VIDEO: Lori Wallach Explains TPP

Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, sets the scene for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and briefly details what's at stake:

Make or Break: Obama Officials Start Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Talks Today - First Obama Trade Deal?

Pressure is on for Administration's Trade Foray to Deliver the New American Trade Policy Obama Promised, not Continue Bush's NAFTA-With-Vietnam Model for TPP

 

The policy and political stakes are high as administration officials today begin negotiations for President Barack Obama's first potential trade agreement - the eight-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Negotiations will be held March 15-19 in Melbourne, Australia, with three additional rounds of negotiations scheduled for 2010, including a June session to be held in the United States.

 

The TPP negotiations are being closely watched because they have become the venue in which the Obama approach to trade pacts will be revealed. Broadly at issue is whether the new administration will use the TPP process to translate Obama's many specific campaign trade reform commitments into a new approach - or whether the administration will fall back on the trade agreement model used by the previous George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. TPP talks were initiated by the Bush administration, which engaged in three rounds in 2008. A majority of House Democrats, including 12 full committee chairs and 58 subcommittee chairs, have made clear their expectations for any future trade pacts by sponsoring the Trade Reform Accountability Development and Employment (TRADE) Act. The legislation translates Obama's trade reform commitments into a new model for American trade pacts that are designed to achieve trade expansion under terms more consistent with Democrats' core policy goals of job creation, consumer safeguards and environmental protection.

GTW Director Lori Wallach Appears on Bloomberg TV

Check out Lori's interview on Bloomberg Television about January's trade deficit numbers and President Obama's National Export Initiative:

 

Watch Lori Wallach LIVE on Bloomberg TV at 2pm

Go here and click on "Launch Video Player" and "U.S."  She'll be talking about trade deficit numbers and President Obama's National Export Initiative.

Putting Twitter Above Labor, Environmental, and Consumer Protections?

In January, Peter Cowhey stepped down from his yearlong stint as senior counselor at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) and he may be giving us an inside look at what the USTR staff is thinking going into the first round of negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement with Singapore, Peru, Australia, Chile, Brunei, New Zealand, and Vietnam next week. Inside U.S. Trade gives us the scoop (sorry, subscription only):

In an interview with Inside U.S. Trade, former USTR senior counselor Peter Cowhey signaled that negotiations to establish a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement could be used to improve upon past bilateral trade deals the U.S. has already negotiated with Singapore, Peru, Australia and Chile, particularly on rules for advanced technologies.

Great! USTR might be looking to improve the Singapore, Peru, Australia and Chile trade agreements while negotiating the TPP!  They could amend the trade agreements to add enforceable labor and environmental protections and remove excessive intellectual property protections on pharmaceuticals and investor-state lawsuit provisions that threaten public interest legislation, all of which would be major improvements to those trade agreements.  But what was that about advanced technologies?

Historically, U.S. trade agreements have assured access for basic telecommunications services and basic data transmission networks, [Cowhey] said. But it is not entirely clear from a legal point of view whether those agreements cover new services such as Twitter and Facebook on the one hand, or integrated energy and environment management control systems for entire buildings and cities on the other, Cowhey explained.

What a let down! Twitter is nice and all, but could we be a bit more ambitious here when we reopen those trade agreements in the TPP negotiations, please?  This must be just a warm up for when the USTR announces a new trade agreement model based on the TRADE Act that a majority of House Democrats have co-sponsored, right?

"Buy, Buy American Pie"

...performed by The Capitol Steps.

 

Green Job Offshoring Reignites Buy America Debate

Last month, an American University think tank made this startling conclusion: 79 percent of the $2 billion in clean energy grants under a U.S. Treasury/ Energy Department stimulus initiative have gone to foreign - not U.S. - companies. By industry estimates, the program has lead to well over a thousand net job losses in manufacturing.

While President Obama ran and won (and has since advocated) a green industry agenda that creates jobs in the U.S., the AU report finds that the Energy Secretary and American Wind Energy Association stating for the record that the grant program did not have immediate U.S. manufacturing job creation as a major goal.

