Last week, nasty infighting between Democrats broke out over President Obama’s public claim that Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Ma.) criticism of his trade agenda didn’t pass “the test of fact and scrutiny.” Warren’s progressive ally, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) charged that the president was acting in a sexist way, and the White House subsequently demanded an apology from Brown. Warren, meanwhile, remained silent on the matter.
But on Monday her office issued what can only be seen as a de facto response to President Obama’s broad criticism of her positions on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—a 68-endnote, 15-page report on labor regulations and US-backed free trade agreements, stretching back to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
The paper, called “Broken Promises,” tacitly-but-obviously, turns the tables on the White House, suggesting that the President himself spectacularly failed “the test of fact and scrutiny.”
“President Obama has repeatedly stated that the TPP is ‘the most progressive trade bill in history’ because it has high labor, environmental, and human rights standards. The President claims the TPP will have ‘higher labor standards, higher environmental standards,’ and ‘new tools to hold countries accountable,’” the report noted. “But proponents of almost every free trade agreement (FTA) in the last 20 years have made virtually identical claims.”
Warren’s staff then went on to chronicle official statements uttered about high labor and environmental standards in 1993 and 2005 in support, respectively, of NAFTA and the Central American FTA (CAFTA-DR), and savaged nearly identical talking points manufactured to justify bilateral FTAs negotiated throughout the past decade by both the Bush and Obama administrations.
In their bid to deconstruct the White House, the progressive firebrand’s staff created a meta-analysis, highlighting how the Government Accountability Office, legal precedent, studies conducted by the Departments of Labor, State, and independent reporting have all shown that countries that have recently signed FTAs with the US still welcome abusive bosses. The paper singled out Jordan and nine Latin American countries, including Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, and Honduras, describing them as being “in violation of international law” by producing commodities “with child labor or forced labor.”
“Guatemala was named ‘the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists’ five years after entering a trade agreement with the US,” the study also noted. “In Colombia, despite the existence of a special ‘Labor Action Plan’ put in place to address long-standing problems and secure passage of the Colombia FTA, 105 union activists have been murdered and 1,337 death threats have been issued since the Labor Action Plan was finalized four years ago.”
Warren’s staff also pointed out that a case against the Guatemalan government being touted by the USTR as evidence that it is enforcing labor standards was only brought by the Obama administration in September 2014 “after another year and a half of working with Guatemala to help it comply with its [CAFTA] obligations” and six years after the AFL CIO and six Guatemalan organizations petitioned the Bush administration in 2008 to compel the Central American nation “to effectively enforce its labor laws and comply with [International Labor Organization] standards .” The first hearing in the matter is scheduled to be held next month.
Although her office’s report on Monday focused on labor issues, Warren has previously come under heavy fire from the White House for saying that its trade agenda could undermine Dodd-Frank financial reforms. In an April conference call with reporters, President Obama called the claim “bunk” and Warren’s arguments “dishonest.” Last week, however, Canada’s Conservative Party Finance Minister Joe Oliver gave Warren a leg-up in the court of public opinion when he alleged that the Volcker Rule violates NAFTA.
“If our trading partners are already invoking existing US trade pacts to issue clear threats against Wall Street reform, why would we undertake an unprecedented expansion of this trade model’s threat to financial stability by fast-tracking TPP and TTIP?” Ben Beachy, the research director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch told The Huffington Post after the incident.
