Rockin’ against the TPP

Anti-Flag and Downtown Boys to headline tour stop in Portland

by Emily Green | 15 Aug 2016

A diverse faction of well-known performers will take the stage in Downtown Portland’s Director Park on Aug. 20, 2016, in an effort to build opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal with a free rock concert.

Portland is the third stop in the “Rock Against the TPP” tour, which kicked off in July in Denver with legendary guitarist Tom Morello, the Flobots and Talib Kweli.

The tour is sponsored by a wide range of organizations, from the Teamsters and United Steelworkers to Sierra Club and Daily Kos.

The Portland concert will feature punk groups Anti-Flag and Downtown Boys, comedian Hari Kondabolu, slack rock guitarist Makana, Danbert Nobacon of Chumbawamba, hip-hop artist Son of Nun and other performers, including Canadian actress Evangeline Lilly of television’s “Lost” and “The Hobbit” movie franchise.

Lilly will MC the event and lead a teach-in at First Unitarian Church the following day where she’ll educate participants on provisions of the TPP and ways to get involved locally.

To gain access to the event, fans must go to RockAgainstTheTPP.org to sign up and add their name to a petition telling members of Congress to stand in opposition to the deal.

Most of Oregon’s representatives in Congress say they’re still undecided.

The TPP is a 2,000-plus-page trade deal written in secret with corporate lawyers and advisors that covers 40 percent of the global economy.

President Barack Obama has said passing it through Congress is the No. 1 priority of his administration while he’s still in office.

Critics of the deal say that it grants new rights to corporations while exploiting workers and the environment and that it erodes the sovereignty of nations.

Those who support the TPP say it will boost U.S. exports, create jobs and stimulate economic growth by removing tariffs.

At the launch of the Rock Against the TPP campaign, organizers said they want to make it clear they are not against global trade. What they are against, they said, are deals written behind closed doors without any public input that put the rights of corporations ahead of people and the environment.

“This is not about isolationism,” said Jonny 5 of the Flobots. Rather, he said, “it’s about saying we have solidarity with people around the world who also want the ability to protect their water, their land, their legal rights – we want that ability as well.”

He said the movement against the TPP is an exciting opportunity for an international victory transcending political ideology.

“At a time like now when there is so much despair and violence around the world, this is a victory that we can create together and celebrate,” he said.

One of the tour’s lead organizers is digital rights group Fight for the Future. Its campaign director, Evan Greer, said the group got involved when it learned how the TPP would hurt internet freedom by exporting “the worst part of U.S. copyright policy to other countries without expanding or requiring protections for fair use or freedom of speech.”

Greer said the same type of enforcement over intellectual property has been used to target legitimate political speech in the past – for example, the repeated deletion of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech from YouTube.

“The TPP would essentially lock that system into place,” Greer said. “It poses a threat in that sense to our ability to really share, express and gain knowledge on the internet. In addition to that, it would also harshen penalties for whistleblowers and journalists that are exposing the wrongdoing of corporations through a section on quote-unquote trade secrets.”

Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, said a key provision of the TPP would grant new rights to thousands of corporations to sue government bodies before a panel of corporate lawyers who are responsible for issuing a verdict.

She said, “These lawyers can award the corporations unlimited sums, to be paid by American taxpayers, including the loss of expected future profits – and these corporations only need to convince those three corporate lawyers that a U.S. law or government decision violates the corporation’s new TPP rights.”

While Obama has already signed the deal, the document is nothing more than a doorstop unless Congress approves it, said Wallach.

She said the White House plans to push the TPP through Congress after the November elections, “when the retired and newly fired get to come back and have one last vote – perhaps when they are thinking about their next job.”

Similar provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement enabled TransCanada Corp. to sue the U.S. for more than $15 billion for blocking the Keystone Pipeline.

The TPP would extend the right to sue governments for limiting profits to thousands more corporations housed in the 12 countries signed onto the deal.

“The TPP gives 9,500 new Japanese corporations the right to sue you for trying to protect your wages, your jobs, your freedom of speech, your access to affordable medicine and your clean air and water,” said actress Lilly at the launch of the campaign. “And that’s just Japan.”

Greer said concert organizers consulted with Morello (of Audioslave, Prophets of Rage and Rage Against the Machine) and folksinger Ryan Harvey to explore how to use music and culture to build a global movement against the TPP.

In 2015, the duo founded Firebrand Records, which signs musicians standing up for social justice issues. Some of the label’s artists, such as synth-pop and soul artist Bell’s Roar, have joined the tour.

“If we’re not allowed to be part of the conversation, we’ll make our own conversation, and we’ll try to make it louder than theirs,” Harvey said. “Music and political action have always been tightly bound together throughout global history.”

Harvey said his business partner’s former band, Rage Against the Machine, took aim at the “exact same economic policies” that are entrenched in the TPP deal.

“We see it as the latest attempt by a lot of the same people, and people of the same political and economic spectrum who are trying to push these same old policies to erode human rights and environmental regulations, to push down wages, push corporate profits up,” he said. “It’s a global trade agreement written for and by corporations.”

Anti-Flag lead singer and guitarist Justin Sane said his group joined the tour to make it clear that they, too, stand firmly against the deal.

“People are already sick and tired of the stranglehold that corporations and politicians that serve them have on our democracy,” he said. “If approved, the TPP would hand them even more power to control and exploit us.”

Polling suggests an effective way to build opposition against the deal is to tell people about what’s in it.

Political consultant Stanley Greenburg worked as a pollster for President Bill Clinton and Nelson Mandela. He said that in recently conducted focus groups and polling around the TPP, when people learn the details of the deal, “it’s kind of a wow moment.”

When his research team begins each survey, respondents are “marginally against it overall,” he said. “But when they are educated, learn how it was created and what its main provisions are – to give corporations more control at the expense of the American government and the American people – they get angry, they get engaged and they want to know what to do.”

Rock Against the TPP is trying to raise funds for a final showdown concert and protest in Washington, D.C.