New Zealand Not For Sale » Free trade

Labor unions rally at Grant Park

Admin2 — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 19:36:07 +0000

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Hundreds of Chicago-area labor leaders and activists gathered in Grant Park Monday to rally and march for more jobs.

Organizers said they want to ”prevent a new NAFTA.”

Chicago labor unions say a looming free trade agreement, the “Trans Pacific Partnership,” will lead to the loss of good-paying U.S. jobs. They compare it to NAFTA.

The Labor Day rally took place just one day before international trade representatives from Australia, Chile, Peru, Brunei, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and Vietnam arrive in Chicago to negotiate the agreement. It’s their eighth round of talks.

“We’re not going to put up with another trade deal that offers jobs, that reduces tax revenue, that drives down the wages and benefits of the jobs that are left. Too many past trade deals have benefited Wall Street and big business at the expensive of working people in Chicago,” said Arthur Stamoulis, Citizens Trade Campaign.
Read the full report

Source ABC 7

TPPA represents the great New Zealand sell-out

Admin2 — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 20:10:57 +0000

A well attended meeting, held last Wendesday night in Wellington, was told that the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) equated to the ‘great New Zealand sell-out”

Jane Kelsey speaking at Wednesdays Forum

The 130+ people attending the forum, hosted by the Wellington based TPPA Action Group, heard Jane Kelsey (University of Auckland) (2), Des O’Dea (University of Otago) (3) and Thomas Beagle (Tech Liberty) outline the dangers of the proposed deal currently under negotiation.

Mary Ellen O’Connor of the Action Group told media that MFAT and the Government should take note: people do not want the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement. “The TPP is not about ‘free trade.’ It’s about ripping the country open to multinational companies,” said Mary Ellen “it represents the great New Zealand sell-out”

“We do not want to see negative effects on public health, on our liberties on the internet, on sovereignty, on our ability to limit the harms of mining companies and cigarette companies” said Ms O’Connor “The TPP is a significant threat to New Zealand that would allow multi-national companies the right to challenge government decisions. This is already happening in Australia with Philip Morris challenging the Australian government’s decision to have brand free packing for cigarettes.

“The fiasco over The Hobbit, and the Copyright Bill, would be just a taste of what is to come if the government goes ahead with the TPPA.”

Part of the 130 plus crowd at the Forum

In the Wellington area and want to get active?

Contact the TPPA Action Group,

TPP – 21st century agreement or 19th century?

admin — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 04:24:51 +0000

The following article appeared slightly edited in the Press on 16 June 2010, p.A21.

By Bill Rosenberg, Policy Director/Economist at the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions Te Kauae Kaimahi

A second round of negotiations towards the Transpacific Partnership Trade Agreement (TPPTA) will open next week in San Francisco. New Zealand is one of eight parties along with the US, Australia, Singapore, Chile, Peru, Brunei and Vietnam, and others may join.

This is much more than a trade agreement. It will reach into medicine prices, our ability to regulate important services such as finance, telecommunications, and education, our right to control foreign investment, our competition rules, rights to copy music and other digital media, the international trade effects of combating climate change, how local and central government can use their buying power for economic development purposes, and much more.

The Obama administration has put significant emphasis on this agreement, and has stated it wants it to “set the standard for 21st-century trade agreements”. It wants it expanded to include China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and other major Pacific economies.

In New Zealand it is sold as opening the US market to our agricultural produce, despite well engraved writing on the wall that any additional access will be bitterly fought, and if it comes will be at a glacial pace. By the time additional access is a reality, producers from many other countries would be competing for the same market.

This emphasis on opening markets with inadequate consideration as to the domestic effects of such agreements in weakening our ability to shape our own society and economy is distinctly 19th rather than 21st century. The globalisation of the 19th century ended with the First World War. The globalisation since the 1980s produced lower growth rates and repeated financial crises.

Prominent Harvard economist Dani Rodrik says he has an “impossibility theorem” for the global economy: “democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full”.

