CHICAGO — With TV cameras in front of them and a small entourage of supporters behind, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield cheerfully pushed a hand truckload of boxes down Michigan Avenue on this sunny but crisp morning. They were attempting to deliver to the Chicago Hilton and Towers Hotel not an order of their famous ice cream but nearly 20,000 postcards.
The missives, collected at their initiative during summer concerts, rallies and other events, were directed to the office of the U.S. trade representative. USTR staff was inside the hotel negotiating with trade ministers from eight other Pacific Rim countries over a proposed Trans-Pacific Free Trade Agreement that the nine countries intended to complete by November.
Ben and Jerry have long been politically active on progressive causes and adopted a corporate policy of buying milk from small, regional dairy farms near their home base in Vermont. Over a year ago, as they adopted fair trade principles for all of their ingredients, they became more interested in global trade policy.
“There’s no reason in the world why trade policies can’t be written for a more just and sustainable world,” Greenfield says.
Blocked from entering the front door by Chicago police and hotel guards, Ben and Jerry pleaded that this was just an exercise in democracy, then pretended to sneak around a large, humorless hotel security official. But they pledged eventually to deliver their message — “fair deal or no deal.”
“I’m actually a little surprised they wouldn’t l us deliver postcards to the USTR,” Greenfield said. “They knew what was in the boxes. These are post cards from our neighbors.” And those neighbors asked the Obama administration not to pursue a NAFTA-style agreement in the Pacific that would protect multinational corporations’ rights. Instead, they wanted a treaty that would
- enforce international labor standards,
- avoid investor rights clauses that undermine environmental and consumer protections,
- guarantee countries’ rights to obtain affordable, generic medicines for their citizens, and
- allow countries to support small-scale farmers and determine national food policies.
On Labor Day, hundreds of union and community supporters of fair trade rallied, then marched to the Hilton with the same message. Today representatives of diverse constituencies, including the Citizens Trade Campaign, Public Citizen, HealhGap, Friends of the Earth, the Family Farms Coalition, and Stand Up! Chicago (a labor-community coalition started by the Service Employee union), joined Cohen and Greenfield.
After the failure of post-NAFTA negotiations by the Clinton administration to create new trading blocs for Asia and the Pacific and for the Americas, the Bush administration attempted to expand both the geographic and policy scope of an emerging Asian-Pacific partnership. For now it includes the US, Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Chile, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore, but it could be designed to add more countries in the future, even China.
Obama, who had campaigned for a new style of trade agreement, delayed action on the Bush-proposed talks, but by late 2009 he embraced the project and the old paradigm. Although the new text is not publicly available (even though corporate trade lawyers get access), critics — who have surreptitiously seen parts of the text — say it largely follows the NAFTA, corporate-rights model.
But it seems that the Trans-Pacific Free Trade Agreement not only is running into broad-based opposition, including from many businesses without Ben & Jerry’s high-profile social consciousness as well as unions, environmentalists and many other progressive groups. It also faces numerous internal conflicts and contradictions, argues Public Citizen Global Trade Watch director Lori Wallach.
First, the document under discussion apparently includes provisions that undermine Obama’s campaign promises, ongoing policies, and major legislative accomplishments, Wallach says. First of all, following the experience of trade agreements with Mexico and many other countries, the agreement is likely to cost the U.S. jobs. That’s unwelcome economically — and politically, for Obama — at a time the country desperately needs to increase employment. And since countries representing 80 percent of the group’s GDP already have trade agreements with the U.S., few markets for the U.S. would be opening up. And the administration proposes prohibiting “buy American”-style clauses governing government procurement, putting many potential jobs from any future stimulus in jeopardy
On another front, the Obama administration negotiators are trying to prohibit governments from establishing formularies that define acceptable drugs and strengthen public plans in negotiating drug prices. Yet many of the TPFTA participating governments rely on such formularies, as does the Affordable Care Act that Obama helped push through Congress.
The deal would also mandate financial deregulation in all signatory countries, not only undermining protections countries have put in place, including the Dodd-Frank legislation that Obama supported.
Wallach also cited international conflicts that could make agreement difficult. Many countries object to the investor rights rules, strict intellectual property protection, limits on subsidies to fledgling industries and other limits on development strategies that rich countries like the U.S. used to industrialize.
A different kind of deal, which might create jobs in the U.S. and in other countries, is possible. “We could have a fair trade agreement this fast,” Wallach said, snapping her fingers, “if the U.S. didn’t insist on jacking up medicine prices, outrageous foreign investment rules, and crazy bans on domestic preference in procurement. If this was a trade agreement with countries trading in what they have a real comparative advantage in, then the agreement could be negotiated quickly with about 50 pages. If they added worker rights and environmental protections and did not have all this corporate garbage, people would sign. They could do a free-trade agreement if it was about trade.”
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David Moberg, a former senior editor of In These Times, was on staff with the magazine from when it began publishing in 1976 until his passing in July 2022. Before joining In These Times, he completed his work for a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago and worked for Newsweek. He received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Nation Institute for research on the new global economy.
