By Zoya Sheftalovich

Are you concerned about the increasing cost of medicines? Do you want to know if your muesli bar contains palm oil? Want the government to be able to implement health policies like plain packaging?

Then you really should care about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade agreement being negotiated in secret between Australia, Brunei, Chile, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam.

In this report, we investigate the TPP and the impact it will have on your consumer rights and privacy. You'll find information on:

• the secrecy surrounding the TPP and details of how the media is being locked out of briefings
• how the Australian government could become more vulnerable to lawsuits from multinational corporations
• why food labelling in Australia is in danger
• how draconian copyright provisions could significantly curb our freedom online
• how extended monopoly provisions could make medication costs skyrocket
• CHOICE's campaign on the TPP.

CHOICE is calling for the TPP text to be released before a final agreement is signed.

read more: https://www.choice.com.au/shopping/consumer-rights-and-advice/your-rights/articles/tpp-secretly-trading-away-your-rights

Labor, the Greens and crossbenchers have formed a new group to raise concerns about the highly secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership deal as political opposition builds ahead of its signing.

One critic told Guardian Australia the agreement amounts to the redefinition of western sovereignty.

The historic agreement between 12 Pacific rim nations could be reached within a fortnight, as the United States mobilises support behind president Barack Obama’s centrepiece trade policy.

The Australian parliamentary working group, founded by Labor’s Melissa Parke, Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson and independent senator Nick Xenophon, will officially launch on Monday.

Consumer group Choice and community conglomerate Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network (Aftinet) will also speak at Monday’s lunchtime event, to be held in Parliament House.

Xenophon said the group is an example of “from little things big things grow”, adding there is “increasing disquiet” over the TPP deal and how it is being negotiated.

The group aims to better inform the community, via educating parliamentarians, on the implications of the deal.

“If people realised what this delivered, they would be horrified,” Parke said. “There are many [parliamentary] colleagues who have expressed concern about the TPP.”

http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/may/22/labor-greens-and-crossbenchers-concerned-at-trans-pacific-partnership

President Obama won a big victory for his trade agenda Friday with the Senate’s approval of fast-track legislation that could make it easier for him to complete a wide-ranging trade deal that would include 11 Pacific Rim nations.

A coalition of nearly 50 Senate Republicans and more than 10 Democrats voted for Trade Promotion Authority late Friday, sending the legislation to the House for a difficult fight as Obama faces more entrenched opposition from Democrats.

The Senate coalition fought off several attempts by opponents to undermine the legislation, defeating amendments that were politically popular but potentially poisonous to Obama’s bid to secure the trade deal.

“This is an important bill, likely the most important bill we will pass this year. It’s important to President Obama,” Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and primary author of the bill, said at the close of debate.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-wins-trade-victory-in-the-senate/2015/05/22/1cb6958e-00c7-11e5-8b6c-0dcce21e223d_story.html

See toon at top...

Liberal senator Bill Heffernan has warned his colleagues within the Abbott government that he will fight and defeat any attempt to allow fresh US beef to be imported to Australia under the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Heffernan told a Senate estimates committee hearing that he was in possession of Edward Snowden-style documents suggesting the US wanted to sell beef products to Australia in return for the Australian sugar industry gaining access to the American market.

“I am aware that some people in our government are philosophically aligned to that [position] even if politically they’re finding it a bit difficult,” he told Department ofAgriculture officials on Monday.

“I don’t give a rats who they are; they’re going to cop it. The TPP arrangements were originally that ‘if you want us [the US] to take your [Australian] sugar you’ve got to take some of our beef’. Now that’s in there, written.”

Heffernan said he was aware that the suggestion had since been “downgraded because of fuss made by certain people”, but he used the committee hearing on Monday to question department officials about risks of mad cow disease.

Simon Murnane, assistant secretary in the trade and market access division, said the department had “provided briefing to the minister on issues associated with the US’s request to import fresh meat into Australia”.

