The President's Betrayal of Progressive Principles is Writ Large in the TPP
And by progressive principles I mean protecting the environment, standing up for labor and working people. This article examines the neoliberal influence of FTAs and persuasively argues that they're built, in large part, on disaster capitalism.
<snip>
The TPP is an appalling initiative on its own terms. Labor unions and others are right to point out that it will hurt
American workers. Moreover, Obama’s pursuit of it is as clear a betrayal of his candidacy as one is likely to find. ted against CAFTA [the Central American Free Trade Agreement], never supported NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement], and will not support NAFTA-style trade agreements in the future.” Former Labor Department secretary Robert Reich has described the TPP as “NAFTA on steroids.”
But left there, the analysis of the TPP’s flaws would be entirely solipsistic. The fact that it will be bad for America isn’t actually the worst thing about it. When viewed through the wider lenses of underdevelopment and migration, the pact illustrates much of what is wrong with the neoliberal global framework the West has erected over the last 30 years.
Given Congress’s refusal to pass comprehensive immigration reform, what the TPP helps build is a world in which capital is free to roam wherever it pleases, while borders remain closed to people. While machines and money may scour the globe in search of cheaper labor, weaker unions, and looser regulations, people are stopped from crossing borders in search of the kind of work that might pay them enough to feed their families.
It’s a system in which economic and military power go hand in hand. “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist,” The New York Times’s Thomas Friedman once wrote. “McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”
Such is the huge gated community that is now the West, spreading chaos and deprivation with its economic and foreign policies and then retreating into its fortified laager to repel those who attempt to flee the mayhem it has wrought. “Free trade,” when dictated by corporations and defined by the powerful, is actually anything but free—and the cost is ultimately paid in human lives.
<snip>
http://www.thenation.com/article/210177/whats-true-cost-free-trade#
= new reply since forum marked as read
