Our inclinations to ingroup favoritism may explain why it took so long for the various TPP-affected groups to reach out to each other and coordinate. The TPP has been in the works for a while now, and there should have been a massive multi-city day of action way before the one planned for January 31 (and hopefully the TPP will not have been fast-tracked by that time). To reach out like this, though, is to potentially give an equal share of decision-making power to other movements and organizations, and this kind of generosity grates against ingroup favoritism.
In an ideal world, you'd think someone could just look up the emails and phone numbers of all the affected movements, call a meeting between movement representatives, identify what to work on independently and what to coordinate on, and then plan three stages of action: (1) to puncture the media blackout on the TPP story, (2) to stop the bill from being fast-tracked, and (3) to ensure that either the worst parts of the bill are removed or that it dies.
A provocative set of warm-up actions (e.g. activists exposing a non-lawbreaking but still shocking degree of flesh with #exposethetpp written on their bodies) could have inspired at least some late night talk show publicity. Activists willing to push the limit a little further could also have taken part in some high-profile acts of civil disobedience, inspired a clumsy police overreaction (as early Occupy protesters did), stoked public outrage, and then gotten a movement snowballing.
And the anti-TPP movement has an advantage that Occupy didn't: a focused goal. That goal of course, is taking out the TPP--first stopping the attempt to fast-track it, and then scrapping the worst contents of the bill itself. Reaching that goal could inspire the movement to set a broader goal: to change the political culture (and, if possible, the laws) so "trade bill" scams like NAFTA, the WTO and the TPP would fight an uphill battle in the future. It's definitely not too late to get the latter movement started, but let's hope it's not too late to deliver the urgent one-two punch to the current TPP scam.
My "ideal world" fantasy makes movement-building sound simple, but in the real world you have to deftly navigate a social psychological mine field to successfully pull off that kind of mass coordination between disparate groups. This is why the Occupy movement still registers as a kind of miracle for those who were involved in it.
Consider again the anti-SOPA, anti-PIPA internet freedom advocates. Some non-negligible proportion of these activists might look at a gargantuan offense to humanity like the TPP and think, "This bill sounds terrible for internet freedom, but I don't want to put too much time and energy into a movement where we'll be just one interest group among many--and might find ourselves part of an anti-TPP gestalt shaped by voices that divide our own."
And this concern has some basis in reality. The internet freedom demographic is different from the labor movement demographic, the anti-fracking demographic, the anti-human trafficking demographic, the immigrant rights demographic and the international aid demographic. And these demographic divides, while they don't have to matter, often do because agreement with a movement won't get you very far if you have qualms about how that movement, in aggregate, gets run.
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