Heffernan repeatedly raised concerns about bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as mad cow disease. The NSW senator said he understood that Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ) had agreed that US-processed beef was “going to get an OK”.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/may/25/bill-heffernan-us-beef-imports-trans-pacific-partnership

How ridiculous... Australia to "import beef" from the US while Australia "exports" beef somewhere else... Isn't this playing some musical chairs to enrich people organising the gig while the public ends up loosing a seat or two or a whole bench of their democratic rights? Is US beef different from Aussie beef? Most likely the US beef comes from feedlots, while the Aussie beef comes from pastures. Feedlots are a breeding ground for Mad Cow Disease, though as small as the threat is. Feedlots are unhealthy places in general and who knows if the US feed-lottery use antibiotics to prevent diseases?... Torpedo this TPP, please. ASAP.

Paul Krugman, This Is Not A Trade Agreement:

One thing that should be totally obvious, however, is that it’s off-point and insulting to offer an off-the-shelf lecture on how trade is good because of comparative advantage, and protectionists are dumb. For this is not a trade agreement. It’s about intellectual property and dispute settlement; the big beneficiaries are likely to be pharmaceutical companies and firms that want to sue governments.

Josh Bivens at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), in No, the TPP Won’t Be Good for the Middle Class:

…TPP (like nearly all trade agreements the U.S. signs) is not a “free trade agreement”—instead it’s a treaty that will specify just who will be protected from international competition and who will not. And the strongest and most comprehensive protections offered are by far those for U.S. corporate interests. Finally, there are international economic agreements that the United States could be negotiating to help the American middle class. They would look nothing like the TPP.

Jim Hightower, The Trans-Pacific Partnership is not about free trade. It’s a corporate coup d’etat–against us!:

TPP is a “trade deal” that mostly does not deal with trade. In fact, of the 29 chapters in this document, only five cover traditional trade matters!

The other two dozen chapters amount to a devilish “partnership” for corporate protectionism. They create sweeping new “rights” and escape hatches to protect multinational corporations from accountability to our governments… and to us.

Read more: https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/stop-the-calling-the-tpp-a-trade-agreement--it-isnt,7759

The TPP is designed to kill democratic rights and favour corporate looting of your cash...

Australian politicians have been told they can view the current confidential negotiating text for the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, but only if they agree not to divulge anything they see for four years, despite expectations the deal could be finalised within months.

As 10 years of highly secret negotiations over the 12-nation trade and investment pact draw to a close and the US Congress debates whether to grant president Barack Obama fast-track authority, MPs and senators were briefed on the deal Monday night by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade assistant secretary Elizabeth Ward and other officials.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jun/02/australian-mps-allowed-to-see-top-secret-trade-deal-text-on-condition-of-confidentiality

Kill the deal ! See toon at top...

United Nations experts issue a grim warning about threats to food, water, health and life over international 'trade' agreements negotiated in secret without public scrutiny or transparency. Sarah Lazare from Common Dreams reports.

ECHOING THE PROTESTS of civil society organizations and social movements around the world, a panel of United Nations experts on Tuesday issued a stark warning about the threats that secret international "trade" agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) pose to the most fundamental human rights.

The statement's ten signatories include Ms Catalina Devandas Aguilar, special rapporteur on the rights of person with disabilities and Ms Victoria Lucia Tauli-Corpuz, special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples.

The statement lists the following concerns:

'Our concerns relate to the rights to life, food, water and sanitation, health, housing, education, science and culture, improved labor standards, an independent judiciary, a clean environment and the right not to be subjected to forced resettlement.'

In particular, the officials raise the alarm about the 'investor-state dispute settlement' (ISDS) systems that have become the bedrock of so-called 'free trade deals', included in 3,000 agreements worldwide, according to the count of The New York Times. Popularly known as corporate tribunals, ISDS frameworks constitute a parallel legal system in which corporations can sue state governments for allegedly impeding profits, thereby superseding democratic laws and protections.

read more: https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/un-experts-warn-of-threats-posed-by-secretive-trade-deals--like-the-tpp,7785

TTIP And EU-India Trade Talks: Big Business Setting Policy With Public Participation Blocked

By Colin Todhunter

04 June, 2015
Countercurrents.org

On Thursday 4 June, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled on an appeal taken by Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) against the European Commission for withholding information related to the EU’s trade talks with India. The documents in question were deemed 'sensitive' and 'confidential' when access was requested by CEO in the public interest. The Commission was accused of discriminating in favour of corporate lobby groups and of violating the EU’s transparency rules. The Court has however ruled against CEO. The decision risks deepening the secrecy shrouding EU trade policy.

