The State Department on Monday took Malaysia off a list of countries with particularly egregious human trafficking records, clearing the path for the country’s participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations, one of the top political priorities for the Obama administration.
The move to officially upgrade Malaysia from Tier 3 to Tier 2 in the department’s annual report on human trafficking came despite scant evidence that the country has improved oversight of the businesses that enslave workers within its borders. It has raised concerns among some anti-trade activists that the decision was made for purely political reasons.
The trade promotion authority that Congress approved, which was signed into law by President Obama in June, came with a condition: No country on Tier 3 of the human trafficking report could get “fast-track” status for trade agreements signed with the United States.
In other words, trade deals with a Tier 3 country could not go to Congress for a guaranteed up-or-down vote without the possibility of filibuster or amendment. Malaysia is one of 12 countries negotiating TPP. The White House tried on multiple occasions to neutralize this language without success. So the State Department’s upgrade for Malaysia could be seen as a Plan B.
The shift has been rumored for weeks. Malaysia controls a key oil shipping lane to China, and the U.S. sees it as a key strategic partner in efforts to neutralize China’s growing influence in Asia.
The Communications Workers of America, which opposes TPP, condemned the Obama Administration for “placing the completion of the TPP ahead of human trafficking concerns.” Furthermore, CWA legislative director Shane Larson said the change “tramples on our country’s basic values. … We simply should not be rewarding bad actor countries like Malaysia with inclusion in trade deals.”
Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., who wrote the anti-trafficking provision into the trade promotion authority, pronounced himself “profoundly disappointed” with the change on Malaysia in a statement. He suggested that the report was “subject to political manipulation,” and vowed hearings, investigations and potentially legislation on the issue.
Despite the White House’s contention that trade deals like TPP are “the most progressive in history,” it appears to be overlooking significant forced labor violations to get it passed.
In 2014, the State Department demoted Malaysia to Tier 3 status for being a destination “for men, women, and children subjected to forced labor and women and children subjected to sex trafficking.” Malaysia’s 4 million foreign workers are threatened by large smuggling debts and confiscated passports that put them at the mercy of recruiting companies. Women in particular, recruited for hotel or beauty salon work, are routinely coerced into the commercial sex trade. And forced labor runs rampant in agricultural, construction and textile industries, producing the same goods that would get duty-free access to U.S. markets under TPP.
There is little evidence that anything has changed for Malaysia’s foreign workers. Just a couple months ago authorities discovered a mass grave of 139 Rohingya Muslims, who fled discrimination in Burma and were sold into slavery upon their escape. Trafficking enforcement remains weak; in April, U.S. Ambassador to Malaysia Joseph Yun criticized the country for doing too little to stop slavery. The Wall Street Journal found persistent forced labor abuses on Malaysian palm oil plantations in an article published Sunday.
The State Department’s 2015 report reads almost exactly like last year’s with a few words changed, the way middle school students avoid plagiarism for book reports. But they allege that, while “the Government of Malaysia does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking … it is making significant efforts to do so.”
The total evidence for this includes amendments to an existing anti-trafficking law that were not passed into law by the time the report was written; a pilot program to aid trafficking victims housed in government facilities; and increased investigations and prosecutions of trafficking operations, even though convictions in 2014 fell by more than half compared to the previous year, from nine to four.
Caption: An abandoned people-smuggling camp in Malaysia.
Why is anyone surprised? The whole point of having these official lists is to exploit them. Same goes with anyone who listens to the ridiculous Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC took the Nation of Islam off its list of hate groups. Why? Because Islam is a religion of peace now. Sure.
Obama is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, doing the bidding of his friends and cronies. That he appears to be a black sheep is really neither here nor there, though it doubtless was helpful in deluding the sheeple: he’s a Wall Street lawyer, all said and done. Anyone who didn’t see it coming when he was elected must have been dreaming. It was a nice dream. Now it’s time to wake up.
That the US government would use a country, Malaysia in this case, to suit its hegemonic and trade ambitions, should really be no surprise, and in this instance, serves only to show the sheer vacuousness of such phoney ‘league table’ moral judgments that the authors themselves clearly have no belief in.
