Re: Scapegoating Labor for Fast Track's Defeat (fwd)

[robert <http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert>]

Glad they mentioned the EFF.  This secretive trade deal does indeed go too
far.

 > From: Noelle <noelle>
 > Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2015 10:47:43 -0700 (PDT)
 >
 >  > From: [** utf-8 charset **] FAIR<http://www.fair.org/~fair>
 >  > Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2015 16:47:57 +0000
 >  > 
 >  > The New York Times sums up opposition to fast track in one image: AFL-CIO 
 >  > president Richard Trumka. (Photo: Win Mcnamee/Getty Images)
 >  > Corporate media have a storyline ready to explain the defeat (for the time 
 >  > being, anyway) of the Trans Pacific Partnership : Big Labor is to blame.
 >  > This was set up well in advance of progressive Democrats outmaneuvering the 
 >  > Obama administration in Congress to thwart the passage of fast track 
 >  > authorityâ??expedited rules for approving trade pacts that are seen as 
 >  > necessary to pass TPP, a vast commercial agreement among 12 Pacific Rim 
 >  > nations. A Wall Street Journal editorial (4/16/15) laid it out in April:
 >  > In the US, Democrats have tried to prevent giving the president trade 
 >  > promotion authority precisely because it will extend trade across both the 
 >  > Pacific and Atlantic oceans. For their friends in Big Labor, this is 
 >  > anathema.
 >  > USA Today editorialized in May (5/7/15; FAIR Blog, 5/5/15):
 >  > The pan-Pacific deal&#8230;would help the US retain a key role in the region,
 >  >  while promoting competition that would give consumers more choices and 
 >  > lower costs.
 >  > Democrats, however, are wedded to unions who blame trade, and trade 
 >  > agreements, for the decline in manufacturing jobs.
 >  > As the vote loomed, USA Today (6/8/15) returned to the theme:
 >  > House Democrats are fighting the deal for a simple, but not very good, 
 >  > reason. Labor has pulled out all the stops to persuade, cajole and pressure 
 >  > them into killing it.
 >  > The paper warned: &#8220;An overwhelming vote to block the trade deal&#
 >  > 8230;would be widely interpreted as the Democrats putting the interests of 
 >  > unions first.&#8221;
 >  > Sure enough, after the vote, that was the interpretationâ??in corporate 
 >  > media, at least. &#8220;Laborâ??s Might Seen in Failure of Trade Deal&#8221; 
 >  > was the New York Times&#8216; front-page headline (6/14/15). &#8220;Trade 
 >  > Defeat Is Huge Win for Labor,&#8221; Politico (6/12/15) declared. &#8220;A 
 >  > Big Win for Big Labor,&#8221; The Atlantic (6/12/15) called it.
 >  > The broad coalition against TPP was seldom acknowledged in corporate media. (
 >  > cc photo: Neil Ballantyne/Wikimedia)
 >  > Such pieces downplayed or ignored the broad progressive coalition that 
 >  > opposes fast track. A letter circulated by the Citizens Trade Campaign 
 >  > illustrates how widely the resistance to corporate-friendly trade deals has 
 >  > spread: Among its 2,000 co-signers are many union groups, to be sure, but 
 >  > also some of the biggest names in environmental activism, including 
 >  > Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, Defenders of Wildlife, 
 >  > 350.org, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the League of 
 >  > Conservation Voters, who charge that TPP would allow corporations to 
 >  > overturn environmental policies.
 >  > Numerous consumer groups joined in, like Consumers Union, the Consumer 
 >  > Federation of America and the National Consumers League,  concerned about 
 >  > TPP&#8217;s impact on consumer protection. Numerous groups representing 
 >  > family farmers also signed on, seeing TPP as aimed at helping agribusiness 
 >  > crowd them out. Likewise groups concerned about the pact&#8217;s potential 
 >  > to make life-saving drugs unaffordable, and to expand copyrights to the 
 >  > benefit of corporate media (who, it should be remembered, are reporting on a 
 >  > fight they very much have a dog in).
