When the president argues it's vital “we” write the rules on TPP, “we” means not the American people

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The Nation ‏@thenation
(Katrina vanden Heuvel) The TPP Is a Rigged Agreement http://thenat.in/1Ct6Jp9


“China wants to write the rules for the world’s fastest-growing region … We should write those rules,” President Obama declared in his State of the Union address. To sell Congress on giving him authority to “fast track” consideration of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade and investment treaty with 12 nations that has been under negotiation for five years, the president argues it is vital that “we” write the rules. The real question, of course, is what does he mean by “we”?

Our global trade and tax policies have been and still are controlled by corporate and financial interests. They, not workers or consumers, write the rules...

The TPP is a classic expression of the way the rules are fixed to benefit the few and not the many. It has been negotiated in secret, but 500 corporations and banks sit on advisory committees with access to various chapters. The lead negotiator, Michael Froman, was a protege of former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin, and followed him from Treasury to Citibank, the bank whose excesses helped blow up the economy before it had to be bailed out. Although corporations are wired in, the American people are locked out of the TPP negotiations. And, as Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said, “Members of Congress and their staff have an easier time accessing national security documents than proposed trade deals, but if I were negotiating this deal I suppose I wouldn’t want people to see it either.”

The brutal negotiations of the TPP haven’t been about tariffs but about protections and regulations. Last week, the draft chapter concerning the “Investor-State Dispute Settlement” mechanism was leaked to Wikileaks and the New York Times. Essentially, the chapter allows a company to sue for taxpayer damages if a government (federal, state or local) passes laws or take actions that the company alleges will impinge on future expected profits. The “tribunal” is a panel of lawyers, drawn from a small group of accredited international lawyers who serve both as judges and advocates. If successful the companies can collect millions in damages from governments. The provisions are so shocking that the TPP mandates that the chapter not be declassified until four years after the TPP goes into force or fails to pass.

The administration says we shouldn’t worry about this, because the United States has never lost a case and that the dispute mechanism is basically designed to be used on countries with weak or corrupted legal systems. But as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has noted, Philip Morris has already sued Uruguay because of its new anti-smoking regulations that have been lauded globally. A French company sued Egypt for raising the minimum wage; a Swedish company sued Germany for phasing out nuclear power...

So remember, when the president argues that it is vital that “we” write the rules, “we” means not the American people, but corporate and financial interests...


read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trans-pacific-partnership-treaty-will-help-neither-workers-nor-consumers/2015/03/31/145e98ba-d727-11e4-ba28-f2a685dc7f89_story.html

[jwirr]

1. When I read that I think about how we have written the rules in so many other places like the South

American countries where we promoted disaster capitalism by overthrowing their elected governments, Like the ME where we are doing exactly that now. I don't think our business world is qualified to write the rules.

If we do not like them we can just refuse to join.

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2. that's exactly right, jwirr

...these trade deals, for the most part, are written by, and for, corporations. Consumers and others affected are just a means to their further enrichment.