Jamaica and the Trans Pacific Partnership

America's New Secret Nafta!

Jamaica needs to urgently start examining the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). I am imploring that both the Ministry of Finance and Planning and the Ministry of Industry, Investment and Commerce, consider the future implications of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In November 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced Washington’s official pivot to Asia. Outlining a vision for an Asia-Pacific Century, Secretary Clinton described a desired symbiotic and unfettered relationship between the two regions that will provide “unprecedented opportunities for investment, trade, and access to cutting-edge technology.” At the center of this pivot has been the TPP, an enigmatic trade pact that has been hailed as a true “21st century agreement,” a purported free trade deal between 11 countries, including the U.S., Canada and Japan, which has been in negotiations for some years.

As a centerpiece of President Obama’s pivot to Asia, which includes Latin America via the TPP, the trade pact sets a powerful, if not potentially dangerous, precedent for future trade agreements in the emerging region. But instead of encouraging sustainable economic trends and responsible transnational relations, the TPP could enact the same policies that have been proven detrimental in past smaller-scale agreements like NAFTA. The TPP rhetoric misrepresents the potential of free trade as it encourages, through greater international regulations, such as those seen in the intellectual property and investment chapters, the creation of domestic policies to manipulate the international market. Often, these actions strengthen the economically powerful, particularly by granting to the leadership the right to set its own nation’s course of action and implement its own visions, while those at the margins suffer. Thus, the TPP presents a troubling case of free trade being purchased at too great a price.

Let us remember that after the United States, Canada and Mexico agreed to become a single market as part of the North American Free Trade Agreement, their exports to each other boomed. But here in the Caribbean, the economies of America's much smaller neighbours reeled from the impact of that success and found it almost impossible to compete. From the apparel plants of Jamaica to the sugar-cane fields of Trinidad, Nafta  resulted in the loss of jobs, markets and income for the vulnerable island nations of the region.

Nafta's devastating effect on the Caribbean was widely fore-casted before the treaty's passage in 1993 and Washington had suggested it would cushion the blow by extending similar trade preferences to the island nations. However, the Clinton Administration's proposals to give the Caribbean ''Nafta parity'' was twice foundered in Congress in election years. It is then easy to see the troubles of the TPP which seems would come into effect vrey close to the U.S. election season.

When Nafta went into effect, the creation of new jobs in Jamaica stopped altogether and overall unemployment rose to 16 percent from 9.5 percent, according to the Statistical Institute of Jamaica. In Mexico it failed to provide equitable stipulations for labor conditions, environmental protection, or investment regulations. Laborers on both sides of the border saw their collective bargaining powers diminish after NAFTA.

Critics of Nafta then, contended that NAFTA should have been transformed from a “free” trade agreement to a “fair” trade agreement through revisions that create jobs instead of destroying them, protect workers, and create an environment that allowed citizens to stay in their home country and earn a fair living wage.

So it is no surprise then that critics of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement have noted that the deal has little to do with free trade. Rather, the TPP is about limiting regulation, helping corporate interests and imposes fiercer standards of intellectual property (to, again, largely benefit corporate interests).

Noam Chomsky has decried the TPP, he told HuffPost Live that the deal, which is not yet finalized, is “designed to carry forward the neoliberal project to maximize profit and domination, and to set the working people in the world in competition with one another so as to lower wages to increase insecurity.”

Chomsky said it was “a joke” that the deal is designated a “free trade” agreement. “It’s called free trade, but that’s just a joke,” Chomsky said. “These are extreme, highly protectionist measures designed to undermine freedom of trade. In fact, much of what’s leaked about the TPP indicates that it’s not about trade at all, it’s about investor rights.”

On reviewing the leaked draft TPP chapter, intellectual property law expert Dr. Matthew Rimmer called the deal, “a Christmas wish-list for major corporations.”

This so-called trade pact of the future covers far more than just trade, with chapters addressing modern topics such as an extension of investment past real property, intellectual property rights, and environmental standards among others. There is no question that the agreement would positively affect many signatory nations’ economies; however, many of the proposed regulations pushed by the U.S. would violate regional domestic laws while compromising national sovereignty.

As a Jamaican I am asking in particular the Honourable Anthony Hylton, Jamaica's Minister of Industry, Investment and Commerce, to be cognizant of the impact of the TPP and its implications for International Law and our domestic laws. I also ask that in any international bargaining that we be put on a level playing field with other international players, and to secure strong lobby and collective bargaining power to secure our owning international commercial future! I ask that the Minister secure us  the opportunity not to be prevented from taking full advantage of the International markets now and not when we begin reeling from the impact of the TPP.

Montegonian Editorial Exclusive: Jamaica, Black Leadership and the Future!

It's been almost one year since Jamaica 50 and sometimes I wonder have we forgotten who we are as a people and has the media forgotten who we are! 

