Alexander Cockburn and Free Trade

Dear Mr. President,

Alexander Cockburn died last year. I miss his wild, articulate and dead-on observations, but a collection of his essays and columns has just been published: “A Colossal Wreck: A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption and American Culture.” He was a sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued observer of both politics and culture and had the ability to see America with the eye of a transplanted foreigner and write with the wit, acerbic tongue and love of language that characterizes the Irish. There’s a review of the book in today’s NYT (p. C1) and, by sheer coincidence, also an article on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (T.P.P.): “House Stalls Trade Pact” p. B1. T.P.P. is another one of those free trade deals that’s being negotiated in almost total secrecy behind closed doors. You’ve been pushing hard to “fast track” it, meaning no amendments and no Senate filibuster. There’s been a lot of opposition to T.P.P. at the grass roots level, not only here but in other countries as well (there’s a photo in the Times article of protesters in Malaysia), but little mention of that in the corporate media and ignored by your administration nabobs. Congressional opposition too, has been simmering and all of a sudden, 151 House Democratic and 22 Republicans have signed letters opposing it. Others have signaled individual opposition. Your chief negotiator, Michael Froman, claims the administration has been working “hand-in-glove” with Congress but many House members counter that they’ve been kept in the dark “by not allowing congressional aides to observe the negotiations and declining to make certain full texts available.” It’s business as usual in The Bubble. There’s concern about jobs being lost, about lack of oversight and regulation, about food safety, health and privacy issues, intellectual property issues, etc. So who benefits? The usual suspects. Alexander Cockburn nailed it back in 1996 in an article on NAFTA: “Free trade is a class issue. The better-off like it. Their stocks go up as the outsourcing company heading south lays off its work force. The worse-off see the jobs disappear.” It’s as true of T.P.P. today as it was of NAFTA then. Here’s another quote from another column that seems appropriate to T.P.P., this one written in 2001: “Since the 1996 Telecommunications ‘Reform’ Act, conceived in darkness and signed in stealth, the situation has got even worse.” If T.P.P. goes through, for most of us, you can bet that things will get much worse, indeed.