Fast-trackless waste

Bulgarian Army officers fighting over cards, sidearms drawn, 1936 or 1937. Wikimedia Commons.

Pointless argument going on at Political Animal this weekend over the stupid Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, which I swore I was going to stop defending, but the bros keep tricking me into it. There's something toward the end of this exchange, though, that gets to the meat of what really bothers me about the anti-TPP campaign, and the question of internationalism.

I'm not copying it here because it's a Disqus thread and Blogger doesn't like the formating, but it started off with somebody called ninjascience suggesting I don't know the TPP isn't a treaty, and kept insisting if the fast-track authority was not passed the negotiating teams would just buckle down and finish writing the thing anyway.

Obviously readers here know I'm aware TPP isn't a treaty; that's the point, that international trade agreements for the past 80 years (which is the entire history of international trade agreements) take the form of agreements rather than treaties, because treaties with the US and its bizarre system of Senate ratification are too difficult and chancy.

The history of 20th-century trade negotiations starts with the Senate learning that it had the power to really muck things up, when it refused to vote out a treaty for the first time in its history, in 1919, and made sure that the War to End War couldn't even end itself.

And then it did it again. One of the worst things about Congress is that it can be pressured (by capitalists, not working people) into protectionism at the wrong time, the worst of all times being 1930, when they passed the vile Smoot-Hawley tariff, which played such a tremendous role in turning the 1929 crash into a worldwide Great Depression, which led in the end to them basically pleading with FDR, "Stop us before we protect again," and he did, as the Congressional Research Service tells us:

The damaging effects of Smoot-Hawley prompted the second major trade legislative event in the 1930s. Congress, with the guidance and encouragement of Secretary of State Cordell Hull, himself a former Senator, developed and enacted the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934 (RTAA; P.L. 73-316). The RTAA authorized the President to enter into reciprocal trade agreements that reduced tariffs within pre-approved levels. The tariffs were applied on an MFN basis. Under the RTAA, Congress authorized the President to implement the new tariffs by proclamation without additional legislation....

For the first time, Congress expressly delegated to the President an expanded trade agreements authority to reduce tariffs within congressionally predefined ranges. In so doing, some argued, Congress aimed to lessen the political pressure from special interests it often faced.

This minimal surrender, not so much of Senatorial authority as ability to step on their own dicks (they set the tariff targets in advance, they just couldn't change their minds to go back on their word after the deed was done) worked so well they renewed it 11 times, then plucked up their courage and awarded themselves the ability to vote on the agreements:

Under the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, Congress granted the President authority for five years to enter into agreements that negotiated the reduction or elimination of tariffs. The act also expanded Congress’s role in the negotiating process by requiring the President to submit for congressional review a copy of each concluded agreement and a presidential statement explaining why the agreement was necessary...

And that was enough to basically put an end to the protective tariff as a barrier to trade, forever and ever, around the world (it's still used as a defensive weapon against somebody else's protectionism). But it wasn't the end of trade negotiations, because there were other kinds of barriers (remember all the Japanese regulatory tricks for keeping American stuff out of their markets?), and there wasn't any adequate law regulating that.

So as the GATT Kennedy Round negotiations were coming to a close in the middle 1960s, they worked out some deals on nontariff trade barriers, which caused some panic in the US chemical industry (again, capitalists, not workers) and steel industry (rules making it difficult to file an antidumping complaint unless the dumping was actually unfair*), and some members of Congress started to get upset. They refused to ratify the NTB provisions on the grounds that the president had no authority to negotiate NTB provisions, and what happened next was that

The refusal by Congress to ratify the International Dumping Code was a severe blow to the Executive’s perceived ability, among its trading partners, to negotiate an agreement and then deliver upon the agreement’s provisions. This led to reluctance by US trading partners to negotiate with the Executive, and this in turn led President Nixon to seek from Congress a legislative framework that would grant the Executive more specific negotiating authority.

And that, children, is how Fast-Track was born, out of the need to find a formula to assure the Congress that it would have some input in the process (Congress and representatives of the private sector, that was language Congress insisted on in 1974, not some horror invented by Obama, and if they'd asked me I'd certainly have told them to include labor union representatives too—still time to do that, guys!) and to assure the partners that when they make a deal it will stick. 

Fast-Track was born, whatever Mr. ninjascience may believe, because the US and its peculiar Constitution couldn't do trade negotiations without it, or something like it, and that's still as true as it was in 1934. There has never been a US multilateral trade agreement without some such mechanism, and there will be no TPP without TPA.

*I'm not against strong antidumping codes, but Congress's refusal to accept these particular codes did not save the steel industry from the same death that the European steel industry suffered at the same time with the codes, because dumping wasn't the problem.

That's not even what I wanted to talk about. The thing that really got to me was where I wrote

" And they are very concerned about secrecy because they don't want their own publics to know what concessions they have made until they are in a position to brag about all the stuff they got. "

and Mr. ninjascience replied,

Exactly! They want to make sure that by the time the American people can see the deal, it's too late to stop it. That's what this is about, not any threat of amendments.

I wasn't talking about "the American people" but the people of Canada and Peru and Japan and Vietnam and Australia and so on, and he didn't seem able to notice, and that's the problem with the anti-TPP agitators in general, that they don't recognize the involvement of those other countries, as if this were a negotiation strictly between the president and Congress.

But the main job here is, precisely, an international agreement, among all these countries with their different interests and preoccupations. What I meant to say is that the negotiator from country A doesn't want people back home to know that she has given in on provision p until she can tell them she's unexpectedly scored on provision q, while the negotiator from country B wants to keep his surrender on q quiet until he can sweeten the news with his triumph on p. And our Ms. Pritzker no doubt feels the same about us, but she's not the only one.

The US has a worthy set of positions on the environment, as I've said, which it's almost alone in defending. The US seems, judging from the WikiLeaks document, to have a fairly awful set of positions on intellectual property, in which all the other countries seem determined to stop it. Isn't there a hope that the document they might craft over the next months, given a chance,  could be a good bit better than it looks?

*****

A statement by Rep. Sander Levin of Michigan of the House Ways and Means committee suggests not, and I have to say it's the most impressive to me of any of the stuff I've seen so far, for or against. It's not against TPA, but Levin thinks the Senate bill is not good enough with a lot of specific and credible detail that I don't see in the oratory of Senator Warren, and for very clear and to me compelling reasons; because, as he says,

Real congressional power is not at the end of the process, it is right now, when the critical outstanding issues are being negotiated.

Levin can imagine the kind of worthwhile TPP I can imagine, and thinks it would be a really good idea, but he doesn't think the Hatch-Wyden-Ryan bill out of the Senate is going to get us there, and I guess we have no reason to think the White House will do this on its own. It would be nice if his own alternative bill could make it out of committee, but it can't as long as these Republicans are in charge.

That's the only trouble with it, the fact that we have the wrong people in Congress, for which I don't really blame the president. But read what Levin has to say. As Krugman was saying this morning, we all, left as well as right, need to be readier to change our minds than we have been lately.