CEO appealed a decision on the original lawsuit that concerned 17 documents - including meeting reports, emails and a letter - related to the ongoing EU-India free trade negotiations. The original lawsuit was filed by CEO in 2011. The Commission shared all of these documents in full with corporate lobby groups such as BusinessEurope. However, CEO only received censored versions, with allegedly sensitive information about priorities, tactics and strategies in the negotiations deleted. CEO contended that documents already shared with business lobbies could not then be declared 'sensitive' or 'confidential' when a public interest group asks for their disclosure.

http://www.countercurrents.org/todhunter040615.htm

WikiLeaks releases today [

on 2015-06-03] 

The release coincides with TISA meetings at the ministerial level at the OECD in Paris today (3–5 June). The 'T-treaty trinity' of TPP-TISA-TTIP is also under consideration for collective 'Fast-Track' authority in Congress this month.

The TISA release today follows the WikiLeaks publication of the secret draft financial services annex of the TISA negotiations on 19 June 2014 showing the aim to further deregulate the financial sector, despite widespread consensus that lack of oversight and regulation was the main cause of the last global financial crisis of 2008. Today's release confirms the ongoing determination to deregulate. Furthermore, standstill clauses will tie the hands of future governments to implement changes in response to changing environment.

Today's release is the largest on secret TISA documents and covers numerous previously undisclosed areas. It contains drafts and annexes on issues such as air traffic, maritime, professional services, e-commerce, delivery services, transparency, domestic regulation, as well as several document on the positions of negotiating parties. WikiLeaks has also published detailed expert analysis of the topics covered in today's release.

https://wikileaks.org/tisa/press.html

How a Trans-Atlantic Trade Deal Can Still Be Fixed

The European Commission is hoping that a major trade agreement with the US will stimulate the EU economy. But many in Europe fear adverse impacts on the environment and democracy. Negotiators ought to consider a third approach. By Spiegel Staff

The branch of Kaiser's in Düsseldorf's Vennhausen neighborhood is a supermarket like many others in Germany. It is open until 10 p.m. on weekdays, farmer's ham sells for €1.49 a pound and Landliebe yogurt for 88 cents a cup.

Nevertheless, there is something special about the supermarket. Once a week, usually on Saturdays, Klaus Müller, the executive director of the Federation of German Consumer Organizations, essentially the top advocate for German consumers, buys a cart full of groceries at the Düsseldorf store.

More than anything else, Müller is currently concerned about the European Commission's plan to conclude a major trade agreement with the United States. These days Müller, an economist, often strolls around his supermarket with a different look in his eyes: as if the agreement already existed.

If it did, Wiesenhof brand chickens from Lower Saxony would be displayed at the meat counter alongside chicken parts from South Carolina and beef from Iowa. The required European certification mark wouldn't be affixed to a drill on sale, but rather a certificate from the applicable US agency. And Müller might even wonder, more often than he does today, whether the canned corn was genetically modified (GM) or the Black Forest ham might be from Virginia instead of Germany.

The negotiations currently underway in Brussels and Washington affect "a broad range of consumer products," says Müller, noting that more competition could mean that "products become cheaper." At the same time, he adds, it will make things more "confusing for the consumer." Europe is about to see changes as serious as when the European Single Market was created more than 20 years ago.

Four letters are dividing Germany. The planned Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the United States, or TTIP, is intended to create a uniform economic zone for about 800 million consumers and eliminate many of the hurdles that obstruct trade across the Atlantic today. It sounds like a subject for association officials and standardization experts, but judging by the controversy the plan has unleashed, it could just as well involve the deployment of medium-range missiles or the construction of new nuclear power plants.

A Needed Counterweight to Asia?

On the one side are the lawmakers in Brussels, Berlin and Washington who see the deal as a chance to revive the economy and create a counterweight to nascent trade alliances in Asia. But they face a powerful protest movement made up of environmental and social organizations, church representatives, lawyers and local politicians, who view the agreement as a giant fraud. The anti-TTIP network claims that free trade is being used as a cover to "facilitate privatization," pave the way "for genetically modified food and meat laced with hormones" and "erode democracy." Protests against TTIP were also planned to coincide with this week's G7 meeting in Germany.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-ttip-and-an-eu-us-free-trade-deal-can-be-fixed-a-1036831.html

