02) WALTZING CHRYSTIA AND THE TPP

By Johan Boyden

            The Trans Pacific Partnership. The largest trade agreement in the world, the most complex, and a political can of worms. The danger to the ruling class is that it might fail. The danger to the working class is that the TPP might succeed.

            The main architect of the deal is finance capital in the United States. Yet US public opinion is wary. Ipsos polls suggest many US citizens are concerned about the impact of the deal on manufacturing jobs. Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders has been firing broadsides at his rival Hilary Clinton for supporting Free Trade.

            Clinton says she now opposes the TPP, a claim which she repeated in early March while debating Sanders in Flint, Michigan. 

            A former auto town, Flint has been destroyed by Free Trade. Today, lead pipes and toxic waste are poisoning its children. In different ways, there are decaying former manufacturing communities like Flint across Canada.

            Although the TPP has been in the works for over a decade, it was largely unknown to most people until recently. In Canada, the TPP has gone from a death-bed election revelation of the Harper Conservatives to a hot potato for the Trudeau Liberals, falling into the briefcase of Chrystia Freeland, Minister of International Trade.

            But when life gives you hot potatoes, make hot potato salad. For some time, the Liberals have been campaigning to turn a bitter harvest from the capitalist crisis into something tastier for the public. Speaking at the Liberal Party Convention in 2014, Justin Trudeau was blunt:

            “And to wealthier Canadians, I say this: the growth we have seen over the past three decades has been the product of a broadly supported agenda. Investments in education, fiscal discipline, openness to trade. All of which the middle class voted for, repeatedly. Here’s the point: The original promise of that agenda was that everyone would share in the prosperity that it creates. That hasn’t happened. That’s not a political point. It’s a fact. If we don’t fix it, the middle class will stop supporting a growth agenda. That will make us all poorer.”

            “Fiscal discipline” and “openness to trade” are, of course, polite code words for something truly vile. Think of this “growth agenda” as a razor-sharp sword, with a double-edge. Free trade is not a gimmick that Trudeau has undertaken to sell to the people.  It is a central and principal economic policy of monopoly capitalism today.

            And winning back public confidence in the capitalist consensus is a mission with which Minister Freeland is well acquainted. After a journalist career reporting on the newly capitalist Ukraine and Russia (which she called “The Sale of the Century” in her book of that title), Freeland became a high-level editor at the Globe and Mail and New York Financial Times.

            Her second book, Plutocrats: The Rise Of The New Global Super-Rich And The Fall Of Everyone Else., is a warning call to the ruling class: shift gears, or risk losing power.

            “[T]he industrial revolution was so socially wrenching that it inspired the first coherent political ideology of class warfare—Marxism—and ultimately a violent revolutionary movement” Freeland writes. “The most astonishing political fact of the past two centuries is that [Capitalism’s overthrow] didn’t happen.”

            “The victorious communists were influential far beyond their own borders—America’s New Deal and western Europe’s generous social welfare systems were created partly in response to the red threat. Better to compromise with the 99 percent than to risk being overthrown by them,” she says, or: “better to give the working class an effective political voice, and a social safety net, than to risk having their Bolshevik vanguard seize power altogether.”

            In an interview on the “TED Talks” website, Freeland goes further, commenting that “If you’re a smart capitalist who thinks for the long-term, then you’re smart enough to realize that an economic set-up which is not delivering for the vast majority of people […] is not going to last.”

            “This isn’t just the story of one country. This is something we are seeing across the western developed economy — that 21st century capitalism isn’t delivering for the middle class.”

            These comments should contextualize Freeland’s current effort to sell the TPP, which will include a full parliamentary debate.

            She has already been very busy “consulting.” According to her twitter feed, most of Freeland’s meetings have been with big business: Ford, GM and Chrysler; Pharmaceutical giants; the Council of Forest Industries; the Canadian Cattlemen; the Port of Halifax; etc. One wonders what meetings don’t get tweeted.

            As we reported previously in People’s Voice, Freeland also met with labour on the TPP. In fact, there have been a number of meetings, especially with UNIFOR (including their Executive and an Oshawa local), but also with NUPGE, the Teamsters, and the Canadian Labour Congress. Notably absent are CUPE, the Steelworkers and Quebec’s CSN.

            These meetings should be viewed as a strategy to dampen opposition to the TPP, furthering an illusion of giving the working class an “effective” voice. But they will not alter the fundamental essence of the agreement.

            Transnational capital cannot afford a repeat of the last decade’s FTAA, which broke down largely due to popular opposition. Today, public perception of Free Trade is somewhat cynical. Freeland, Trudeau and Clinton are delicately manoeuvring, trying to smoothly waltz this vile creature through its debut in the court of public opinion. What could disrupt that dance is organized, class-conscious resistance. This is the challenge we face. The sooner we start, the better.

            (Boyden is the Central Organizer of the Communist Party of Canada.)

The above article is from the March 16-31, 2016, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading socialist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)