Perhaps the degree of blatancy is surprising, but get used to it: we’re beginning to feel the pressure of the iron heel of a ruling elite which is selfish and amoral, but which for now, when it suits them, still pays lip service to moral values (how laughable that they would even think to come up with a league table of other countries’ people trafficking) which it uses as a vehicle to further its own immoral and souless ends.
Let me see if I understand this article correctly.
Since our overriding “humanitarian” concern no matter what in these quarters is stopping the TPP on grounds that the unions said that NAFTA was responsible for all the jobs getting drained from the country to, um, China, we will suddenly become concerned about the plight of the 50 million or so migrants fleeing armed conflict and persecution, and the huge numbers that are fleeing disastrous climate change or poverty. We’ll do so on Malaysia, screw the massive slave trade the camp we show in the picture is feeding which is the Thai fishing slavery that feeds all the dogs we love on this site. We’ll remember to hit all the buzz words, worry the most about people trafficked into the sex trade instead of where most of the people get trafficked, mention the Rohingya at least once and use it all to…
Slam the Obama administration for corruption for transgressing against that august pillar of anti-corruption New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez who is facing federal um, er, corruption charges.
But it’s all for a good cause!!!! Defeating the TPP.
And then, on another channel, we talk about how it feels for journalists to come face to face with their own reporting techniques.
Not to be outdone, the NYTimes led its international page with Obama calling the Ethiopian government “democratic”. Because, it isn’t, which we all know, but mostly because Ethiopia has a human rights record so atrocious that no American president should ever visit there, screw the fact that it is the seat of the African Union in a shiny new building built by the Chinese using no local labor. And that can’t be countenanced! Ethiopia, after all, JAILED NINE JOURNALISTS!!!!!! (Obama himself laughed at that one given that not a peep would ensue if he visited China which two weeks ago jailed 200 journalists, bloggers and human rights lawyers).
So the NYTimes just HAD to put the story about President Obama spending yesterday in Addis huddled with AU leaders and surrounding country leaders — just wait till David Dayen finds out he met with both Hailemariam Desalegne and Yoweri Moussevini in one frigging meeting — to try to end a war so brutal that 27 humanitarian workers have been killed in a year and a half (26 have been killed in Syria so far) and rape as a weapon of war is being brutally combined with burning people alive.
Let’s talk about hypocrisy first, because it’s the internet. Once you show me anywhere on this site you really give a flying fuck for those displaced in this world, then we can talk about them, but they deserve the human dignity of being reported on in their own right, not just to support big American trade unions.
@ Ondelette
I think you are confused about two things: 1) that the American government and/or its business elites give two flying coherent f*cks about “humanitarianism” or “human rights” anywhere in the world, including here, or 2) that there is some sort of majority of Americans who do. At best one might be true but only in the theoretical, and not when push comes to shove like asking the American people to “sacrifice” by fundamentally altering their “way of life.”
So it seems odd to me that you are castigating a journalist for bringing at least one instance of such inhumanity to light. But I guess if one reporter doesn’t report on every instance of inhumanity, or if he tactically decides that maybe linking those atrocities to “trade” and its effect on American jobs is an effective tactic to get people to notice instead of “reporting on it in its own right”, then he is a hypocrite in your book. Amiright?
At least you are consistent over the years in clinging to that asinine understanding of what “hypocrisy” is at the intersection of journalism and humanitarianism. But hey here’s my question, I thought you’ve spent years here showing that there are plenty of journalists already reporting on all the human rights violations all over the globe if people were just willing to look for it. And if that’s the case why bash on Mr. Dayen for adding some emphasis to this particular one?
Dayen is indulging in humanitarian porn. He has a cause he wants to further — opposing the TPP — and he thinks he’s found an opportunity to do so by deciding that the Malaysia TIP score was corruptly jury-rigged to further the TPP. Which is highly debatable and he doesn’t make a case for it.
And no, his given reasons don’t work. The reason they were lowered to Tier 3 wasn’t because of their lack of “oversight of businesses that enslave workers within its borders.” They were lowered to Tier 3 because of failure to improve holding conditions for victims which was having an impact on carrying arrests through to trials, for victims who were trafficked into the country from the outside.