The US House of Representatives has rejected a key trade bill pushed by Barack Obama, giving a severe blow to the US president's trade agenda aimed at strengthening ties with Asia-Pacific nations.In a dramatic vote, Obama's own Democrats, as well as Republicans, failed to produce enough support to approve a bill that would have given aid to workers who lose their jobs as a result of US trade deals with other countries.
The measure was soundly rejected in a 302-126 vote.
That was quickly followed by the House's narrow approval of a separate measure to give Obama "fast-track" authority to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. But the legislation is stuck in the House because of the defeat Obama and House Speaker John Boehner suffered on the first vote.
Bill Schneider, a public policy professor at George Mason University, told Al Jazeera that this is a serious blow for President Obama."It's a very serious blow, it confirms the fact that he is a lame-duck, that's America phrase for president who cannot run for re-election again. Therefore, he has very little clout even in his own party," he said.
"In the US politicians are in business for themselves, they are independent political entrepreneurs. If the president is a member of their party they will support him but only if they think it will do them good, and oppose their own president if they think it's going to hurt them," Schneider said.
"And in this case many of them were threatened by opposition from organised labour, one of the key sources of support for Democrats. They decided to defy their own president which just weakens his position for the remainder of the term."
American jobs
Trading partners such as Japan have urged the US Congress to act in order to help wrap up a Pacific Rim trade deal covering 40 percent of the world's economy.
read more: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/06/key-obama-backed-trade-bill-defeated-house-150612233303988.html

The problem with the Trans-Pacific Partnership and, indeed, the way we conceptualize trade deals, is that they produce 20th-century accords that fail to fit the realities of the 21st.

In the mid-20th century, the United States traded with other nations from a position of almost unparalleled strength. Even if the countries we traded with were poorer than we were and their workers paid less than ours, the institutions we’d put in place to protect our workers’ interests and ensure a more egalitarian economy — unions, decent minimum wage standards, job-generating infrastructure projects — diminished the effects of low-wage competition.

Despite the growing gap between investment income and work-derived income, however, trade pacts still are written with the explicit intent of protecting the interests of those who invest in foreign ventures (indeed, establishing a special investment-protection litigation process for them, outside the signatory nations’ judicial processes), while doing little to nothing to protect the interests of those who work here in the United States. For a number of years, the one such offset placed in or alongside trade accords has been Trade Adjustment Assistance, which funds retraining for workers who can show they lost their jobs as a direct consequence of a trade pact. On its own terms, the program has never been a stunning success: Most of the re-employed workers end up in jobs that pay less than the ones they lost. But the main problem with Trade Adjustment Assistance is that it does nothing for workers who keep their jobs but see their incomes erode as low-wage competition eats into their paychecks.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-anachronistic-trade-agreement/2015/06/19/b33b95a6-16aa-11e5-9518-f9e0a8959f32_story.html?hpid=z3

The government is not merely determined to strip away the rights of its citizens on grounds of terror, it is also delivering powerful new rights to corporations on grounds of trade.

Get used to seeing these four letters: ISDS. They stand for Investor-State Dispute Settlement. They are legal clauses common in trade deals and they lend a foreign corporation the right to sue a government if that government has the cheek to govern in a way that damages their commercial interests.

And there they were this very week: ISDS provisions interred in the minutiae of Australia's Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with China – provisions which may give the Chinese rights to sue Australia if they feel aggrieved by some change in our laws.

As corporations slowly but relentlessly tighten their grip over governments, it is worth considering how far they are prepared to go to enforce their rights, especially as the secretive Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal includes ISDS clauses too.

This is how far they have gone already: Egypt raised its minimum wage at the beginning of last year. It wasn't much by Australian standards, just $74 a month, but for a state employee on 700 Egyptian pounds a month ($102), a rise to 1200 pounds is not to be derided.

A French multinational with operations in Egypt, however, did not like this minimum-wage effrontery. A couple of months later, Veolia, the global services juggernaut, bobbed along and sued Egypt for the grievous disadvantage it had suffered thanks to the industrial relations changes.

Veolia's claim relies on ISDS provisions in a trade treaty between Egypt and France.

Then there is the fifth-largest pharmaceutical group in the US, Eli Lilly, which is suing Canada for having the temerity to make medicines cheaper and more accessible to Canadians.

Eli Lilly is demanding $US100 million ($129 million) in compensation because not one but two Canadian courts decided to uphold the country's own patent laws. They found in favour of a generics manufacturer.

