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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:
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.”
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:
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.
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