{"id":63330,"date":"2015-09-07T12:00:58","date_gmt":"2015-09-07T11:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=63330"},"modified":"2015-09-07T09:01:12","modified_gmt":"2015-09-07T08:01:12","slug":"disposable-people-obama-the-tpp-and-the-betrayal-of-human-rights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/09\/disposable-people-obama-the-tpp-and-the-betrayal-of-human-rights\/","title":{"rendered":"Disposable People: Obama, the TPP, and the Betrayal of Human Rights"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"tpp-slavery-300x167<\/a><\/p>\n

31 Aug 2015 – <\/em>During the lead-up to the vote on the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership (TPP) that the President\u00a0narrowly won, Obama and his surrogates consistently suggested that those in labor and other\u00a0allied groups opposing the deal were \u201cfighting the last war\u201d and were against \u201cthe most\u00a0progressive trade agreement the world has ever seen.\u201d Indeed, he even went so far as to accuse\u00a0critics like Senator Elizabeth Warren of \u201cmaking stuff up<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

As we know, Obama defeated labor and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and, in\u00a0concert with Republicans and just enough New Democrats like San Diego\u2019s own Scott Peters\u00a0and Susan Davis, he succeeded in forwarding the multinational corporate agenda.<\/p>\n

Since that time the gaze of the national media has turned elsewhere and, as negotiations have\u00a0encountered difficulties<\/a>, the administration has sunk to new lows in its\u00a0zeal to finish the deal on the TPP.<\/p>\n

Indeed, after scolding critics and pooh-poohing concerns about human rights, it appears that the\u00a0proponents of \u201cthe most progressive trade deal in history\u201d aren\u2019t so politically correct that they\u00a0would stand in the way of slavery in the name of ideological purity if it might sink the TPP.<\/p>\n

As Reuters reported in a piece <\/a>that will surely make Project Censored\u2019s list of the most\u00a0under-reported stories of 2015:<\/p>\n

[An] examination, based on interviews with more than a dozen sources in Washington\u00a0and foreign capitals, shows that the government office set up to independently grade\u00a0global efforts to fight human trafficking was repeatedly overruled by senior American\u00a0diplomats and pressured into inflating assessments of 14 strategically important countries\u00a0in this year\u2019s Trafficking in Persons report.<\/em><\/p>\n

In all, analysts in the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons \u2013 or J\/TIP, as\u00a0it\u2019s known within the U.S. government \u2014 disagreed with U.S. diplomatic bureaus on\u00a0ratings for 17 countries, the sources said.<\/em><\/p>\n

The analysts, who are specialists in assessing efforts to combat modern slavery \u2013 such as\u00a0the illegal trade in humans for forced labor or prostitution \u2013 won only three of those\u00a0disputes, the worst ratio in the 15-year history of the unit, according to the sources.<\/em><\/p>\n

As a result, not only Malaysia, Cuba and China, but\u00a0countries such as India, Uzbekistan\u00a0and Mexico, wound up with better grades than the State Department\u2019s human-rights\u00a0experts wanted to give them, the sources said.<\/em><\/p>\n

Why does this matter? As The Fiscal Times<\/a><\/em> notes, it has nothing to do with human rights and everything to do with the politics of the TPP:<\/p>\n

Last year, the State Department listed Malaysia among the world\u2019s worst human trafficking nations because of \u201climited efforts to improve its flawed victim protection regime.\u201d The report described a horrendous life for Malaysia\u2019s foreign workers, threatened by large smuggling debts and confiscated passports that put them at the mercy\u00a0of recruiting companies. <\/em>Women in particular, recruited for hotel or beauty salon work, are routinely coerced into the commercial sex trade.<\/em><\/p>\n

The conviction rate for smugglers has actually fallen in Malaysia since last year\u2019s report,\u00a0suggesting no improvement on fighting human trafficking. One house of Malaysia\u2019s\u00a0parliament did pass legislation giving more protections to slavery victims, but it further criminalizes something that\u2019s already illegal. The problem has always been sustained\u00a0enforcement. The U.S. Ambassador to Malaysia, Joseph Yun, criticized the lack of will to defend trafficking victims as recently as this April. Yet an unnamed administration\u00a0official told Reuters that the U.S. had been working closely with Malaysian leaders to remedy the problem.<\/em><\/p>\n