Yesterday, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) joined Sens. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.) in calling for a suspension of the grant program until legislation can be passed that makes sure the federal agencies prioritize U.S. job creation. In Schumer's words, "We should not be giving China a head start in this race at our own country's expense."

And as the New America Foundation showed, all of this is part of a longer term "green trade deficit" the U.S. has yet to address.

This latest kerfuffle has reignited last year's debate about Buy America provisions. People need to remember two things: Buy America has been shown to aid U.S. job creation, and neither the stimulus bill nor this latest Brown amendment change long-standing U.S. policy.

Live Blogging the Senate Finance Hearing on Kirk

Note: This is not a verbatim transcript. Not even close. It is an attempt to capture major areas of discussion of interest to EOT readers.

Is There an Outbreak of Amnesia at USTR?

During the presidential campaign, Obama made it clear that he intended to renegotiate NAFTA to include enforceable environmental and labor rights provisions in the main text of the agreement.  The USTR’s 2010 Trade Policy Agenda, released yesterday, entirely lacked any plans to fulfill this crucial campaign promise.

When President Obama was campaigning for office, the only “r” verb he used on NAFTA was “renegotiate,” coupled with a friendly “opt out.” In contrast, USTR's report uses the verbs “review” and “recalibrate,” but then only to refer to actions they promised to take but still haven't taken. On NAFTA’s severe environmental and labor shortcomings, the report only stated that NAFTA’s central oversight body, comprised of officials from each country’s trade negotiating body, would “strengthen its relationship” with the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation and the North American Commission for Labor Cooperation, which are bodies established under NAFTA whose role is mostly limited to releasing reports about the labor and environmental effects of NAFTA. They have no enforcement capabilities, which Obama heavily criticized.

It’s not like Obama whispered his position on NAFTA to labor unions and environmentalists in private meetings.  He was loud and clear about his plan to renegotiate NAFTA, proclaiming it several times in the televised presidential debates.  In a January 2008 debate, he said that “it is absolutely true that NAFTA was a mistake.” Obama reminded us that his position on NAFTA has been consistent during a February 2008 debate:

MR. RUSSERT: Senator Obama, you did in 2004 talk to farmers and suggest that NAFTA had been helpful. The Associated Press today ran a story about NAFTA, saying that you have been consistently ambivalent towards the issue. Simple question: Will you, as president, say to Canada and Mexico, "This has not worked for us; we are out"? 

SEN. OBAMA: I will make sure that we renegotiate, in the same way that Senator Clinton talked about. And I think actually Senator Clinton's answer on this one is right. I think we should use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage to ensure that we actually get labor and environmental standards that are enforced. And that is not what has been happening so far.

That is something that I have been consistent about. I have to say, Tim, with respect to my position on this, when I ran for the United States Senate, the Chicago Tribune, which was adamantly pro-NAFTA, noted that, in their endorsement of me, they were endorsing me despite my strong opposition to NAFTA.

In the Democratic candidates’ debate in August 2007, Obama had a sense of urgency in his voice when he discussed his position on NAFTA:

USTR’s 2010 Trade Policy Agenda: The Good, The Bad, and the Bizarre

Statement of Lori Wallach, Director, Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch Division

Relative to last year’s March 1 report, the 2010 Trade Policy Agenda released today by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) excludes some troubling elements, such as the call for rapid action on the leftover Bush trade pact with Panama, the demand that climate policy conform to trade rules and the reference to renewed presidential trade authority. But at the same time, the report unfortunately fails to deliver the new fair trade agenda that President Barack Obama promised during the campaign and that is needed for our country’s economic recovery.

It also continues to mimic the misrepresentations that the Bush administration borrowed from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce with respect to only considering the role of exports on U.S job creation, as if the U.S. did not have a massive job-killing trade deficit. An example is the hilarious statement about 10 million U.S. jobs being supported by exports in 2008 – a year we had a $696 billion deficit – without any reference to the net U.S. jobs effect of the flood of imports underlying that deficit. The report also fails to mention that 5 million net U.S manufacturing jobs – one out of every four – have been lost since the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, or the downward pressure our current trade policies are putting on wages across the economy.