So, here is a situation where a foreign multinational is trying to entrench monopoly protection for its products in the name of free trade; the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is the treaty.

read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/comment-and-analysis/trade-deals-acronym-really-translates-to-we-lose-20150619-ghrqm8

A revolution won't come soon enough to "reset the buttum"

By Ralph Nader

“We have an opportunity to set the most progressive trade agreement in our nation’s history,” it states on BarackObama.com, the website of the president’s “Organizing for Action” campaign.

One must seriously question what President Obama and his corporate allies believe to be the definition of “progressive” when it comes to this grandiose statement. History shows the very opposite of progress when it comes to these democratic sovereignty-shredding and job-exporting corporate-driven trade treaties — unless progress is referring to fulfilling the deepest wishes of runaway global corporations.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) set our country’s progress back through large job-draining trade deficits, downward pressure on wages, extending Big Pharma’s patent monopolies to raise consumers’ medicine prices, floods of unsafe imported food, and undermining or freezing consumer and environmental rules.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is formally described as a trade and foreign investment agreement between 12 nations — Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam. The White House is now pressuring Congress to Fast Track through the TPP. Fast Track authority, a Congressional procedure to limit time for debate and prohibit amendments to proposed legislation, has already passed in the Senate, although only after an unexpectedly rough ride.

read more: http://www.eurasiareview.com/10062015-ralph-nader-10-reasons-the-tpp-is-not-a-progressive-trade-agreement-oped/

I worry that T.P.P. will simply exacerbate income inequality. Then I show them a slide from Bassett, Va., circa 1942. A couple stands in front of a company house, with their little girl, Bettie, in front of them.

The little girl, now in her late 70s, told me she was so poor growing up that, lacking pencils and paper, she learned to write by tracing her letters in the condensation on the windows. But she went to college on her father’s factory wages, and she grew up to become an inner-city social worker with a master’s degree. That was the upward mobility trajectory in America before globalization.

Then I show them another black and white, this one of a ragamuffin girl, circa 1969. When the economy was good, her mother soldered airplane lights at a local factory. When it was bad, her mother picked up under-the-table jobs like waitressing and babysitting for other people’s kids.

That little girl, now 51, was the first in her family to go to college, and she threaded the needle of early trickle-down economics quite by luck: She came of age when it was still possible for a promising poor kid to go to college solely on Pell grants and other need-based financial aid.

That little girl in the picture is me, standing in the driveway of a ramshackle house in Urbana, Ohio. I did not grow up to become an economist spouting theories of creative destruction. But I’ve spent the past several years telling the tale of the people left behind, teetering in globalization’s wake.

I wish I could tell the people in my audiences exactly who will benefit most from T.P.P.

But anything this secretive, and this marked by corporate influence, leaves little room for doubt: It will not be America’s factory workers.

Beth Macy is the author of “Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local — and Helped Save an American Town.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/opinion/whos-speaking-up-for-the-american-worker.html?_r=0

OFFERING A STARK WARNING of how corporate-friendly trade pacts, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) put both democracy and the environment at risk, a Canadian company is seeking damages from Romania after being blocked from creating an open-pit gold mine over citizen concerns.

Gabriel Resources Ltd announced last week that it had filed a request for arbitration with the World Bank's International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes — a body not unlike the secret tribunals that critics like Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) have warned against.

The corporation's Rosia Montana open-pit gold mine project stalled after a series of protests in cities across Romania in 2013 demanded Gabriel's plan be dropped. As reported at the time, Romanian residents and environmental activists have opposed the mine since it was proposed in the 1990s, charging that it would blast off mountaintops, destroy a potential UNESCO World Heritage site, and displace residents from the town of Rosia Montana and nearby villages. In particular, local communities opposed the use of cyanide as part of the extraction process.

Such opposition led to widespread street protests in 2013, which in turn pressured the Romanian Parliament to reject a bill introduced by the government that would have paved the way for the mine.

Now, Gabriel Resources, which holds an 80 per cent stake in the Rosia Montana Gold Corporation, says  [PDF] the country has violated international treaties.