The political implications of reclassifying Malaysia suggest another rationale for the\u00a0upgrade. During the markup of trade promotion authority (aka \u201cfast track\u201d), signed into\u00a0law by the president last month, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) passed a provision\u00a0denying access to fast-track procedures for any trade partner in Tier 3 on the human\u00a0trafficking report.<\/em><\/p>\n

As Zach Carter\u2019s reporting in \u201cObama Shrugs Off Global Slavery to Protect Trade Deal\u201d in the\u00a0Huffington Post<\/a><\/em>\u00a0suggests, this move was about as craven as you\u00a0can get:<\/p>\n

The Obama administration outraged human rights advocates on Monday by removing Malaysia from its list of the world\u2019s worst human trafficking offenders \u2014 a move that the\u00a0activists said damages U.S. credibility \u2014 simply to boost the president\u2019s trade agenda.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Administration has turned its back on the victims of trafficking,\u201d Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said in a written statement. \u201cThey have elevated politics over the\u00a0most basic principles of human rights.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hundreds of Democrats and a handful of Republicans\u00a0had previously urged the State Department to maintain Malaysia\u2019s ranking as a \u201cTier 3\u201d human trafficking violator. For\u00a0years, the Malaysian government has largely turned a blind eye to sex slavery\u00a0involving\u00a0men, women and children.\u00a0Forced labor is rampant in several sectors of the country\u2019s\u00a0economy, particularly the electronics industry. In April, mass graves\u00a0holding more than 130 human trafficking victims were discovered near the country\u2019s northern border with\u00a0Thailand. That same month, the U.S. ambassador to Malaysia said the government\u00a0needed to take human trafficking prosecution more seriously. Nevertheless, the State Department officially upgraded Malaysia\u2019s status to Tier 2.<\/em><\/p>\n

By ignoring modern day slavery to advance the TPP, Obama has given the lie to the rhetoric of\u00a0TPP advocates with all their bluster about how this trade deal was somehow about a more\u00a0progressive world order with regard to labor and human rights. As the Citizens Trade Campaign\u00a0noted in their statement <\/a>on the matter, \u201cThe administration\u2019s alleged willingness to turn a blind eye to trafficking abuses in\u00a0Malaysia in order to get the TPP done also\u00a0does not bode well for the hope of any enforcement\u00a0of labor and environmental provisions were the TPP actually enacted. \u00a0If the administration were\u00a0serious about using the TPP to enforce basic rights, they would make such enforcement a prerequisite to joining.\u201d<\/p>\n

In many ways, the Obama administration\u2019s complicity with global slavery in the name of\u00a0furthering the neoliberal economic agenda is not surprising. As Kevin Bales documents in his\u00a0seminal work, Disposable People: The New Slavery in the Global Economy<\/em>, today\u2019s bondage is\u00a0no longer about race but rather economics.<\/p>\n

More specifically, modernization and rapid economic globalization in concert with an exploding\u00a0population has created a situation where labor markets have been flooded with desperately poor\u00a0people, 27 million of whom have ended up in some form of slavery. According to Bales,\u00a0\u201cModern slaveholders are predators keenly aware of weakness; they are rapidly adapting an\u00a0ancient practice to the new global economy.\u201d<\/p>\n

And counter to the propaganda put forth by hegemonists such as Thomas Friedman, the\u00a0neoliberal regime that the TPP perpetuates has not made the world flatter for slaves, it has only\u00a0made the elites richer and the poor more disposable. And along the way, it has allowed many\u00a0multinational corporations to extract profit from slave labor that is hidden by multiple layers of\u00a0middlemen who provide plausible deniability for our faceless masters.<\/p>\n

But slavery is not the problem of the lords of the global village; it is merely an externality\u2014a\u00a0cost that somebody else has to pay.<\/p>\n

Thus despite all the stories we like to tell ourselves about human dignity, at present we live in a\u00a0world where the market is the final measure of all things and anything that stands in the way of profit is ultimately disposable.<\/p>\n

_____________________________<\/p>\n

Jim Miller, a professor at San Diego City College, is the co-author of <\/em>Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See and<\/em> Better to Reign in Hell, and author of the novel <\/em>Drift. His most recent novel on the San Diego free speech fights and the IWW, <\/em>Flash, is on AK Press.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 sandiegofreepress.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Obama administration outraged human rights advocates on Monday [31Aug] by removing Malaysia from its list of the world\u2019s worst human trafficking offenders simply to boost the president\u2019s TPP trade agenda. \u201cThe Administration has turned its back on the victims of trafficking,\u201d Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[169],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trade"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63330\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}