The Trans-Pacific Partnership is not about free trade. It's a corporate coup d'etat -- against us!
by James Wood Crown Capital ManagementIn 2002, it was reported that British Prime
Minister Tony Blair had told a friend an amusing tale about our man George
W. Bush. It seems that the two of them and French President Jacques Chirac had
gotten into an economics
discussion, after which George supposedly confided to Tony that he was
decidedly unimpressed with Jacques' views: "The problem with the
French," Bush scoffed, "is that they don't have a word for
'entrepreneur.'"
W's head has always been a no-fly-zone for factual reality.
However, what would boggle his mind even more than the fact that we Americans
filched that word from the French, is the reality that government
is not quite the entrepreneur-devouring ogre (Mon dieu! George, another French
word!) that Bush's cartoonish dogma paints it to be. Actually,
government-at-its-best can be an entrepreneur's buddy. One surprising place to
see this buddyship at work is in one of the most mundane of government offices:
Procurement (i.e., the Department of Buying Stuff).
Where does your mayor, school board, governor, or any other
"public shopper" go to purchase fixtures, food, furniture, ferns, and
whatnot? Where I live, various agencies have Buy Austin, Buy Texas, Buy
American, Buy Green, Buy Sweatshop-Free, and other targeted policies that apply
our tax dollars to our values. This sensible idea has swept across the country,
most likely including where you live, and these agency purchases add up to a
big financial boost for start-ups, independents, women-owned, and other
homegrown enterprises. Rather than buying everything from Walmart or China
(excuse the redundancy there) -- thus shipping truckloads and boatloads of cash
out of our communities -- plow that public money back into the home turf for
grassroots economic growth and the flowering of local jobs.
Stop making sense
Imagine the uproar if President Obama and Congress tried to pass a
bill to outlaw such "preferential procurement" policies, summarily
canceling our democratic right to decide where to make public purchases. I'd
get pretty PO'd, wouldn't you? And what if they also proposed that foreign
corporations in Brunei, New Zealand, Vietnam, and other nations must be given
the right to make the sale on any and all products purchased with our tax
dollars? That'd set my hair on fire!
The American people would never stand for this brazen affront to
our sovereignty, so I can assure you that Obama and Congress will definitely
NOT be proposing any such thing. Not directly, that is.
Instead, their hope is to tiptoe it around us. The nullification
of our people's right to direct expenditures of our own tax dollars is but one
of the horror stories being quietly packed into a political-and-economic
bombshell benignly labeled TPP -- the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
This thing is a supersized and nuclearized NAFTA,
the 1994 trade scam rammed through Congress by Bill Clinton, Wall Street's
Robert Rubin, and the entire corporate establishment. They promised that the
"glories of globalization" would shower prosperity across our land.
They lied. Corporations got the gold. We got the shaft -- thousands of
factories closed, millions of middle-class jobs went south, and the economies
of hundreds of towns and cities (including Detroit) were hollowed out. (Most
Mexicans got the NAFTA shafta, too. US grain traders like ADM dumped corn into
Mexico, wiping out millions of peasant farmers' livelihoods, and thousands of
local businesses were crushed when Walmart invaded with its Chinese-made
wares.)
Twenty years later, the corporate gang that stuck us with NAFTA is
back, hoping to fool us with an even more destructive multinational deal. (This
calls for another immortal quote from George W: "Fool me once, shame on --
shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again." Well, you know what
he meant).
This time we really must pay attention, because TPP is not just
another trade deal. First, it is massive and open-ended. It would hitch us
immediately to 11 Pacific Rim nations (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan,
Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam), and its door
would remain wide open to lure China, Indonesia, Russia, and other nations to
come in. Second, note that many of those countries already have trade
agreements with the US. Hence, THIS AMAZING FACT: TPP is a
"trade deal" that mostly does not deal with trade. In fact,
of the 29 chapters in this document, only five cover traditional trade matters!
The other two dozen chapters amount to a devilish
"partnership" for corporate protectionism. They create sweeping new
"rights" and escape hatches to protect multinational corporations
from accountability to our governments... and to us. Here are a few of TPP's
provisos that would make our daily lives riskier, poorer, and less free:
Food safety. Any of our government's food safety
regulations (on pesticide levels, bacterial contamination, fecal exposure,
toxic additives, GMOs, non-edible fillers, etc.) that are stricter than
"international standards," as most are, could be ruled as
"illegal trade barriers." Then our government would have to revise
our consumer protections to comply with the weaker global standards. Also, our
government could no longer ban meat imports that don't meet our safe-to-eat
laws, as long as the exporting nation simply claims that its inspection system
is "equivalent" to ours. In addition, food labeling laws we rely on
(organic, country-of-origin, animal-welfare approved, GMO-free, etc.) would
also be subject to challenge as trade barriers.
Fracking... Our Department of Energy would lose
its authority to regulate exports of natural gas to any TPP nation. This would
create an explosion of the destructive fracking process across our land, for
both foreign and US corporations could export fracked gas from America to
member nations without any DOE review of the environmental and economic impacts
on local communities--or on our national interests. It also means that most of
the gas produced by this violently polluting process will not go to us, but to
foreign users, which will raise our consumer prices and cut manufacturing
growth.
Jobs... US corporations would get special foreign-investor
protections to limit the cost and risk of relocating their factories to
low-wage nations that sign onto this agreement. For example, an American
corporation thinking about moving a factory would know it is guaranteed a
sweetheart deal if it exports to a TPP nation like Vietnam. The corporation
could skirt Vietnam's laws and demand compensation at an international tribunal
for any government policy or action (such as a hike in the minimum wage) that
undermined its "expected" profits. These guarantees would be strong
incentives for corporate chieftains to export even more of our middle-class
jobs.
Drug prices... Big Pharma would be given more years
of monopoly pricing on each of their patents and be empowered to block
distribution of cheaper generic drugs. Besides artificially keeping everyone's
prices high, this would be a death sentence to many people suffering from
cancer, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and other treatable diseases in impoverished
lands. The deal would also restrict the rights of our government to negotiate
with drug giants to get lower consumer prices with bulk purchases, as Medicare
and Medicaid do in the US.
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Created on Dec 31st 1969 18:00. Viewed 0 times.
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Aug 16th 2013 19:14