White House
Reveals Desperate Lack of Support for TPP
Widespread Environmental Opposition to TPP Leads to Embarrassing White House
Statement Claiming Environmental Support – the Opposite of Reality
By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers
April 08, 2015 "ICH"
- The White House has
published a handful of comments from “environmental groups” implying widespread
support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and other corporate trade agreements.
Yet these cherry-picked comments from some of the most conservative,
corporate-funded environmental groups actually reveal the administration’s
desperation to find any support for such deals.
Indeed, the reality is that scores of major
environmental organizations including Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense
Council, League of Conservation Voters, Defenders of Wildlife, Union of
Concerned Scientists, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, 350.org, and many others
oppose fast-track for the TPP. Many recognize the TPP is a backward step for
environmental protection that will help push the world over the tipping point
for climate change.
The White House’s false image of
environmental support for the TPP
The White House is having a hard time generating any
momentum for fast-track trade authority for the TPP and other agreements. The
Obama administration pushed to stop the Seattle
City Council from opposing fast-track legislation and the TPP, but instead
got a unanimous vote against them from a major port city that trades with Asia.
One of the key issues that has fostered opposition
to the TPP is the impact of the agreement on the environment. In order to
counter the reality of broad environmental opposition, the
White House published an article seeking to spin reality. The White House
carefully selected environmental groups that are heavily corporate-funded and
then cherry-picked quotes inaccurately portraying their position. In fact,
all the groups quoted by the White House have said they have not endorsed the
TPP and are waiting to see what the agreement says.
In response to the White House effort
Karthik Ganapathy, a spokesman for 350.org said: “So many groups and
organizations who care about climate change have repeatedly bashed this
corporate giveaway — and suggesting otherwise is nothing short of misleading
cynicism.” And,
Jake Schmidt, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s international
program said: “The White House took some of their statements and spun them
out. There are a large number of environmental groups that came out pretty
clearly and said … ‘What we’ve seen on TPP doesn’t look good.’”
One of the key issues fostering opposition to the
TPP is the impact of the agreement on the environment. In order to counter the
reality of broad environmental opposition, the White
House Blog published an article on March 31 seeking to spin reality. The
White House carefully selected quotes from environmental groups that are heavily
corporate-funded, then it cherry-picked quotes inaccurately portraying the
positions of these groups.
The first quote comes from Carter Roberts, CEO of
the World Wildlife Fund. WWF, which is viewed
as one of the most conservative environmental groups, receives more than $50
million in grants from the government, making up 19 percent of its funding. Corporate
Watch accuses WWF of being too close to businesses to campaign objectively. WWF
was one of seven environmental groups that provided cover for President
Clinton to fast track NAFTA. In 2010 WWF received
$80 million from corporations, including many heavy-polluting industrial or
energy companies. Some donors are actively involved in deforestation and other
environmental abuses, and WWF has hired
executives from those companies.
Jeffrey St. Clair wrote for Counterpunch in
2002 that WWF “functions more like a corporate enterprise than a public interest
group.” He continued, reporting that it “rakes in millions from corporations,
including Alcoa, Citigroup, the Bank of America, Kodak, J.P. Morgan, the Bank of
Tokyo, Philip Morris, Waste Management and DuPont. They even offer an annual
conservation award funded by and named after the late oil baron J. Paul Getty.
It hawks its own credit card and showcases its own online boutique. As a result,
WWF’s budget has swelled to over $100 million a year and it’s not looking back.”
From this corporate/government enterprise the White
House picks a quote that claims the TPP is “one of those potentially
game-changing solutions . . . to help protect our planet.” This quote was lifted
from a
blog post that WWF CEO Roberts penned for the Huffington Post in January
2014, right after the leak of the environmental chapter which showed no
environmental enforcement in the TPP.
Yet Roberts also notes in his post that the TPP
could protect the environment if it “includes strong environmental obligations
[that] could provide critical new protections for some of our planet’s important
natural resources.” And he asks: “Do they keep their promise to create an
ambitious 21st century trade deal with a fully enforceable environment chapter
or do they abandon real environmental protections for weak, voluntary promises?”
Despite the promises of U.S. Trade Representative
Michael Froman, it seems the TPP wouldn’t even pass WWF’s test because it lacks
an environmental enforcement mechanism.
The next quote, which continues to use phrasing like
“if the administration can deliver,” comes from a
March 16 letter to President Obama from several organizations including the
Nature Conservancy, the largest and most corporate environmental group in the
Americas with assets of $6.14 billion in 2014 and $1.1
billion in revenue. President and CEO Mark Tercek is a former managing
director of Goldman Sachs. The Nature Conservancy has ties to roughly 1,900
corporate sponsors. Its
funders include notorious polluters such as Arco, Archer-Daniels-Midland,
BP, DuPont and Shell. Its governing board consists of numerous executives and
directors of oil companies, chemical producers, auto manufacturers, mining
concerns, logging operations, and electric utilities.
Indeed, the Nature Conservancy has a reputation for
remaining silent on key environmental issues that involve business practices in
general. But it has been known to sometimes work with corporations to weaken
environmental laws, as with the rewrite
of the Endangered Species Act. The Nature Conservancy’s stated mission is to
preserve land, yet it permits
oil drilling, timbering, mining, and natural gas drilling on land donated to
the organization and has been involved with controversial
land deals.