Bloomberg reports that, in 2013, Gabriel threatened to seek as much as USD $4 billion of damages should Romanian lawmakers vote to oppose its gold and silver project in the country.

https://independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/european-mining-dispute-illustrates-risks-of-isds-in-tpp,7997

Obama Admin’s TPP Trade Officials Received Hefty Bonuses From Big Banks

Officials tapped by the Obama administration to lead the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade negotiations have received multimillion dollar bonuses from CitiGroup and Bank of America, financial disclosures obtained by Republic Report show.

Stefan Selig, a Bank of America investment banker nominated to become the Under Secretary for International Trade at the Department of Commerce, received more than $9 million in bonus pay as he was nominated to join the administration in November. The bonus pay came in addition to the $5.1 million in incentive pay awarded to Selig last year.

Michael Froman, the current U.S. Trade Representative, received over $4 million as part of multiple exit payments when he left CitiGroup to join the Obama administration. Froman told Senate Finance Committee members last summer that he donated approximately 75 percent of the $2.25 million bonus he received for his work in 2008 to charity. CitiGroup also gave Froman a $2 million payment in connection to his holdings in two investment funds, which was awarded “in recognition of [Froman’s] service to Citi in various capacities since 1999.”

Many large corporations with a strong incentive to influence public policy award bonuses and other incentive pay to executives if they take jobs within the government. CitiGroup, for instance, provides an executive contract that awards additional retirement pay upon leaving to take a “full time high level position with the U.S. government or regulatory body.” Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, the Blackstone Group, Fannie Mae, Northern Trust, and Northrop Grumman are among the other firms that offer financial rewards upon retirement for government service.

Froman joined the administration in 2009. Selig is currently awaiting Senate confirmation before he can take his post, which collaborates with the trade officials to support the TPP.

http://www.republicreport.org/2014/big-banks-tpp/

Posted by John Weeks on Feb 24th 2016,

Nonsense repeated often enough…

With the frequency of email spam, we are assailed by dire warnings that opposition to TTIP that will take us back to the dark age of mercantilism.  The latest alarm bell over “protectionism” comes via the Financial Times from a self-styled think-tank (“independent”, of course) Global Trade Alert.

The GTA tells us that during the first 10 months of 2015 governments across the globe introduced a shocking 539 “protectionist measures”, up from 407 over the same period the year before.  To capture the full horror of this assault against Free Trade, go to the GTA website where you will find a world map speckled with large and small red dots (reminiscent of a measles epidemic), each referring to some government transgression (“distortion”) against the free flow of commerce and profit.

Inexcusable in itself, the GTA tells us that this government assault on cross-border buying and selling has constrained global imports and exports, a constraint that is the leading cause of the slow down and stagnation of global growth rates.  To put it in a nutshell, when in 2015 the government of Belarus introduced “temporary licensing for the import of gypsum boards”, the protectionist curse falls upon us all. 

But all hope is not lost.  Early this year Uzbekistan in a show of international solidarity exempted X-ray equipment from import duties.  I could go on in this vein but the ease of ridicule quickly renders the exercise dull. 

These apparently respectable anxieties about protectionism come not from sound economic theory, even less are they supported by empirical evidence.  They are the perennial propaganda of the professional free traders whose always implicit and frequently explicit purpose is to discredit public policies designed to protect the consumer, maintain decent working conditions and prevent capital flight.

The output of organizations such as the Global Trade Alert is ideology that ignores (or denies) some extremely inconvenient shortcomings of so-called free trade.  These begin with the absurdity of the underlying theory.

Trading Fantasies

Mainstream trade theory seeks to establish an analysis of the allocation of resources, not of growth or employment.  The analysis begins from full and efficient employment of all resources.  Beginning with full employment, the analysis cannot then argue that more trade will increase employment.  The assertions common in the media that global trade generates employment and makes businesses more efficient are ad hoc with no theoretical justification.

No excursion into mathematics, descent into Edgeworth boxes, or other forms of fakeconomics trickery can sustain the trade-enhances-growth syllogism.  If any country suffers from unemployment (and almost all do) this must be the result of insufficient demand.  Factories, offices and shops operate below capacity because they cannot sell more.

Exports are only one of several sources of demand, the others being household spending, public expenditure and domestic private investment.  If exporting provides the impetus to more output, the others would do so as well.  The assertion that trade makes producers more efficient suffers from its own problems.  The most obvious is that external competition may (and does) wipe out entire industries rather than generating a harmonious and benign competition.

