5/20/2015 - Terry Jeffrey Townhall.com
President Barack Obama is negotiating a
multilateral trade agreement with the governments of 11 nations. These include
Malaysia and Vietnam -- as well as Japan, Brunei, Australia, Singapore, New
Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Chile and Peru.
This so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership would
govern most of the commercial relations between the nations that sign it.
"With over 20 chapters under
negotiation," explains a Congressional Research Service report published
in March, "the TPP partners envision the agreement to be 'comprehensive
and high-standard,' in that they seek to eliminate tariffs and nontariff
barriers to trade in goods, services, and agriculture, and to establish or
expand rules on a wide range of issues including intellectual property rights,
foreign direct investment and other trade-related issues."
The Obama administration has granted the draft
of this massive deal more secrecy than a Hillary Clinton email. Documents
related to it are classified, and members of Congress can review them in a
secured room.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House
Speaker John Boehner would like to enact legislation giving Obama "Trade
Promotion Authority" -- aka "fast track" power -- to enshrine
this deal in U.S. law.
Fast-track legislation would allow Obama to avoid
presenting the 12-nation deal to the Senate as a treaty -- which, under our
Constitution, would require a two-thirds vote of all senators present. Instead,
it allows him to present it to both houses of Congress for a simple majority
vote -- with no amendments allowed.
In our prospective "free-trade"
partner, Malaysia, according to Obama's State Department, the "government
restricted union and collective-bargaining activity, and government policies
created vulnerabilities and worsened child labor and forced labor problems,
especially for migrant workers."
Malaysian human rights problems, says Obama's
State Department, include "restrictions on freedoms of speech, assembly,
association, and religion; and restrictions on freedom of the press, including
media bias, book banning, censorship, and the denial of printing permits."
Our prospective "free-trade" partner
Vietnam, according to Obama's State Department, is "an authoritarian state
ruled by a single party, the Communist Party of Vietnam."
This Obama-Malaysia-Vietnam deal that
Boehner-McConnell want to fast track through Congress raises many questions.
The most obvious: Is there any such thing as free trade with unfree countries?
The Congressional Research Service report
politely describes socialism as "state-owned enterprises."
"In the context of the current TPP
negotiations, the SOE presence in Vietnam -- estimated to represent 40 percent
of output -- may warrant particular attention, although Malaysia and Singapore
also have important SOE sectors," says the report.
Will Obama's multilateral trade deal with 11
nations put private-sector American manufacturers in Ohio and Michigan into
unfair competition with foreign manufacturers in places like Malaysia and
Vietnam?
Yes.
But it will likely do something worse than that.
It will put American workers into competition with nominally American companies
that move more of their capital and jobs abroad -- where they will be able to
exploit cheap labor in less-than-free countries and evade the often-excessive
U.S. regulation and taxation Obama himself advances.
In America, there is a sharp dividing line
between private businesses. On one side are capitalist enterprises owned by
families, individuals and small partnerships of individuals. On the other are
big businesses -- public-stock companies -- run by professional managers in the
theoretical interest of diffuse bodies of stockholders.
Families and individuals who own businesses are
free to run them according to their own values. And, yes, making a profit is
clearly one of those values. But a family that owns a business might sometimes
decide to forego a measure of profit in favor of the well-being of their
friends, neighbors and country.
They may decide that love of country and love of
God trumps love of money.
But for publicly owned big businesses -- that
are not controlled by the moral values of an individual or family owner -- the
pursuit of ever-higher profit is the highest good. If the only bottom line
governing business decisions is the financial bottom line, it might make sense
to manufacture a drug or device that, say, kills an unborn child.
Or, no matter what you make, move your jobs to
Vietnam or Mexico.
"Ford Motor Co. on Friday made official a
$2.5 billion investment in Mexico for two new plants and an expansion of a
diesel engine line that will create about 3,800 jobs," the Detroit News
reported last month.
We have lost 7,231,000 manufacturing jobs since
manufacturing employment peaked in America in 1979. The real median household
income of Americans who completed high school but did not attend college
dropped 27.8 percent from its peak in 1973 to 2013 -- falling from $56,395 to
$40,701 in constant 2013 dollars.
Obama, Boehner and McConnell are on the same
side of this issue. It is the wrong side.
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