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Trans-Pacific Partnership Deal Struck As "Corporate Secrecy" Wins Again
Once again the corporatocracy wins as the so-called "Trojan horse" Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement has been finalized. As WSJ reports, the U.S., Japan and 10 countries around the Pacific reached a historic accord Monday to lower trade barriers to goods and services and set commercial rules of the road for two-fifths of the global economy, officials said.
For the U.S., the TPP (reportedly) opens agricultural markets in Japan and Canada, tightens intellectual property rules to benefit drug and technology companies, and establishes a tightknit economic bloc to challenge China’s influence in the region (likely forcing their hand into separate trade agreements).
However, Obama is likely to face a tough fight to get the deal through Congress (especially in light of presidential candidates' opposition).
The US, Japan and 10 other Pacific Rim economies have reached agreement to strike the largest trade pact seen anywhere in two decades, in what is a huge strategic and political win for US President Barack Obama and Japan’s Shinzo Abe.
As The Wall Street Journal reports,
The deal, if approved by Congress, will mark an effective expansion of the North American Free Trade Agreement launched two decades ago to include Japan, Australia, Chile, Peru and several southeast Asian nations.
The trade deal has been in the works since 2008 but has been stymied by politically sensitive disputes, including a fight between the U.S. and Japan over the automobile industry.
Beyond that, however, it represents the economic backbone of the Obama administration’s strategic “pivot” to Asia and a response to the rise of the US’s chief rival, China, and its growing regional and global influence. It is also a key component of the “third arrow” of economic reforms that Mr Abe has been pursuing in Japan since taking office in 2012.
Biotechs, among others, are the big winners...
In pharmaceuticals and other industries, U.S. officials sought a deal that would be acceptable to other countries and as many members of Congress as possible, without triggering the outright opposition of a major business group. Many Democratic lawmakers and groups backing generic drugs and less expensive medicine didn’t want any more than five years of exclusivity for biologic drugs, and it wasn’t immediately clear if the compromise in the TPP would satisfy their concerns.
One of the last disputes to be resolved pitted Australia against the U.S., which was seeking up to 12 years of protection for biologic drugs against generic imitators. The two countries reached a complicated compromise that provides at least five and potentially up to eight years of exclusivity for biologics. Chile, Peru and other countries remained concerned about adding to the price of drugs through long exclusivity periods, according to people following the talks.
In another last-minute deal, Canada and Japan agreed to increase access to their tightly controlled dairy markets, allowing some American dairy products in, but New Zealand also persuaded the U.S. to accept more of its milk products. The sour milk fight caught the attention of Congress, where Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.), two lawmakers overseeing trade policy, demanded that dairy producers in their states gain more access to Canadian consumers, a sensitive concession for Canada during its own election season.
But critics remain vocal...
U.S. labor unions and their allies among consumer and environmental groups are among the biggest critics of the TPP. The left-wing opposition has prevented Mr. Obama from getting many fellow Democrats—already skeptical of the deal’s benefits to U.S. workers—to support his trade policy.
An array of Republican lawmakers object to provisions that would strengthen the influence of labor groups, impinge on the ability of tobacco companies to fight against packaging rules and other laws overseas, and possibly harm local industries, from dairy farmers to sugar.
So it isn't over yet... (as The FT reports)
The deal announced on Monday by trade ministers from the 12 countries still must be signed formally by the countries’ leaders and ratified by their parliaments. In the US Mr Obama is likely to face a tough fight to get the deal through Congress next year, especially as presidential candidates like Republican frontrunner Donald Trump have argued against the TPP.
Only a handful of Democrats support Mr. Obama’s trade policy, and Republican support is unpredictable in the 2016 election year, depending on the stance of presidential candidates and new leadership in the House. As it is, the deal can’t go to a vote before Congress until early next year.
The odds of passage in Congress will hinge in large part on the final language in a number of provisions, ranging from the strengthening of rights for labor unions to whether U.S. cigarette companies will face special limitations within TPP countries.
“I will carefully scrutinize it to see whether my concerns about rushing into a deal before meeting all U.S. objectives are justified,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement Sunday before the deal was completed.
Critics around the world have also lambasted the deal for being negotiated in secret and being biased towards corporations, criticisms that are likely to be amplified when the national legislatures seek to ratify the TPP in the months to come.
* * *
Finally, as we detailed previously, the most troubling aspect of the TPP, asserts Ellen Brown, is the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provision, which “first appeared in a bilateral trade agreement in 1959.” Brown continues:
According to The Economist, ISDS gives foreign firms a special right to apply to a secretive tribunal of highly paid corporate lawyers for compensation whenever the government passes a law … that [negatively impacts] corporate profits — such things as discouraging smoking, protecting the environment or preventing nuclear catastrophe.