In any case the competition-efficiency argument flounders on its own assumption, that global markets are competitive.  In practice a few cartels and huge corporations exert controlling power over some of the most important trade commodities, petroleum and software being the most obvious.

Finally, the most absurd argument of all must be exposed, that evidence shows growth and trade go-hand-in-hand.  See chart below for the fake evidence.  The vertical axis shows the rate of growth of world exports and the horizontal axis global GDP growth.  The movements of the two variables are so similar that it must mean that trade stimulates growth, yes?

Emphatically NO.  First, the chart implies nothing about the direction of causality, exports to growth or growth to exports.  Second, a quick statistical calculation reveals that when a 10% increase in trade growth matches in a 3% increase in GDP growth.  This ratio almost exactly corresponds to the ratio of global exports to global GDP.  In other words, the main reason that exports and GDP move together is that the former is 30% of the latter; i.e., one includes the other to the tune of 30%. 

To touch base with reality – global trade does not simulate global growth, nor does it foster efficient production.  TTIP may bring more jobs to some countries, and it will do so because of declining employment elsewhere.  GDP growth results from investment in production and countercyclical fiscal policy.

All about Profit & Power

For almost fifty years negotiations within the framework of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade sought to eliminate quotas, brought down import and export duties, and chipped away at “non-tariff barriers to trade” (a catch-all for any arrangement free traders did not like).  These negotiations, first among the high income countries, then generalized across the globe, achieved considerable success.

By the time the World Trade Organization was founded in 1995 and subsumed the GATT process within it tariff reduction consisted of little more than a tidying up exercise.  Under the guise of further trade liberalization corporate interests sought the far bigger goal of the global liberation of capital and supra-national institutions to prevent any “populist” backsliding.

The key elements in this global liberation of the 1% were 1) global protection of patent-based monopolies (“intellectual property rights”);  cross-border privatization (“free trade in services”); and treaty provisions for private interests to over-ride national legislation and national courts (multinational courts in the case of the European Union).

Corporate interests require no international treaty to liberalize trade in commodities.  With very few exceptions (e.g., North Korea) cross border commodity trade is unconstrained by quotas or tariffs.  Companies seeking to make direct investment need no facilitating agreements national or global.  Their problem, if they have one, is over-eager would-be hosts of amazing gullibility.

The new generation of treaties seek to make the final leap – global privatization of the public sector and an end to accountability to democratic processes.

read all: http://www.pieria.co.uk/articles/ttip_and_free_trade__myth_

See toon at top and read articles below it.

Back on 10 December 2015, the head of the U.S. Senate, the pro-Obama-trade-deals Republican Mitch McConnell, said that Obama shouldn’t try to pass his TPP or any other of his three mega-trade-deals until after the November elections, because Senators and Representatives won’t vote for it until the voters have already voted for their re-election (so that they’ll then be free to vote against those voters’ interests).

The previous congressional votes on these deals showed that congressional Republicans overwhelmingly favor them but many congressional Democrats oppose them. For example, in the crucial vote, in the Senate, only 37 of the 100 Senators voted against the enabling legislation (without which legislation they can’t pass), called “Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority,” which will enable the President to ram these treaties through Congress, and 30 of these Senators were Democrats, 5 (Collins, Cruz, Paul, Sessions, and Shelby) were Republicans, and 2 (Sanders and King) were independents. That’s both independents, 30 of the 44 Democrats, and only 5 of the 54 Republicans. So: these bills are overwhelmingly Republican trade bills, which were created by a ‘Democratic’ President.

These deals will be enormously favorable to large international corporations, at the expense of workers’ rights, consumer rights, and environmental protection; so, it’s natural that they have overwhelming Republican support in Congress.

However, Republican voters are overwhelmingly against these bills. For example, on 18 February 2014, Huffington Post headlined “Conservatives Oppose Fast Track, TPP: Poll,” and reported that “Voter opposition explains why Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and even Joe Biden are wary about pushing the issue before the mid-term elections,” and all three of those people are Democrats. The Democratic leaders in Congress might be with the President on these bills, but most other congressional Democrats are opposed to these bills. However, “Republicans [Republican voters] overwhelmingly oppose giving fast-track authority to the president (8% in favor, 87% opposed), as do independents (20%-66%), while a narrow majority (52%) of Democrats are in favor (35% opposed). The takeaway: Republicans should be afraid, very afraid of voting for fast track if they want to keep their jobs: Two-thirds (68%) of Republicans say they are less likely to vote for a Member of Congress who votes to give President Obama fast-track authority.” And congressional Republicans overwhelmingly ignored their own Republican voters on this: they voted for Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority for the President anyway. (Their billionaire campaign donors demand it.)

