(This post
is from our new blog: Unofficial Sources.)
The millions of people who signed up to get email
from Mitt Romney in 2012 would be pretty irked if they started
getting messages now from his team about a super new bill in Congress
that raises taxes, cuts the Pentagon’s budget in half and forcibly marries
every registered Republican man to Neil Patrick Harris.
So you can imagine how members
of Organizing for Action, or OFA, felt when they got email on Friday
telling them about a super new “Trade Promotion Authority” bill. Passage of the
Trade Promotion Authority, better known as “fast track,” would pave the
way for the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty, or TPP, which includes a grab-bag
of things the Democratic base absolutely loathes. It would raise the cost of prescription
drugs, give Obama an environmental trade record “worse
than George Bush’s,” create a special legal system for multinational
corporations to kill any
domestic law that hurts profits, and much
more.
The OFA email was especially head-turning
because OFA is a successor organization to President Obama’s 2008 and 2012
campaigns (which had the same initials, then standing for Obama for
America), built on the email lists developed during those campaigns of millions
of volunteers and supporters. And any political campaign’s email
lists are, in a real sense, the shared creation of everyone involved in the
campaign.
The OFA email did not ask members to take action
supporting fast track; instead, it appears to be an attempt to mollify them
enough so they don’t take action opposing it. In any case, the email is filled
with assertions clearly crafted to mislead OFA members:
• “… though the TPA is often called ‘fast track,’
that’s a bit of a misnomer. TPA is a bill like any other (it must go through
both the Senate and the House, and then be signed by the President).”
This is embarrassing. No one has ever believed “fast
track” was called that because the fast track bills themselves were
fast-tracked. They’ve been called that because they fast-track trade
agreements introduced later.
• “This has been the trade agreement process for
decades. In fact, presidents on both sides of the aisle have been relying on
Congress to pass versions of the TPA since 1974.”
Congress first gave the president Fast Track
authority in 1974, but it expired in 1994. It was passed again in 2002 under
George W. Bush and lasted until 2007. So presidents haven’t had fast track
authority since 1974, they’ve had it for 25 of those years, or about 60 percent
of the time.
Moreover, not having fast track after 1994 didn’t
stop the Clinton administration from negotiating and passing 130
trade agreements.
• “The rules set by Congress through the TPA guide
the framework for the final trade agreement — the President’s team will then
negotiate the deal on the international stage …”
The fast track bill does not set any “rules”; it
describes “negotiating objectives” that Congress thinks would be nice, but
these don’t bind the Obama administration in any way. And “the President’s
team” won’t start negotiating the deal if fast track passes — they’ve
been negotiating it for five years, and are clearly almost finished.
• “The good news is that this bill ensures … that the
entire process is transparent.”
This is perhaps the most deceptive sentence of the
email, because for five years the Obama administration has been pathologically
secretive about the TPP. Since they began negotiating it in
2010 there’s been essentially no way for regular people to learn what
the the treaty contains except for drafts leaked to WikiLeaks. At
first Obama’s trade negotiators even refused
to allow members of Congress to see the current text. Meanwhile, many
corporate executives, as members of U.S. trade advisory boards, are allowed
to see relevant sections whenever they want.
It’s true that the fast track bill will require
the Obama administration to make the final text of the TPP public, at long
last. But fast track also will forbid Congress from making any changes to
it whatsoever. So the “transparent process” will be Obama telling Congress:
here it is, take it or leave it.
If you’re a member of OFA and would like to say
something about the organization’s support for Fast Track authority and the
TPP, please get in touch.
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