Our trade and investment agreements have ignored this incompatibility in favour of increasingly intense global economic integration, resulting in the wilting of our national sovereignty – our ability to make rules that would assist our development. Our democracy has weakened as a result: we still elect governments, but they are increasingly powerless to change the rules.

So what might a truly 21st century agreement look like – one which learns the lessons of the past?

First, open up the process of negotiation. This agreement will be more important than much of the legislation that goes through Parliament, yet it is negotiated behind closed doors with no opportunity for public scrutiny of proposals until the deal is signed, when it is too late. Let the citizens of the eight nations see the negotiating texts as they develop, and open them to debate.

Learn the lessons of the global financial crisis. It grew from high risk financial practices, and was spread rapidly round the world due to the absence of international financial regulation. It’s time to build new agreements in which nations cooperate in managing international financial movements, tax international financial transactions and regulate financial practices which are a danger to the health and safety of our economies. Instead, the financial rules being proposed give banks and other financial corporations the right to sell risky products, increasing international borrowing and trade risky instruments overseas with only limited protection for our financial system and economy.

“21st century” agreements should respect people’s need for affordable health care, and to organise their health services the way they choose. Instead, the vital work Pharmac does to force down monopolist prices charged for medicines is under attack from big US pharmaceutical corporations who want to use the TPPTA agreement to allow them to charge whatever the market will bear.

Many New Zealanders have been concerned at the control of strategic assets and land by overseas interests. A forward-looking international agreement should enhance our ability to select the investment we think is best for our needs. Instead the US has made clear its corporations dislike even our feeble foreign investment rules, and want the right to sue the government for damages before secretive international panels.

Such disputes have led to the award of hundreds of millions of dollars against governments which took action to protect the environment or to reverse privatisations which went wrong. In a current case, tobacco multinational, Philip Morris, is suing the Uruguay government to prevent it taking stronger anti-smoking measures.

International agreements have for decades been a recognised way to improve the rights of people at work. This one should be no exception.

If the TPPTA is genuinely there to improve people’s wellbeing it will ensure that core international labour rights conventions are just as enforceable as trade access and bad labour practices are not used as silent trade subsidies. Instead previous agreements have sidelined labour rights, while workers lose from the endless restructuring forced by globalisation, many seeing their high paid skilled job being replaced by a low paid, insecure one.

Similarly, international agreements are essential to protect our environment: many environmental threats require global solutions. Climate change is one, and controls on emissions can be undermined by trade with countries which have lower standards. The TPPTA should allow us to ensure our environment and our contribution to avoiding climate change are not undermined by trade. But the TPPTA countries all have very different approaches – in climate change, some have as yet done nothing. Protecting the environment should be an enforceable part of any agreement.

For the first time, the peak union bodies of most of the countries involved are cooperating in order to act on their concerns at the likely direction of the TPPTA. They have issued a declaration outlining their concerns, which include the above and many more.

Will the TPPTA be truly a 21st century agreement – or just more of the same?

Trans-Pacific Partnership: New Zealand jumping onto a sinking ship

admin — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 05:49:14 +0000

Talks started in Melbourne today for the US, Australia, Peru and Vietnam to join an expanded Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (TPP, currently comprising NZ, Chile, Brunei, and Singapore, known as the P4 Agreement), with November 2011, when the US hosts APEC, as the target to seal the deal. This will be used as the backdoor means to secure a US/NZ Free Trade Agreement. Already the Americans have said that they see this as more than a mere free trade deal but as a vehicle for broader Asia/Pacific economic integration, which has enormous political implications. Alarm bells should be loudly sounding.

A free trade deal with the US would be catastrophic for any remaining economic sovereignty that New Zealand has. CAFCA says this not because we are “anti-American”. All such FTAs – such as with the existing P4 partners, or the more recent ones with Malaysia, the Gulf States and Hong Kong – pose the same threat to a greater or lesser degree. And our opposition to them is not because of “xenophobia” but for well founded grounds that they simply enmesh NZ more and more tightly in a cobweb of transnational corporate control.

