Making the World Safe for Big Business

[polly7]

By Sean Starrs
Source: Jacobin Magazine
May 15, 2015

After five years of intense negotiations, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) may come to fruition by the end of this year. Much has been written (and rightly so) about the negative consequences of the TPP for American labor. But what are the international implications of the TPP, and in a world awash with bilateral and multilateral trade and investment treaties (there are over 3,200 international investment treaties alone), how is this one different?

The architects of the TPP are structuring the agreement to serve their own interests: protection of intellectual property rights and investor arbitration facilitate the continued dominance of the world’s top corporations, which remain European, Japanese, and most of all American.

Protection of IP rights ensures that advanced knowledge sectors, like the pharmaceuticals industry, maintain their healthy profit margins (and the poor continue to be denied life-saving drugs). US agribusiness will profit from the opening of Japan’s agricultural sector, and Nike will benefit from the further liberalization of Vietnam (where most of its shoes are manufactured).

To understand whose interests are being served, one simply has to note that US trade representatives are accompanied by over six hundred “corporate advisers” to the negotiations, which are shrouded in secrecy. Labor advisers? Zero.

The TPP will also make it easier for transnational corporations to sue governments for labor, environmental, health, safety, and other regulations, in order to gain taxpayer compensation for “loss of future returns” due to “expropriation.” Investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms — already in place in many existing international investment treaties — will be consolidated and strengthened in the TPP to ensure a single, more predictable, standard for the record-breaking number of new cases.

Full article: https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/making-the-world-safe-for-big-business/

[stonecutter357]

1. .

[polly7]

2. So interesting!

I love that you can gather all your thoughts so early in the day and post such an informative opinion.

Personally, I worry very much about corporations ruining the lives of millions around the world and trade agreements that are in no way 'fair' to those at the bottom who WILL be the ones to suffer, just as they do under the IMF. World Bank and pretty much every agreement that's been forced upon them so far. Corrupt gov'ts or those who cannot fight the larger, richer, more powerful will sacrifice their citizens - it's terrifying to me. I'd love to hear why it's such a snoozer for you - ok, not really, I find that anyone who supports these unfair trade agreements probably profits somehow by doing so, but thanks anyway for the cute little smilies.

[stonecutter357]

3. it is way more than you deserve.

[polly7]

4. As was my reply way more than you deserve.

[Judi Lynn]

5. This is a grab the fascists need to lose. Can't believe a Dem. Pres. supported it for a moment. n/t