TransPacific Trade Agreement and Inequalitiy

 A few snippets from a piece on a trade agreement that would cover 40% of global economic activity that you can read about here:





As with NAFTA, the TPP will benefit U.S. companies relocating jobs to
low-wage, high-repression nations, argues economist Mark Weisbrot,
co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). This
would also exert strong downward pressures on the pay of U.S. workers,
“Most U.S. workers are likely to lose out from the TPP,” Weisbrot says.
“This may come as no surprise after 20 years of NAFTA and an even-longer
period of trade policy designed to put lower- and middle-class workers
in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world.”



Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, points
out that only five of the TPP’s twenty-nine chapters are about trade at
all. But the remaining provisions cover such immensely important
measures as the creation of a kind of corporate supremacy over the
democratically established regulations enacted by member nations. If an
existing law threats to diminish profits, corporations in the TPP
nations would be entitled to bring their complaint to an international
dispute panel of anonymous corporate members, who could impose major
financial penalties on the “offending” countries. “



Some of the most controversial TPP features have become public only
thanks to Wikileaks. American participation in the TPP negotiations has
been limited to a tiny circle of just 600 top corporate executives.
Numerous members of Congress have complained about the secrecy
surrounding the negotiations, charging that it exceeds even that
practiced by the Bush-Cheney administration. The public’s understanding
of the massive stakes involved in the TPP has been further hampered by
the failure of major media to offer even minimal analysis. The
major-network news shows, according to a new study by Media Matters,
made no mention at all of the TPP from August 2013 through January 2014.

The
TPP would provide transnational corporations with easier access to
cheap labor in Pacific Rim nations and new power to trump
public-interest protections—on labor, food safety, drug prices,
financial regulation, domestic procurement laws, and a host of
others—established over the last century by democratic governments. The
nations currently negotiating the TPP—which together comprise nearly
40%of the world economy—include the United States, Australia, Brunei,
Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore,
and Vietnam. - See more at:
http://triplecrisis.com/tpp-would-deepen-income-divide/#sthash.tg3MiTgm.dpuf