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The TPP Is A Test Of Democracy - HuffPo
The TPP Is a Test of DemocracyJedediah Purdy - HuffPo
Posted: 05/23/2015 7:54 pm EDT Updated: 05/24/2015 9:59 am EDT
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Democracy is the problem with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade negotiation. It's the problem for TPP supporters because the trade deal has been secret so far -- known to the public only through leaks and rumors -- and because the Fast Track authorization that the Obama Administration wants would box Congress out of meaningful input on the treaty.
As Yale Law School international trade scholar David Grewal has pointed out, the TPP is about national regulation of domestic economies, issues like environmental, labor, and consumer safety law that are at the core of self-government. It's outlandish that this sovereign power is being bargained away in secret, with the final deal dropped before Congress in a take-it-or-kill-it package. So TPP critics have found that democracy is by far their easiest argument. In fact, given how much of the negotiations remain secret, just about the only informed argument they can make is that the secrecy itself is a problem. And it is a terrible problem. It should make the whole backroom arrangement illegitimate, at least until we all know what is in it.
But democracy is also a problem for TPP opponents, and in a subtler way. Consider: Who actually thinks the US Congress would be able to hold a reasoned debate on a complex trade agreement and deliver a sound judgment reflecting the will of the people? Who even believes that Congress holds reasoned debates, ever, or that there is such a thing as the will of the people, rather than fleeting gusts of public opinion and internet mobbing? If you think the TPP is a good thing, you definitely do not want to put it through the political process. TPP supporters don't, by and large, believe they are trying to put one over on a wise but unwary public: they believe democracy is broken, the public is ignorant and renders irrational decisions, and that Congress is no better (though sometimes teachable, thanks to lobbyists).
And who, honestly, doesn't believe something like this about US democracy today? Who really wants to submit their highest value, or the project they have worked on for decades, to this democracy? Really?
The press to fast-track TPP is a sellout of democracy, but it is also a symptom of a deeper collapse of faith in American self-government. Increasingly, people who want to get something done find ways around democratic lawmaking: private investment, nonprofit social mobilization, executive actions, lawsuits in the courts, anything but going to Congress. The TPP sellout of democracy has attracted so many supporters among well-intentioned, sophisticated, realistic people because, frankly, such people are used to disregarding democracy when they want to accomplish something important.
Acting like we have no democracy to protect -- in fact, believing we have none -- has vicious circular effects. The deep reason to be skeptical of the TPP isn't just that it an unlabeled pill; it's that once we swallow it, we surrender some of the power to shape our own economy to advance our own ideas of fairness, safety, solidarity, sustainability, and so forth. The life and aspirations of a democratic community should come before its economy, and give their shape to the economy -- not the other way around. That was certainly FDR's view during the New Deal, and LBJ's when he proposed the Great Society. But who really believes it now? Who wants the regulatory laws that these guys, the politicians now in power, and the people they listen to, would make?
From what we know of the TPP, it works as an economic policy straitjacket, locking its members into a shared set of market rules. It even brings in "investor-state dispute settlement" -- a fancy term for allowing foreign corporations to sue governments whose lawmaking interferes with their profits, outside the courts of law, in suits resolved by private arbitrators. All of that is fundamentally anti-democratic. It reverses the basic and proper relationship between a political community and its economy. But plenty of Americans are seeking just that reversal. Not all of them believe the market is perfect and magical; but they believe it works, more or less, and that democracy does not. They are more than half right that this democracy, "our democracy" (a phrase that's hard to say without irony), does not work. And that is the reality that makes their anti-democratic agreement so plausible.
So the movement against the TPP has to be more than that. It has to be organically and explicitly linked to a pro-democracy movement: one that works against money in politics, for stronger antitrust laws to reduce concentrated economic power, against the economic inequality that pulls Americans apart and isolates them in their insecurity, and for access to good education and political empowerment for everyone in this country.
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Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jedediah-purdy/the-tpp-means-giving-up-o_b_7429358.html
11 replies
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The least financially secure group was more likely to say that the government should do more to help the needy, which might indicate support for a proposal like Van Hollen’s. But the bigger problem is that people who were the least financially secure were also the least likely to vote. On top of that, few of them ever wrote to their Congressperson or knew much about the current Congress or the current political field.
This is a big group of voters—at least 20 percent of Americans—who could be swayed by Democratic policies. Yet both parties leave their votes on the table.
This is a big group of voters—at least 20 percent of Americans—who could be swayed by Democratic policies. Yet both parties leave their votes on the table.
DULink: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026410677