So it’s a recipe for disaster to enter into an FTA with the biggest economy in the world, headed by a Government that aggressively pushes the interests of American Big Business (there is a seamless flow between the US Government and US Big Business, as is evidenced by the trillion dollar bailout of the mega-greedy financial sector, a textbook example of socialism for the rich).

And why would NZ want to jump onto a sinking ship? The US has big, big problems at the moment, with huge debt, record numbers of people losing their jobs and/or homes, company crashes, and a preoccupation with having to do something to fix its ramshackle social infrastructure (President Obama has postponed his Australian trip, which was to coincide with the start of these negotiations, to spend more time dealing with his campaign to reform the laughing stock that is the US health system). World trade dropped 12% in 2009, the biggest plunge since WW2, and globalisation is no longer flavour of the month – except with blinkered ideologues like Mike Moore, whom the Government has appointed as Ambassador to the US with an FTA as his self-proclaimed top priority. We’d be better off getting as far away as possible from this particular sinking ship.

A full blown US FTA will:

Remove any remaining “restrictions” on foreign investment, as the US regards NZ’s (purely token) oversight regime as “discriminating” against US transnational corporations, even though the Government has promised to further “liberalise” the Overseas Investment Act, a law which is in danger of being liberalised to death.

push up the price of medicines by potentially hundreds of millions of dollars a year by attacking Pharmac;

make access to digital recordings more expensive, and copying more restricted;

attack our GE controls and food labelling,

weaken our controls on food imports where they might carry diseases.

It is always presented as a means of getting NZ agricultural products into the US market. Ask Australian sugar cane growers how successful they were in getting their product into the US under the US/Australia FTA (Australia is one of the countries wishing to join the TPP, so that what they managed to protect from their FTA with the US is now also up for grabs). The Americans have a simple policy when it comes to “free trade” – do as they say, not as they do. In other words, they want the world’s markets opened up to their products, while keeping their own heavily subsidised agribusiness sector fully or heavily protected from outside competitors.

Both National and Labour myopically see a US FTA as being the Holy Grail of their adherence to the cargo cult of “free trade”. It’s actually a poisoned chalice and it will be New Zealand which will be poisoned by it.

This is also presented as NZ’s “reward” for being a loyal little satellite of the US, and taking a bigger role in the American war in Afghanistan. Older New Zealanders will remember the infamous “guns for butter” phrase of Sir Keith Holyoake, Prime Minister during our involvement in the Vietnam War. It means sending our soldiers to fight in US wars in order to, theoretically, gain trade access. Nothing much seems to have changed in the ensuing 40 years (except now it is “guns for milk”, as the Government’s trade policy is driven by a single minded focus on serving Fonterra’s interests). It is worth noting that the Waihopai spybase is NZ’s biggest contribution to each and any American war, much more so than any deployment of a few SAS troops to help prop up a horrendously corrupt Government of warlords and drug barons in Afghanistan.

People who kid themselves that “we” stand to gain from a Free Trade Agreement with the US would be wise to reflect on the rueful words of Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain’s Ambassador to the US in the runup to the 2003 US/UK invasion of Iraq. Speaking to the current public Inquiry into Britain’s part in that invasion and war: “Meyer expressed frustration that Britain was unable to gain much diplomatic leverage from its position as the US’ chief ally. Britain failed to persuade the US to liberalise trans-Atlantic air travel and, almost on the day when British commandoes joined the fighting in Afghanistan, the US imposed tariffs on imports of specialised British steel” (Press, 28/11/09). If this is the way that the US treats its “chief ally” when it comes to protecting its own trade and economic interests, how do you think little old NZ will get on?

For full details see the New Zealand Not For Sale Website www.nznotforsale.org

There you will find a wealth of information about just why this proposed Free Trade Agreement is such a bad thing.

We particularly recommend that you read Bill Rosenberg’s excellent article “Who Wins If We Get A Free Trade Deal With The US?”

Murray Horton

Secretary/Organiser

CAFCA

Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa

Box 2258, Christchurch, New Zealand

cafca@chch.planet.org.nz

http://www.cafca.org.nz