UPCOMING EVENTS 08/19 Seattle, 08/20 Portland Rock Against the TPP Until 09/02, TPP'zza Deliveries to Congress 08/23 at 5:30PM in Newton, NJ, TPP Vigil 08/24 at 9PM EST organizing call, all welcome

First off, if you do not know what the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) is, please go to the bottom of the post to learn the basics.

A spectre is haunting the Pacific Rim - the spectre of a mass movement against the TPP. Due to the large success of a coalition of community groups, environmental organizations, internet geeks, socialists, and unions, the TPP only has one last chance to get ratified: the lameduck session of the US Congress. President Obama announced last week, August 12th, that he was going to try to push his masterpiece of corporate imperialism through Congress.

The pathetic reply of the liberal mainstream has been to plead for neoliberal presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to oppose it. Even if such a statement is secured, it will not be enough, so many others are instead focusing on Congress and getting out into the streets.

So I want to compile a master list of tactics for people to use to stop the TPP once and for all. While pleading to war criminals is not something I want to list here, let's have a diversity of tactics: from civil disobedience to Congressional lobby days, from general strikes to district meetings with your representatives. I need your help, so please comment with anything to add, especially more radical stuff that is less publicized. Also the Obama administration is having talks all around the country about TPP starting this week: if you find out when and where those are happening, please let us know.

Congress: Here are some key legislators that will influence what happens over the next few months.

Orrin Hatch (R) Senator of Utah, chair of the all-important Senate Finance Committee. Major force behind fast track but not expressing concern over final agreement, particularly around biologics. If he decides to oppose it, that's the end of the TPP. Ballotpedia Open Secrets

Democrats Who Approved Fast Track

Senate Finance Committee: Ron Wyden of Oregon, Maria Cantwell of Washington, Bill Nelson of Florida), Tom Carper of Delaware, Ben Cardin of Maryland, Michael Bennet of Colorado, Mark Warner of Virginia.

House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee: Ron Kind, 3rd District of Wisconsin and Earl Blumenauer, 3rd District of Oregon

Progressive and Radical Environmental Groups Fighting TPP

350.org

Rising Tide North America

Unions Fighting TPP

AFL-CIO

CWA

Teamsters

Coalition Groups

Flush the TPP

Citizens Trade

BASIC EXPLANATION: The Trans Pacific Partnership is an international trade agreement between the governments of Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam. Its purpose is to deregulate certain aspects of trade to bring the laws of these countries into uniformity along lines of (1) workers' rights and wages; (2) environmental collapse and climate change; (3) sovereignty of nations and democratic rule of law; (4) Internet freedom; (5) food safety and agriculture; (6) healthcare and pharmaceuticals; (7) finance. Its projected effect is to start a race to the bottom in wages, encourage greater carbon emissions, give corporations more power to overrule laws, increase costs of medical treatments, and provide more backdoors for finance to avoid regulation like the Dodd-Frank Act.

(1) Workers' Rights and Wages The TPP will create a trade deficit which threatens jobs in the auto, aerospace, aluminum and steel, apparel and textile, call center, and electronic and electrical machinery industries. Particularly the agreement threatens to have US workers compete with Vietnamese workers, which will offshore US jobs and put downward pressures on employment and wages in the US while also increasing corporate expansion into Vietnam and further exploitation of the workers there in a "race to the bottom."

(2) Environmental Collapse and Climate Change Even the liberal Sierra Club has come out against the TPP because of its failure to create meaningful protections against illegal timber and wildlife trade and the increase in trade of liquefied natural gas used in fracking.

(3) Sovereignty of Nations and Democratic Rule of Law Exxon Mobil and Dow Chemical alone have launched over 600 cases against 100 countries using international tribunals. A common misconception of the TPP is that it will create an international tribunal between corporations and governments but unfortunately that was created a long time ago. Rather, the TPP would allow for the tribunal to be stacked to make it nearly impossible for governments to win against the corporations by having a majority of arbitrators come from the corporate sector. It will also expand access to the arbitration system to 9,000 new corporations. This is by far the most dangerous part of the agreement, as it will give unprecedented transnational power to corporations.

(4) Internet Freedom Ironically while the TPP is largely about deregulation, its provisions around the internet are about exporting the worst parts of US Copyright law abroad, creating arbitrary and punitive regulations around sharing content, and perhaps most frighteningly, would make it a crime to reveal corporate wrongdoing "through a computer system."

(5) Food Safety and Agriculture The TPP's Rapid Response Mechanism will allow companies to challenge import inspections that "cause an unnecessary delay." It will also allow companies like Monsanto to challenge laws that prohibit their GMO seeds: regardless of how you feel about GMOs Monsanto has used them in economic warfare against farmers for cross-pollination, what they call "improperly reusing patented seeds."

(6) Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals The TPP will allow increases in the prices of medication as well as banning the generic alternatives that make such medication cheaper. Particularly targeted are drugs in the treatment of HIV, tuberculosis, and cancer, and while this will be devastating in countries like the United States, it will be catastrophic in the Global South.

(7) Finance Of those 9000 new companies mentioned earlier added to the international arbitration system are finance companies. The TPP would not allow governments to ban the kind of derivatives that caused the $183 billion bailout of AIG, firewalls like the Volcker Rule or a reinstated Glass-Steagall, and would prohibit a capital gains tax.

And it is really worth emphasizing that for all the negative effects this will have on people in the United States, Canada, etc., that this trade agreement exists mostly to be a weapon of imperialism against the Global South. Unfortunately among the Western Left consciousness on how things like free trade agreements hurt the Global South is very low. Here is a good list of how the TPP hurts the Global South.