So suddenly he waxes concerned about the Rohingya, about sex workers (who are a minority of the trafficking victims both within Malaysia and without) because he knows that both topics pull good solid liberal heartstrings. And that’s all. Because if he really cared, and wasn’t just spicing up his boring TPP argument with humanitarian misery for the good visuals, he’d know all that, and then some, and report on the trafficking when he wasn’t trying to stave off the TPP.
Yes, I have spent years here and elsewhere trying to get journalists to cover it. This isn’t covering it. It’s sampling it for its emotional ability to jack up the visceral reaction to the article. The same exact thing that porn does elsewhere. Just look to the comments. They’re all on free trade, just where David wanted them to be.
Next time just be honest:
OPPOSE TPP! LIVE NUDE GIRLS! LIVE NUDE GUYS! LIVE! NUDE! DOWN WITH TPP!
(now that I’ve got your attention, write your congresscritter, no on free trade)
Senators made a fortune fast tracking TPP. http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/may/27/corporations-paid-us-senators-fast-track-tpp
Wonder how much they will receive for this fast tracking of the slave trade.
‘Duty-free’, ominous and insidious, never just your cheap can of tuna.
The Impartial Law of Corruption:
You cannot inject impartial standards into politics. You can only inject politics into impartial standards.
It was a compliment by american teenagers: If you were a plane we would hijack you. – I mean, was it a compliment? . . .
Apparently it is for their role in helping MH370 disappear into a US air base in the Indian Ocean. Obama had to reward them for helping the CIA flush out those Chinese engineers who worked on the hypersonic missile.
There was NEVER the thought of anything Free about Trade. Our agreements are self-satisfying contracts of greed, and manipulation. Nothing more. Nothing less. Wide swaths of people will be impacted negatively by these new documents, and our US Republican Congress will be to blame for it. Obama is just a tool for the corporatists. But then so is this Congress.
More on the slave trade in that part of the world, from NYT business page.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/27/world/outlaw-ocean-thailand-fishing-sea-slaves-pets.html
On point in that those waters include the sea lanes the Malaysians supposedly patrol.
So the US has finally agreed to drop its non-tariff barriers to human trafficking. This is in line with the best neo-liberal free trade principles. While some people oppose human trafficking for moral or ideological reasons, it’s really just the free market in action. Now that this opportunity has opened up, I expect a number of US based multinationals to get involved. It seems like a natural for Silicon Valley – they know how to take a legacy industry and revitalize it by injecting a bit of new technology. It’s encouraging to see the US reviving industries it once dominated but subsequently neglected.
Maybe it’s impertinent to ask this, Duce, but what Tier would the U.S. occupy?
Despite all the rhetoric about “freedom” and free trade, what it seems to have brought us to is a Metropolis economy. There is a city of beauty and art and leisure above, white collared managers scrambling to justify their existence, and then there is the other city “below”, in some sweatshop on the far end of the world, where the work is done. Yet my feeling is that in a much earlier time – a much poorer time, supposedly, the workers at the first Ford plants could buy the cars they made and drive them around.
I keep hearing about the damage done by international trade – the Indians pushed off their ancestral lands because NAFTA made Mexico repeal article 25 of its constitution, the urban workers pushed out of their jobs by underpaid ‘nacos’, the illegal immigrants desperate to cross the border into the U.S. after they lost their jobs in Mexico, and of course, the Americans complaining they are out of work or working for less. The question is… where does all the damn money go, and why are we told that this is progress?
The argument against the TTP unholy trinity of treaties is simpler though. The U.S. should not be surrendering its sovereignty. When they pass the treaty, people need to buy the TTP group’s flag (unless it is also a confidential secret known only to some well-connected corporations?) and fly it proudly at the top of their flagpole. The U.S. flag can go somewhere lower down on the rope.
So much for “Green Lanternism.”
When Obama wants to do something for big corporations, he really is a superhero.
~
He’s Captain Nice, if not the Greatest American Hero, if either TV reference still has any currency.
This really is a big deal.
Spreading “freedom and democracy” through trade deals or sanctions and, if/when that “fails,” at the end of a drone or a rifle.
To hear anyone in this country speak of the US and support for human rights in the same sentence all but leads me to hurl. I don’t know about the damage US hypocrisy is doing internationally, but I’m not at all confused about the damage it’s doing to my regard for the institutions of this country.