Passing The TPP Test.

Test Mission: The way in which Prime Minister Ardern and Trade Minister Parker conduct themselves at the TPP-11 discussions in Danang, Vietnam, will have a major bearing on how the new Labour-NZ First-Green Government is perceived by its supporters. To sign the TPP, without first fixing it, would be to "Fail" the first major test of the Coalition's political resolve.

IN JUST NINE DAYS, Prime Minister Ardern, and her Trade Minister, David Parker, will be in Vietnam. At a side-bar gathering to the Apec Conference that summons them, they will meet with the remaining 11 signatories to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). At that gathering, the New Zealand government will attempt to negotiate a number of minor modifications to the agreement.

Essentially, the Prime Minister and Trade Minister will be asserting their country’s right to prevent foreign speculators from purchasing urban property and farmland within its borders. A right the previous National government, for reasons it never adequately explained, failed to assert. A right reserved by just about every other signatory to the TPP agreement.

The Prime Minister and Trade Minister will also assert New Zealand’s right to renegotiate its predecessors’ acceptance of the Investor/State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) procedures of the TPP. These are the procedures which grant foreign corporations the power to sue the New Zealand Government for legislating in what it believes to be the best interests of its own people. Such litigation will take place in corporate-controlled tribunals, without reference to the New Zealand judiciary. Once again, the previous National government’s failure to defend this, the most fundamental duty of any sovereign state, awaits a convincing explanation.

Presented in this fashion, the mission of the Prime Minister and Trade Minister is not only an important, but also a necessary, act of remediation. In its present form, the TPP should never have been signed by the former National Government. Accordingly, any failure on the part of the remaining 11 signatories to accede to the Labour-NZ First-Green Government’s entirely reasonable requests for minor, country-specific, modifications (President Donald Trump has already pulled the United States out of what he dismissed as “a very bad deal”) should trigger New Zealand’s immediate withdrawal from the agreement.

What a pity, then, that the Prime Minister’s and Trade Minister’s mission is not being presented in this fashion. Ms Ardern and Mr Parker will depart for Danang shrouded in the same obfuscating clouds of free-trade rhetoric that have prevented the New Zealand public from ever being vouchsafed a clear understanding of the TPP agreement.

Rather than allowing an open and informed debate on the pros and cons of the TPP, the free-trade lobby is presenting Ms Ardern’s trip to Apec as a crucial test of her political and economic maturity. Any outcome other than New Zealand’s unequivocal ratification of TPP-11 will be publicly represented as a significant failure.

Even if the Prime Minister and Trade Minister manage to secure their desired modifications to the TPP text, the free-trade fanatics will still insist that the Labour-NZ First-Green Government has fallen at its first hurdle. By displaying hostility to globalism in general, and foreign investment in particular, the new government will be accused of endangering New Zealand’s economic security.

As if that wasn’t reason enough for Ms Ardern and Mr Parker to feel nervous, the opponents of an unmodified TPP are as likely to turn her trip to Vietnam into a critical test of her government’s intentions as its supporters.

The fight to turn Labour away from what its “free-trade-right-or-wrong” position under Helen Clark has been as gruelling as it was long. For those engaged in this fight, persuading the Labour caucus to take a firm position on the critical question of national sovereignty constituted a pivotal victory. Without it, Labour’s relationships with NZ First and the Green Party would have come under enormous strain. Indeed, had Labour not refused to sign-on to the TPP, as negotiated by the National Government, it is difficult to see the formation of a Labour-NZ First-Green government ever becoming a realistic possibility.

Labour’s opposition to TPP was also an important factor in deescalating the vociferous protest movement which reached its crescendo in February 2016. Had all the parties committed to changing the government not been more-or-less on the same page in relation to the inadequacy of the National Party’s TPP, it is debateable whether or not the massive protest demonstrations it was beginning to inspire would have proved so easy to wind down.

To the New Zealanders who feared that TPP would bring with it a permanent loss of their nation’s sovereignty, the following words from Labour were a source of considerable reassurance:

“The TPPA will have ramifications for generations of New Zealanders. For their sake, we should not so lightly enter into an agreement which may exacerbate long-term challenges for our economy, workforce, and society.”

