take a focused and sustained effort. In the
meantime, it is urgent that we head off developments like the TPP and Fast
Track that would make it even more difficult - if not impossible - to
change the course of civilization towards a world that truly works for all
of us, in a truly deep, wonderful, and sustainable way.
= = = = =
RESOURCES
Here are some links if you wish to find out more and act with some
knowledge under your belt...
Wikipedia covers fast track and TPP from a non-advocacy perspective with
some coverage of the controversy...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_track_(trade)<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1389635125-b904841afaa1541987056f2231cba14d-aaef217?pa=19724593534>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Strategic_Economic_Partnership<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1389635125-90a5cf0aaecb9f68376de868ce41a580-aaef217?pa=19724593534>
Information on TPP and Fast Track from a protest perspective. Any of these
will prove eye-opening.
http://www.flushthetpp.org/<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1389635125-d8e22e3902adb2ae57815a8df4d9a2bc-aaef217?pa=19724593534>(contains
a short educational slide show)
http://www.eugeneweekly.com/20140102/news-briefs/secretive-trans-pacific-partnership-revealed<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1389635125-7dcf706de5debabd663491a8199de896-aaef217?pa=19724593534>
http://www.progressive.org/naftas-harms-show-why-tpp-deal-must-be-stopped<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1389635125-820920bda9b44bc9fe6ad4885527829e-aaef217?pa=19724593534>
http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/tpp/<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1389635125-ce474c62f3a514cfb8c52512557d5cc6-aaef217?pa=19724593534>
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/tpp-leak-confirms-worst-us-negotiators-still-trying-trade-away-internet-freedoms<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1389635125-71face4e76e878d65a7de24caa4b498b-aaef217?pa=19724593534>
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Use-This-Innovative-Action-by-Joan-Brunwasser-Action_Action-Pages_Activism_Agreement-140105-266.html<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1389635125-62b380c5a3af2204b73cdb1525fa3edb-aaef217?pa=19724593534>
http://wikileaks.org/IMG/pdf/tpp-salt-lake-extracts-.pdf<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1389635125-b7b0b41990abb53184f9b24784ee679e-aaef217?pa=19724593534>
http://wikileaks.org/IMG/pdf/tpp-salt-lake-positions.pdf<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1389635125-6619249d45dad7591258a4c1874e71f3-aaef217?pa=19724593534>
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37073.htm<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1389635125-a20760c6f697e07469239688ed83910d-aaef217?pa=19724593534>-
10 minute video
http://billmoyers.com/segment/yves-smith-and-dean-baker-on-secrets-in-trade/<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1389635125-83584f16e0a3a25e700b647824e061c0-aaef217?pa=19724593534>-
33 minute video
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/11/fast-track-trade-democrats_n_4580720.html<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1389635125-6aa5402676e516f6cf5422b1454545af-aaef217?pa=19724593534>
Anti-Fast-Track petitions (parentheses show number of signers as of this
message) - all of which include educational materials:
MoveOn (16,941):
http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/congress-dont-renew-fast<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1389635125-97ba300a1982cd2973c3ec9d1fecb334-aaef217?pa=19724593534>
Credo (170,000):
http://act.credoaction.com/sign/fast_track?nosig=1%3Fsource%3Dchaser&rd=1<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1389635125-d777fd4735c1e4dd36c3a95248329700-aaef217?pa=19724593534>
Public Citizen (11,934):
http://action.citizen.org/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=12263<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1389635125-671c736ce42198505069ef682acdcb8d-aaef217?pa=19724593534>
Media organizing (letters to the editor, etc.)
http://salsa3.salsalabs.com/o/1987/letter/?letter_KEY=1515<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1389635125-6f4e008491a5f45d6e6c9964ecafc0e8-aaef217?pa=19724593534>
Protest action organizing site (includes upcoming actions and past actions)
http://www.flushthetpp.org/category/local-actions/<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1389635125-f6490bb9965295a4b458d4c0d8787bb6-aaef217?pa=19724593534>
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