Why should we care? About the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)
January 11th, 2015 | Published in Power & Politics
Retired professor of biostatistics, Ron Forthofer calls the TPP “a thoroughly predatory pact”. Here are some reasons:
- It eases the rules governing transnational companies (Halliburton and Chevron, for example) and serves their interests at the expense of Jo Citizen.
- It involves 12 nations, including Australia, and has been underway since 2010, almost entirely in secret. The secrecy and media blackout alone raise serious alarm bells.
- It affects daily life in relation to the internet, movies, pharmaceuticals, the environment, and democracy, and therefore cannot be dismissed as irrelevant, or ‘just about trade’.
- It involves different rules for transnational and domestic companies, and capacity to order “unlimited payments of tax dollars to foreign corporations.” Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) grants investors the right to use dispute settlement proceedings against foreign governments.
- It favors financial deregulation, despite the lessons of the last financial crisis.
- The negotiating table does not embrace consumers, libraries, students, advocacy groups or other users of intellectual property; internet service providers and generic drug manufacturers (as distinct from Big Pharma) are also poorly represented.
IN SUM, it’s a secret deal, favoured by (some) mega-corporations; a new-age superpower with questionable accountability, about which Noam Chomsky has much to say (the following image also ran on my 2020socialjustice Facebook page and I will embed the post as a comment to preserve discussion, along with the Facebook posting of the above synopsis of Forthofer’s points.)
Click here for a Facebook group in Australia opposing the TPP…Joan Beckwith.
One of my favorite comments on the Facebook post of the Noam Chomsky quote came from Marina Barlow, who said: “This deal should be renamed, perhaps ‘Transpacific Economic Dictatorship’ or Transpacific Neocolonialism’ are far closer to the truth.”