Imagine a scenario in which the U.S., coming to its senses about climate change, imposes a revenue-neutral carbon fee on fossil energy. According to provisions of the TPP, a fossil-fuel company in a signatory nation could then sue the U.S. for lost profits, real or imagined.
The threat is not idle. In 2012, the U.S.’s Occidental Petroleum received an ISDS settlement of $2.3 billion from the government of Ecuador because of that country’s apparently legal termination of an oil-concession contract. Currently, the Swedish nuclear-power utility Vattenfall is suing the German government for $4.7 billion in compensation, following Germany’s phase-out of nuclear plants in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster.
The ISDS provisions of the TPP are insidious: the means by which signatory nations voluntarily surrender national sovereignty to the authority of corporate tribunals, without appeal, and apparently without exit provisions. No wonder the negotiations are secret.
Packaged as a gift to the American people that will renew industry and make us more competitive, the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a Trojan horse. It’s a coup by multinational corporations who want global subservience to their agenda. Buyer beware. Citizens beware.
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The author misses the main purpose of TPP - which is to allow American companies to move their factories to cheaper labor countries and not have to worry about the U.S. imposing any tariffs or duties when importing the same products that used to be 'Made in the USA'
Viva corpocracy Trilateral...
The Empire tries to entrench its corporate presence and global blueprint deeper into Australasia, using the Oligarchy lever.
A badly baked caked made in haste wlll always be easy to expose as a can of worms later down the road.
Lets just remind ourselves how the Asian can of worms for the US has evolved since the end of WW2 and America's hegemonial plays in that region.
The man who coined the Containment strategy under Truman in 1947 at the beginning of Cold War, George Kenan, based his strategy for countering the influence of Marxist regime of USSR by proposing to use a mix of defensive and psychological measures based on economic intiatives which would induce the Soviets to become VICTIMS of their own internal contradictions.
That strategy, after "we've lost China" trauma, became the more aggressive "rollback" strategy of Dulles's ; Alan and John Foster twin plays using both covert and overt (American aid) methods to stem the tide of Red menace in South East Asia.
Given the evolution of Pax Americana since then, that strategy increasingly morphed into hubristic NWO.
Kenan's prophetic analysis was metamorphosed into more hard core MIC oriented plays that led to Nam invasion and subsequent dystopia for the Empire.
Now that the shoe seems to be on the OTHER foot and the Empire is now a vast corpocracy bent on making its elites the new Politburo of the NWO, in inverted totalitarian ideology, we can say the best defense against this global TPP initiative is to LET GLOBAL CORPOCRACY die of its own contradictions in death by a thousand cuts!
Giap applied that "thousand cuts" guerilla strategy to kill Imperial France, Imperial USA and genocidal Khmer Rouge; thus earning the reputation of being the greatest military strategist of the second half of the 20th century.
What the China high command now has to do is let the TPP bring to a boil its own dissensions on the TItanic.
Instead of upping the ante by using a "rollback" hubristic strategy just like the Dulles's did to the great distress of the nations of that region and ultimately its inevitable blowback to the Home of Imperial power!
But do people learn the lessons of the past?
Do not interrupt enemy while he make mistake.
" Obama is likely to face a tough fight to get the deal through Congress. "
There will be some song and dance opposition to it for our entertainment, but ultimately they all know who they are working for and who pays the bar bill and the sluts off at the end of the night.
is this suppose to save japan as us-satellite bitch state and establish a new connection to keep influence on south east asia?
“I will carefully scrutinize it to see whether my concerns about rushing into a deal before meeting all U.S. objectives are justified,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement Sunday before the deal was completed.
Remedial translation:
'Hand me that pen, please...'
You got that right. Exept you forgot to put "now" at the end of your translation.
When these primates have sent the last decent paying middle class job to Malaysia, who is supposed to be over here buying all this imported junk?
Maybe they plan to drop tupperware and cheap blue jeans into the fema camps with helicopters.
But wait, there's more! TPA, TTIP & TTP's ugly kid sister:
http://www.jbs.org/legislation/stop-the-trade-in-services-agreement-tisa
The TiSA would give the UN’s World Trade Organization (WTO) unprecedented control of the service sector. Americans in services jobs that require occupational licensing would likely be hard hit by TiSA’s changes in the regulatory environment. Services professions requiring occupational licensing include physicians, lawyers, teachers, plumbers, electricians, real estate agents, insurance agents, audiologists, architects, certified public accountants, engineers and more.
The Sheeple get flocked, as usual.
http://www.thedailysheeple.com/
NAFTA and repealing Glass-Steagall worked out so well for “Just Us”, let's double down.
So Germany is going to have to pay to scrap tens of thousands of worn out windmills and cover losses to foreign nuclear suppliers?
