A Pacific Nafta is about to hit us. This time it's the TPP, or Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The TPP is an expansive, highly secretive international free trade agreement. It's being negotiated by delegates from twelve Pacific Rim countries, including the United States, along with hundreds of industry leaders. Elected officials, civil society, and the press have largely been shut out of negotiations, but these leaked documents reveal disturbing provisions.
The TPP would empower corporations to directly sue governments over laws and policies that they claim reduce their profits. Legislation designed to address climate change, curb fossil fuel expansion, and reduce air pollution could all be subject to attack as a result of the TPP.
Right now, our best chance to stop this train wreck is to stop Congress from giving “fast-track” authority to President Obama, allowing him to push the agreement through without a public debate. ...350.org
Another Democratic president presiding over another Nafta, only bigger.
I don't know about you, but I join others in thinking this move deserves our attention even more than does the issue of the Keystone pipeline. Both would, in effect, nullify environmental protection agreements. The TPP just makes the problem hemispheric rather than binational.
The pact, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), is deliberately shrouded in secrecy, a trade deal powerful people, including President Obama, don’t want you to know about. More than 130 members of Congress have asked the White House for greater transparency about the negotiations and were essentially told to go fly a kite. While most of us are in the dark about the contents of the deal, which Obama aims to seal by year end, corporate lobbyists are in the know about what it contains.
And some vigilant independent watchdogs are tracking the negotiations with sources they trust, including Dean Baker and Yves Smith, who join Moyers & Company this week. Both have written extensively about the TPP and tell Bill the pact actually has very little to do with free trade.
Instead, says Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, “This really is a deal that’s being negotiated by corporations for corporations and any benefit it provides to the bulk of the population of this country will be purely incidental.” Yves Smith, an investment banking expert who runs the Naked Capitalism blog adds: “There would be no reason to keep it so secret if it was in the interest of the public.” ...billmoyers.com
Congress is iffy -- focusing on economic risks, not the environmental risks inherent in the Partnership.
Lawmakers have proposed a bill that would narrow the Obama administration’s room to negotiate new free-trade agreements, demanding that sensitive issues such as currency manipulation be covered in future treaties and deepening congressional oversight of the process.
The legislation, introduced Tuesday by three of the top lawmakers on U.S. trade policy, would give the administration a green light to complete new trade pacts covering an important swath of Asia and Latin America and all of the European Union — the most significant such agreements in a generation.
But the bill also creates some difficult hurdles for the administration and sets up a potentially divisive debate over economic globalization and whether expanded trade agreements will produce more U.S. jobs or siphon them overseas. ...WaPo