The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is back on Obama’s agenda. He’s hoping to sneak it through with secret meetings and this past Monday, he encouraged world leaders to move forward with the deal.
“This has the potential for being an historic agreement,” said Obama.
The agreement isn’t sunshine and rainbows though, as the administration would have the public to believe. As Ring of Fire has noted previously, there are a number of negative affects that will come from the TPP.
Here are a few:
Lead to Job Loss: Nearly 5 million American manufacturing jobs have been lost since the implementation of NAFTA and WTO. TPP would expand on the NAFTA model. It would provide special benefits to companies that relocate abroad and eliminate risks that make companies hesitant to move to low-wage countries.
Attack Environmental and Health Laws: TPP would empower foreign corporations to skirt domestic laws and challenge governments’ health, environmental, and public interest policies. Leaked text reveals that TPP would include and expand corporate privileges by elevating foreign corporations to equal status with the governments signing TPP, allowing corporations to privately enforce the public treaty.
Waive “Buy American” Policies: TPP would require that all firms operating in any one of the 12 signatory countries be provided equal access as domestic firms to US government procurement contracts over a certain threshold. The US would agree to waive “Buy American” and “Buy Local” procurement policies for foreign firms, thereby eliminating the policy tool to use US tax dollars for US job creation.
Benefit Wall Street Bankers: TPP would provide big banks with a means of rolling back efforts to regulate Wall Street after the global economic recession. It would prevent countries from banning risky financial products such as toxic derivatives and would require a return to the model of extreme deregulation that caused the economic crisis.