Ukraine makes more sense everyday.
Germany is broke, worse they invested "their" assets in CA and Detroit municipal bonds, not only are they gonna lose interest, they'really gonna lose principle.
More Muslim babies will help, nothing fixes a problem like a bunch of broke indigent inbred muslims.
Okay I've totally had enough. Time to toss the garbage out.
So now, if the U.S. government does anything that hurts the feelings of some giant trans-national conglomerate, said conglomerate is given the right by treaty to sue the hell out of the American people in a secret court stuffed with their own lawyers? No! Do not honor the treaty. Just tear it up. If our captured supreme court insists that we must pay these vampires, impeach the judges and never replace them and bulldoze the court buildings to make room for hungry Americans. And tear up the stupid TPP document and the fake, never-enforced “U.S. constitution” and go back to the Articles of Confederation, which are legitimate (except for a few noxious provisions). Stop being slaves to such fake “documents” and get on with real life.
Do away with phony ridiculous “intellectual property” and simply grant achievement awards to people who create or invent useful things so that everybody can play all the music they like and freely make valuable products.
And get rid of voting machines and get strategy-friendly simple score voting – cast out the Ivory Tower election methods cranks that devise unworkable systems.
No more delusional reverence and submission to sacred “papers” forged by sleazy lawyers.
Enough!
Gold star.
Trump is the only Republican against TPP. Remember this when you vote !
And the only one that has said maybe we should let Putin sort out Syria and ISIS.
I would give him Syria not to have TPP. TPP is a fucking joke on the American People
Trump could have a field day with this one if he chose to.
Think of it as being chained to the oars on a sinking ship. Thats on fire.
Here come the secret laws. My guess is even after its made into law we still wont be allowed to read it.
Think about that stall folks.
Corporate America is the system, but it's not our system. It's the system of the 0.01%. It's their system and their game, and the only way to win the game is by not playing...
That movie's theme is what I keep saying...masses of young men have no place in today's society. No roles to take, no frontiers to conquer. So far, they've been appeased into passivity, but it HAS to come out somewhere...
I just hope this doesn't just end with all those young men beating each other (or us!)into pulp senselessly. But so far, it's not looking good.
Actually, the military and LE are kinda like 'fight clubs'...
I just wonder how long before they start going after our personal tools.
Ill give them my 'personal tool'.... all they have to do is come on over and bend over, lubed up, or not...
Fuck this corporatist government. What a bunch of fucking sell-outs.
"this corporatist government"? Show me one, going back 120 years, that wasn't!
Understand that in the global economy slave states are the only way to compete going forward.
Does this mean that we'll get the pleasure of eating Japanese radioactive rice with less restrictions. Matter of fact, I bet we'll be eating only their rice and shipping ours over there. Sounds delicious.
Does this mean that we'll get the pleasure of eating Japanese radioactive rice with less restrictions. Matter of fact, I bet we'll be eating only their rice and shipping ours over there. Sounds delicious.
But wait, there's more more!
http://www.thedailysheeple.com/did-obama-bomb-doctors-without-borders-fo...
Had the President of Nobel Peace Prize-winning Doctors Without Borders not warned us of the “imminent threat to global health” posed by the TPP, would these 22 doctors and patients have lost their lives early Saturday?
“I don’t know exactly how long, but it was maybe half an hour afterwards that they stopped bombing. I went out with the project coordinator to see what had happened. What we saw was the hospital destroyed, burning...”
Here you go, ZH Readers...
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/10/michael-hudson-on-parasitic-finan...
I challenged our resident Business School Economist on his comments about the TPP on MSM today and he responded with a paper by Krugman. I'm so revolted at the prospect of reading Krugman's drivel that I decided to read more Z/H instead. I can't bear to read one more paper by Krugman when all previous have been so nauseatingly pathetic. Frankly, I really don't get these antiquated NeoLiberals or their slavish devotion to Paul Krugman's drunken meanderings on defunct notions of Macroeconomics, and bankrupt schools of thought?
I'll bet every business school director in the world is firing off Paul Krugman papers in response to all who question this lunacy on the TPP.
p.s. I'm going to send this article to our resident business school Economist not because I think he will read it, but because I think he will look at the cartoon before he hits the delete key.
We will not comply.
I think we should even consider revolt? No? Too old fashion?
Each and Every Agreement involving America is a losing proposition because America will have monopoly & terrorise the smaller weaker dungeons(developing countries).
Do not deal with America
Do not trade in dollar
Be safe
"lower trade barriers" means, of course, "More Americans out of work, and more of the USA looted and sold off to the lowest foreign bidder".
Does anyone agree with TPP? Is there any citizen at all that thinks its good? How can a secret deal happen in a democracy? Is this still a democracy? I dont think its even close anymore. There should be a march on the capital.