The votes that made the Labour-NZ First-Green government possible were inspired by many factors. That the three parties’ common opposition to the TPP was one of then cannot be disputed.

As Ms Ardern and Mr Parker wing their way to Vietnam, they should consider very carefully whose test of free-trade principles they most wish to pass.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 31 October 2017.

Only A Matter Of Time: American Fascism Awaits Its Marching Orders.

Trump's Angry Acolytes: That the vector of American fascism would be a cross-class alliance of marginalised white workers and anxious suburban conservatives has been obvious since 1968, when hundreds of working-class “Hard-Hats” marched off their New York construction sites to beat up young anti-war protesters – and “the great silent majority” of small town and suburban USA cheered them on.

 

LAST FRIDAY, on the Seattle campus of the University of Washington, a Trump supporter shot a Trump opponent. The (non-fatal) shooting took place during a violent protest against the presence of Milo Yiannopoulos – the tech editor of Breitbart News. Violence erupted after Yiannopoulos’s opponents formed a picket-line and physically obstructed the Alt-Right commentator’s followers from entering the auditorium where he was speaking.

In a nation where “the right to bear arms” is constitutionally protected, it can only be a matter of time before such clashes escalate into a ferocious firefight – and fatalities.

What happens then is all-too-easy to predict. President Trump will denounce his political opponents as enemies of free speech and democracy. Federal, state and local law enforcement agencies will crack down hard on anti-Trump agitation. More ominously, the President’s most vociferous supporters will militarise themselves into special protection squads. Presented to the American public as “self-defence” organisations, the actual purpose of these goon squads will be to intimidate and/or terrorise progressive individuals and groups into silence.

Thus will President Trump pay homage to his mentor Vladimir Putin – whose use of “patriotic” organisations (often comprising a hard core of former soldiers and secret policemen) to shut down his political opponents is well documented. The appearance on American streets of an aggressive political militia will be the strongest proof yet that the United States has fallen under the sway of a fascist regime.

The arrival of these political thugs will force Trump’s opponents to make a choice. Either: fall quietly into line with the new realities of American political life. Or: put your own personal safety (not-to-mention the safety of your friends and family) at risk by continuing to speak out against the policies of the Trump Administration.

This choice will likely be an urgent one for members of the journalistic profession. If the Putin comparison holds true, it will not be long before at least one reporter, columnist or blogger pays the ultimate price for exposing the sins of Trump and his supporters.

If fearless journalism leads directly to murder, as is currently the case in the Russian Federation, America’s editors will feel torn between the duty-of-care they owe to their employees, and their democratic duty to defend freedom of expression. Their decision-making will, almost certainly, be simplified by their publishers, America’s huge media corporations, making it clear that the shareholders’ dividends (and the CEO’s bonuses!) are not to be jeopardised by Quixotic editors sanctioning crusades to rescue the First Amendment.

With the consequences of opposition clearly evident to the by-now-thoroughly-cowed news media, Trump’s people will invite the Fox News Network to assume the role played by the state-owned broadcasters of the Russian Federation. Fox will receive the Administration-approved editorial line on matters political and cultural, and all the other mainstream media organisations will be expected to follow its lead.

The quiescence of the American working-class during any such period of political co-ordination will likely be secured by the Trump Administration’s skilful co-optation of the American trade unions. Already, Trump has received praise from the leader of the US trade union movement, AFL-CIO President, Richard Trumka, for nixing the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Trumka hailed the President’s actions as “just the first in a series of necessary policy changes required to build a fair and just global economy.”

Further union backing is to be anticipated as Trump ramps up his “American jobs for American workers” infrastructure programme. Few union leaders – and especially not the leaders of the steelworkers, auto and construction unions – will be willing to kill Trump’s golden, job-creating goose by standing in solidarity with the environmentalist and Native American opponents of the controversial Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines – both of which were restarted today (25/1/17) by Executive Order.

Hard-Hat Riot - New York 1968

 

That the vector of American fascism would be a cross-class alliance of marginalised white workers and anxious suburban conservatives has been obvious ever since 1968, when hundreds of working-class “Hard-Hats” marched off their New York construction sites to beat up young anti-war protesters – and “the great silent majority” of small town and suburban America cheered them on. Nixon eulogised these voters. Reagan primed them. Trump has set them in motion.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 26 January 2017.