The excerpt from that letter is followed by a
snippet from a
March 20 statement from the Humane Society, which boasts $229 million in
assets and $125 million in annual income. While there is a constant presence of
dogs and cats in its fundraising, the Humane Society is not affiliated with
local animal shelters. It gives less
than 1 percent of its funding to animal shelters, spending more
on its pension plan and lobbying. Positive comments from the Humane Society
are especially strange, since one of the goals of the agreement, according
to Friends of the Earth, is “to undercut consumers’ right to know what is in
their food and whether the food is produced in a humane manner protective of
animal welfare.”
Other statements pointed to in the White House Blog
come from Bloomberg Philanthropies and The Center for American Progress, a
virtual White House think tank, whose former director, John Podesta, served as
chief of staff to President Clinton and as counselor to President Obama.
The reality: Broad opposition in the
environmental and climate justice communities
The White House is well-aware of the vast
environmental and climate justice opposition to the TPP and fast-track trade
authority, so it is intentionally trying to deceive the public. Forty-four
environmental groups expressed their opposition to TPP and other deals like it
in a Jan.
21 letter to Congress. The letter begins:
“As leading U.S. environmental and science
organizations, we write to express our strong opposition to ‘fast track’
trade promotion authority and to urge you to oppose any legislation that
would limit the ability of Congress to ensure that trade pacts deliver
benefits for communities, workers, public health, and the environment.”
The letter goes on to specifically describe how the
deals being negotiated would undermine the environment rather than protect it,
and they urge a totally new approach to trade that creates a race to the top for
environmental, health, jobs and other areas, rather than a race to the bottom.
This new approach needs to be transparent and participatory, not secret, rushed
and without broad participation, they assert.
When the letter was released, Michael
Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, said, “Trade should be done
right — not just fast — to protect our families and neighbors from pollution and
climate disruption. Fast tracking flawed trade pacts is a deal-breaker. With
fast track, we would be trading away clean air, clean water, and safe
communities.”
Likewise, Peter
Lehner, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s executive director, said,
“Congress shouldn’t give a fast lane to trade pacts that don’t protect our
public health and climate. These trade bills would give foreign corporations and
governments the right to challenge our bedrock protections for clean air, safe
drinking water, healthy food and proper chemical safeguards.”
In a recent report, Teamster
Mike Dolan writes that NRDC was one of seven environmental groups that
provided cover to President Clinton when he fast-tracked NAFTA through Congress.
The environmental chapter of the TPP was published
by WikiLeaks in January 2014. It was a major setback for the TPP and
fast-track because it solidified opposition to the trade agreements among
environmental and climate justice advocates. Indeed, the leak showed that the
TPP represents a step backward from the Bush-era deals because it provides no
environmental enforcement mechanism. A joint
analysis of the leaked environment chapter by Sierra Club, World Wildlife Fund,
and NRDC notes, “[T]he leaked text takes a significant step back from the
May 2007 agreement.”
“Environmental protections are only as effective
as their enforcement provisions, and a trade agreement with weak enforcement
language will do little or nothing to protect our communities and
wildlife,” Lehner said,
further noting, “Considering the dire state of many fisheries and forests in
the Asia-Pacific region and the myriad threats to endangered wildlife, we
need a modern trade agreement with real teeth, not just empty rhetoric.”
As a result of the environmental community’s strong
reaction to the leak, a month later more than 120 members of Congress sent a
clear message to U.S. Trade Representative Froman: They could not support
the TPP trade pact unless it had a robust, fully enforceable environment chapter
addressing the core conservation challenges of the region.
To make matters worse, another
leak revealed that the U.S. Trade Representative is actually trying to
weaken language in the pact that deals with climate disruption and biodiversity.
The U.S. negotiating position seeks to eliminate even a reference to climate
change and the international forum designed to address the climate crisis — the
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Desperate moment for
the White House on trade
Why would the White House put out such a weak
statement falsely implying environmental support? The administration knows that
the environmental and labor impacts of the TPP and other deals are the two
biggest areas of concern surrounding the deal. If there is opposition from the
environmental and labor movements, it becomes very difficult to pass fast-track
legislation. Yet the White House could not put out a stronger statement because
there is no real support in the environmental and climate justice movements for
fast track or TPP-type deals. Indeed, this misleading statement from
corporate-environmentalists was the best they could do.
This is not the first time the White House has been
caught attempting to mislead on an important fast-track or TPP issue. Indeed,
dishonesty seems to have become a tactic:
-
The U.S. Trade Representative has been making
false claims that the TPP will create 650,000 jobs. For this claim, the
Washington Post, which generally supports trade agreements, gave the Obama
administration four
Pinocchio noses, the highest dishonesty score possible.
-
And recently, when U.S. Trade Representative
Froman met with Democrats in Congress to try to fudge the international
trade deficit, Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) described the dishonesty as attempts
at “baffling”
Democrats “with bullshit.”
Froman, appointed by President Obama, is negotiating
three massive trade agreements in secret under the current administration. Now
the president is pushing to rush thousands of pages of legalese through Congress
without any congressional hearings and no real opportunity for citizen input —
only brief arguments on the floor of Congress and then an up or down vote
without amendments.
It is bad enough to secretly negotiate rigged
corporate trade deals for six years, classify it as a secret so it can’t be
discussed and attempt to fast track it through Congress without any real debate,
now to justify secret agreements with misleading statements shows it is time for
President Obama to give up on passing fast track for corporate rigged
agreements. The response is clear – the American people are not buying it. We
need a completely new approach to trade, one that is transparent and
participatory and that puts people and planet before profits.
Kevin Zeese
and Margaret Flowers co-direct
Popular Resistance.
