The Port Of Los Angeles As Obama Fast-Track Trade Plan Heading To Narrow House Vote

Congress denied President Obama authority to move ahead a monumental trade pact with Pacific nations.

(Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg)

It's a safe bet the giant Trans-Pacific Partnership and President Obama's quest for fast-track authority to implement it is not a topic on every tongue in America today.

Crowds don't cluster around office water coolers to debate its merits. It's not likely the talk of your neighborhood watering hole. And I can attest personally that it doesn't dominate dinner table talk much either.

But that's too bad. For the TPP and fast-track trade authority serve as symbols of an issue likely to prove significant in next year's national election: the income gap and just what priority the candidates and their parties give it.

It's a high temperature topic among the political elite, academic economists, and in think tank circles. But all this intellectual energy has produced little consensus on the issue. A few Democrats back the TPP but the overwhelming majority oppose it; a few Republicans oppose it but a lop-sided majority support it.

It's a classic little-guys-versus-big-guys clash, with Big Labor and Big Business, liberals and conservatives knocking heads. And while each side has made some good points neither has been persuasive enough for a national consensus to develop.



The result is a stalemate in Congress, with Obama and the GOP leadership unable to muster enough votes to pass enabling legislation. It's in limbo just now but another stab at passage is promised this week.



The AFL-CIO argument is that past trade deals - like NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement - have cost American workers thousands of jobs. And that's indisputable on the evidence.

The ink was still wet on the deal when auto transmission makers were off to lower-wage Mexico in droves, idling thousands of American auto workers. Ditto U.S. truck drivers. They lost work to shippers using Mexican trucks and Mexican drivers who undercut them in pay and especially benefits.

The argument by TPP supporters, made most forcefully by the economic Tories in the Wall Street Journal's editorial bunker, is that few such jobs would be at risk, and that, anyway, most of the hard-hat manufacturing jobs labor mourns for have been lost to technological advance and are not coming back. So take that.

Undoubtedly true. And the claim that organized labor is a special pleader fighting primarily to keep from losing more dues-paying members, a regular WSJ complaint, is also true. But the Journal is itself a special pleader.

It's a mouthpiece for big business and the investor class (when not hauling water for the Republican Party). It understands that the TTP, whatever it does to American labor, will be a sweet deal for our multinational masters of the universe and make millions for their camp followers - international law firms, Wall Street investment banks, merger specialists and hedge funds. The deserving rich, you might say.

In other words, it's not easy to find a completely honest, totally disinterested broker on either side of the dispute.

One aspect of the TPP legislation bill that's got less attention than it deserves is a provision allowing foreign companies which feels ill-used by American law or regulation to sue for relief - not in an American court but in special tribunals set up under the trade pact.

What criteria (if not American law) would these special panels use to try cases? It's not clear and for good reason, as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren contends. Details of the TPP legislation, she claims, are being crafted behind closed doors by committees dominated by big business and devoid of labor representation.

Not to worry, say the TPP's admirers. These suits rarely occur, we're assured. That may have been true in the past but news articles lately have noted the rate of such suit filings has increased in recent years as multinational corporations attack not just laws but national regulations they deem burdensome.

What's really worrisome is what this provision and these suits say about the growth of the multinational economy and its imperial culture.

What they all have in common is a desire to be as free as possible of national control, laws or regulations - any national laws and regulations in any country. They're actually one-world-ers. From their point of view it makes sense, like the desirability of a common international currency.

But if unchecked it could lead us into something Europe is now viewing with more than a little buyer's remorse - the borderless European Union and a Common Market dominated by an unanswerable Brussels bureaucracy.

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