 >  > For these and other reasons, the declaration of opposition to fast track was 
 >  > joined by numerous general grassroots progressive organizations, like 
 >  > MoveOn.org, People for the American Way, Americans for Democratic Action 
 >  > and Common Cause, and by a wide spectrum of liberal religious institutions, 
 >  > including the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Evangelical Lutheran Church 
 >  > in America, the United Methodist Church&#8217;s General Board of Church and 
 >  > Society, American Friends Service Committee, the American Jewish World 
 >  > Service and Catholics United. Civil rights groups like the NAACP and women&#
 >  > 8217;s rights groups like Feminist Majority also took the anti-fast track 
 >  > side.
 >  > &#8220;It&#8217;s preposterous to think that the labor movement could 
 >  > browbeat a majority of House Democrats if most Democrats in Congress were 
 >  > not already sick of being strong-armed by corporate elites and Democratic 
 >  > presidents in thrall to them,&#8221; wrote American Prospect co-editor 
 >  > Robert Kuttner (Huffington Post, 6/14/15) in a post-mortem on the fast track 
 >  > vote. More to the point, it&#8217;s impossible to imagine that labor alone 
 >  > could have swayed a majority of Democrats&#8211;and overcome the 9-to-1 
 >  > advantage pro-fast track groups had in campaign contributionsâ??if virtually 
 >  > every organized Democratic constituency hadn&#8217;t made it clear that 
 >  > defeating fast track was a top priority.
 >  > Yet all these movements tended to drop out of establishment media accounts 
 >  > of the fast track fight, leaving labor as the lone opponent. Nine-tenths of 
 >  > the way through, that &#8220;Labor&#8217;s Might&#8221; New York Times 
 >  > piece acknowledges that &#8220;the hostility of the industrial unions toward 
 >  > trade deals has spread to a growing roster of liberal activists&#8221;â??but 
 >  > gives no clue as to who those activists might be.
 >  > Think how different the impact of these stories would be if, instead of 
 >  > limiting fast track opposition to organized labor, which now represents 
 >  > just 11 percent of US workers, media reported that pretty much every 
 >  > environmental group you&#8217;ve ever heard of thinks TPP will be bad for 
 >  > the planet, consumer groups warn that it will be bad for consumers, and 
 >  > maybe the church you attend on Sunday is against it too.
 >  > Interestingly, the openly right-wing press is more willing to acknowledge 
 >  > environmental opposition, perhaps assuming that for their audience 
 >  > treehuggers are as much a bogeyman as labor: The New York Post (4/28/15) 
 >  > says that &#8220;Obamaâ??s problem&#8221; is &#8220;fellow Democrats â?? 
 >  > pandering to unions and greens,&#8221; while the Wall Street Journal (
 >  > 4/16/15) says that &#8220;on the Democratic left the opposition includes an 
 >  > array of unions, environmentalists and anti-business activists.&#8221; Such 
 >  > admissions are seldom to be seen in news outlets whose audiences actually 
 >  > care what environmental groups think.
 >  > One corporate outlet that did a notably better job was Newsweek (6/12/15), 
 >  > whose explainer, headlined &#8220;What Is the Trans-Pacific Partnership and 
 >  > Why Are Critics Upset by It?,&#8221; actually attempted to answer that 
 >  > question. Reporter Taylor Wofford notes that &#8220;internet privacy 
 >  > advocates like those at the Electronic Frontier Foundation say that 
 >  > regulations in the leaked chapter on intellectual property go too far&#8221; 
 >  > and that &#8220;environmentalists were upset at what they saw in the leaked 
 >  > chapter on environmental regulations.&#8221;
 >  > In the last paragraph, Newsweek notes that &#8220;other groups have shown 
 >  > concern too&#8221;â??like &#8220;the AFL-CIO, a federation of unions,&#8221; 
 >  > for instance.
 >  > 
 >  >  
 >  > Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org.Â