An illuminating and chilling interview by Sam Seder of Majority Report with Harvard Law grad Lori Wallach from Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch on the rights-destroying secret provisions of Barack Obama’s TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership [previously].
The proposed agreement bans “Buy American” laws, fair trade laws, and a whole host of other regulations designed to protect the environment and save citizens from rapacious banksters, as well as creating a secret tribunal system privatizing enforcement of the treaty and elevating corporations to the status of sovereign citizens. Presiding over the tribunal will be private sector corporate attorneys.
In other words, the Trans-Pacific Partnership combines the worst of NAFTA with the new corporate rights bestowed by Citizens United, the ruling that transferred ultimate control of the American political system to corporate sponsors.
Here are some of the law’s secret provisions, from an Global Trade Watch news release [PDF] issued earlier this month:
Although the TPP has been branded a “trade” agreement, the leaked text of the pact’s Investment Chapter shows that the TPP would:
- limit how U.S. federal and state officials could regulate foreign firms operating within U.S. boundaries, with requirements to provide them greater rights than domestic firms;
- extend the incentives for U.S. firms to offshore investment and jobs to lower-wage countries;
- establish a two-track legal system that gives foreign firms new rights to skirt U.S. courts and laws, directly sue the U.S. government before foreign tribunals and demand compensation for financial, health, environmental, land use and other laws they claim undermine their TPP privileges; and
- allow foreign firms to demand compensation for the costs of complying with U.S. financial or environmental regulations that apply equally to domestic and foreign firms.
>snip<
The TPP offered an opportunity to develop a new model of trade agreement that could deliver the benefits of expanded trade without unduly undermining signatory nations’ domestic public interest policies or establishing special privileges for foreign corporations. President Barack Obama and countless members of Congress campaigned on fixing these investment rules to better protect the public interest. But Public Citizen’s analysis of this text shows that the U.S. positions do not reflect any of the changes that candidate Obama pledged when he recognized the threats posed by the NAFTA-style investment provisions in trade agreements.
Barack Obama is giving us lots of Change™ without any of the Hope™.
Anyone who still thinks Obama is a liberal suffers from a serious case of endocrectocraniality.
H/T to Moussequetaire.
UPDATE: Wallach writes about the TPP here.
Chile’s ex-chief negotiator drops a bombshell on TPPA
Sunday, 2 June 2013, 5:06 pm
Press Release: Professor Jane Kelsey
2 June 2013
For immediate release
Chile’s ex-chief negotiator drops a bombshell on TPPA
In a dramatic public statement, Chile’s former chief negotiator for the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPPA) Rodrigo Contreras has urged fellow Latin American countries to work together to defend their interests against the demands of rich countries in the talks.
Contreras warned that unless they held back those demands the TPPA will become ‘a threat for our countries: it will restrict our options for development in health and education, in biological and cultural diversity, and in the design of public policies and the transformation of our economies’.
It will also provoke a backlash from Latin America’s increasingly active social movements.
The warning came in an opinion piece in the 16 May edition of Peru’s Spanish language weekly Caretas, at the start of the most recent negotiating round in Peru.*
Contreras stood down from the role in February 2013. Informed bloggers note ‘It’s widely believed that he left his post voluntarily. He’s held in high esteem not just in Chile but among his fellow trade negotiators. His departure left people on the trade beat scratching their heads. It now appears probable that the reason for his resignation was that he saw where the TPP was likely to go and didn’t want his name attached to it.’
‘Chile’s former chief negotiator has dropped a bombshell on the talks’, said Professor Jane Kelsey who is a critic of the negotiations.
‘While his concerns are targeted at the poorer countries at the TPPA table, the risks are essentially the same for New Zealand’ Professor Kelsey observed.
‘Here is an insider who knows the texts. Rodrigo Contreras has sat in the negotiating room for several years and tried to get the US and others to back off their most damaging demands. He now believes the current direction of the TPPA poses a threat to his country’s economic and social development’.
‘The evidence continues to mount against this agreement every day. New Zealand cannot continue to negotiate the TPPA under the shroud of secrecy. With many chapters nearing closure, it is way past the time to release what is on the table so we can evaluate and debate its implications’, Kelsey said.
*For an English translation see: The New Chessboard – English Translation of Rodrigo Contreras Article