Neoliberalism, My Ass

[Hortensis]

63. International business IS engaged in a

conspiracy to use trade agreements to neutralize local laws and thwart the will and needs of the local people. That is beyond question.

What those wringing their hands over the TPP don't consider is that, even as giant corporations
win some brief victories, the end of this tactic is already in sight and that they have already had many losses. Just last year the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was boasting everywhere that the TPP was going to make its nations liable for tobacco industry losses due to any anti-smoking laws and practices of those nations. They lost that one. That's hardly the only one business is losing in that one treaty.

Over the past 40 years or so especially of great technological advances, international business was able to operate extremely aggressively in a relatively lawless international environment. The necessary legal controls had not been developed between nations, and business was able to take great advantage of vacuums and lack of cooperation, becoming extremely powerful and buying whatever influence they needed in the process.

However, that power is already diminishing because the world's nations need it to and are beginning to write laws aimed at bringing it under control. A very imperfect process, as the current form of the TPP shows, but it is happening.