There was a time when PanAfricanism was ripe in the island, with the likes of Walter Rodney and Rastafari played a role as the memory of the people, when people remembered their Africaness. There was a time when Michael Manley was in dialogue with Kwame Nkruma and Julius Nyrere. 

Oh come on, for goodness sake! We were a people that inspired Haile Selassie to come here, a man so revered he was on the cover of Time several times and featured in the national geographic and is even spoken of highly still today in modern literature such as Robert Greene's Strategies of War and Laws of Power, as well as Wings to Freedom by and Indian Yogi named Yogiraj Gurunath Siddhanath. Jamaicans are a people that inspired Nelson Mandela to come here. We produced Marcus Garvey one of the greatest black icons and PanAfricanist of all times. We produced Bob Marley who not only the world loved but Africans.

So why is it then that as Africa is now being looted and plundered by Europe and America, commercially colonized by China with a renewed 21st century thrust... Why is no one speaking out about it? Europeans are streaming into northwest Africa en masse, the huge U.S. airlift capacity may soon be necessary to keep the “Crusaders” supplied and the military industrial complex oiled and firing. African militaries are being cobbled to do the Caucasian’s bidding. 

The U.S. has almost practically establish a Somalia-like operation on the near side of Africa – with Americans at the helm. A sentiment echoed by even republican politician in the states Ron Paul who said "U.S. Action in Mali is Another Undeclared War".

All this while in America itself under the Obama administration the plight of Black Americans has worsened:  A recent interview on MSNBC’s “Meet the Press,” NAACP CEO and president, Ben Jealous, told the show’s host that black Americans “are doing far worse” than when President Obama first took office. “The country’s back to pretty much where it was when this president started,” Jealous told show host David Gregory. “White people in this country are doing a bit better. Black people are doing far worse.”  Dr. Julianne Malveaux of Your Black World recently wrote that the Obama Administration needs to speak out more about existing racial disparities and persistent problems in black unemployment.

The Black Diaspora has seen the US elect thousands of African American local and state officials and re-elect the first black president. But Obama seems to have proven just a symbol, symbolic and nothing more. Nothing real, nothing substantial, nothing progressive as it pertains to the plight of blacks.

The media is slow and unwilling to note that our black leaders are dithering. Floundering. Flailing... failing and falling even. Symbolism supersedes the fact that black leadership has few or no victories to boast for the seventies, the eighties, the nineties or the new century, apart from their own illustrious careers. 

No black leader is man enough to speak to or look at the fact that the war on drugs and the prison state sprung up in north America. The symbol of Obama over rides the fact that black unemployment remains at record levels, that US wages have not risen in thirty years and that the first black president apparently forgot his campaign promise to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour almost as soon as he made it. And what has been done for the Caribbean? Nothing. He continues an illegal international embargo on Cuba, he continues Gitmo torture in our territory, and turned down our request to exonerate Jamaica's hero and Rastafari Icon Marcus Garvey. 

Obama seems a symbol used to nullify and quiet the analytic black mind and voice. "Nigger shut up we got a black president now!" 1 black President... and 10 million  black persons still suffering. And let us not examine his neglect of his black family in Kenya, or his brother that lives in a Shanty Town.

Who in Jamaica or the media is willing to look past the fact that he is JUST a black president and willing to examine the fact that the black role model president conducts weekly “Terror Tuesday” meetings in the White House basement at which he dispatches drones to murder and special forces to kidnap and torture in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and across the African continent. It matters not at all that the First Lady is a poster girl for Wal-Mart, attacking child weight, rather than bolstering education, that the Department of Justice prosecutes whistle blowers instead of war criminals, or that black military and diplomats like Susan Rice are up to their armpits in African blood.

The black political class at home and abroad is utterly self-interested. It cannot begin to mobilize black communities to demand higher wages, a massive jobs program to relieve unemployment, a new paradigm of urban economic development that isn't just moving poor people out of neighborhoods and richer ones in. It seems our egotistical black intelligentsia can't begin to make these things happen because foisting itself and its own advancement off as “representing” the black oppressed masses is the beginning and the end of who they are and what they do. They are not truly about the black diaspora and its plight, they do not truly care to ease the existential condition of his brothers, neighbours and friends.

For them, the election and and re-election of Barack Obama is the end of black history. The be all and end all of our history. Addressing black unemployment, pervasive economic injustice, opposing the neo-liberal,capitalist, globalist, transnational agenda of privatization and austerity put forth not just by the black president, but by an entire layer of black thinkers are, in their language not pragmatic or “realistic.”

So if our black leaders have anything to say about it, more years of Barack Obama means more years of black silence and irrelevance on the issues that matter most to our communities; on jobs and economic injustice. It means black leadership will wring its hands and do nothing as American federal policies drive the militarization of Africa. Our politicians will continue to philander and spinelessly acquiesce to whatever old might Uncle Sam says, we will genuflect at his very whim. We will not be the bold humans, bold leaders that stood down injustice and untruths in the past we will be the bandwagonists of a new age much to our demise!