Furthermore: “John Boehner and GOP leaders support Obama’s trade agenda.” Whereas Democratic voters were in favor of these trade-bills because they come from a ‘Democratic’ President, Republican voters were overwhelmingly opposed to these trade-bills, merely because the President had a ‘Democratic’ label — but the people who represented Republican voters in Congress served their campaign-donors on these bills, not the people back home (who would perhaps take this as ‘bipartisanship’ and consider it favorably in that false light).

After the November elections, and the billions of advertising dollars that are spent on fooling voters to re-elect their existing supposed ‘representatives’ in Congress or else to elect their opposite-Party opponents, those incumbents will then be free to pay back their donors by voting for TPP and any other Obama trade-deal.

This article also said:

• The poll found voters across the board believe so-called ‘free trade’ deals are bad for working Americans:
• Two-thirds (66%) say a convincing reason to oppose fast-track authority for TPP is that “workers in countries like Vietnam and Malaysia are exploited and paid as little as 28 cents an hour, which creates unfair competition that drives down wages for American workers.”
• By a 35-point margin, the voting public believes the TPP deal would make things worse (56%) rather than better (21%) in terms of American wages and salaries.
• Three in five voters (62%) feel this is a convincing argument against fast- track authority: “This is a NAFTA-style trade deal, and since NAFTA, the United States has run up an eight-trillion-dollar trade deficit, resulting in millions of lost manufacturing jobs.”
• Voters are three times as likely to say that preventing U.S. jobs moving overseas should be a top goal for trade deals as they are to cite opening foreign markets to U.S. exports.
• By a five-to-three ratio, voters anticipate that the TPP deal would make things worse (52%) rather than better (30%) for American jobs.
• Voters understand precisely who will benefit from the TransPacific Partnership – and who will be hurt:
• American voters overwhelmingly expect TPP to be a good deal for large corporations: 72% say it will help these corporations and just 17% say it will hurt them.
• However, voters have the opposite expectation when it comes to a vastly more popular institution: America’s small businesses. Just 24% feel that TPP would help small firms, while 64% think TPP will mostly hurt small businesses.
• Significantly, voters in small business households (in which a voter either owns or works for a small business) believe that TPP will harm small firms: 61% say they expect TPP to hurt more than help small businesses.

Hillary Clinton helped to pass NAFTA into law, but in both 2008 and 2016 presented herself to Democratic primary voters as if she had never favored NAFTA, TPP, or any similar legislation. Bernie Sanders has consistently voted against those bills. Donald Trump says that he’s against those bills but he has no actual voting-record by which to judge his sincerity.

So: TPP, and perhaps TTIP and TISA, will be voted on after the elections and will almost certainly be passed into law; and, if Bernie Sanders will have been elected as President, he will do everything possible to undo them. Clinton almost certainly will not. Trump is a big question-mark.

read more: http://off-guardian.org/2016/03/19/how-obama-and-congressional-republicans-intend-to-pass-tpp-into-law-after-the-november-elections/

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has cast more doubt on the controversial Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), saying the proposed trade deal did not "respect EU interests."

Speaking to members of his governing Socialist party, Valls said that French officials would not be bullied into agreeing to such a deal with the US and other EU member states.

"No free trade agreement should be concluded if it does not respect EU interests. Europe should be firm," he said, adding: "France will be vigilant about this.

"I can tell you frankly, there cannot be a transatlantic treaty agreement. This agreement is not on track."

If #TTIP wasn't dead in the waters before, it is now with #Brexit. With Hollande against it & huge opposition in Germany, deal very unlikely

​The criticism follows similar concerns raised by French President Francois Hollande, while there have been ongoing grassroots and trade union demonstrations and protests against the proposed trade deal.

Valls said TTIP in its current form "would impose a viewpoint which would not only be a breeding ground for populism, but also quite simply be a viewpoint that would be bad for our economy."

Growing Concerns Over TTIP

TTIP aims to slash trade barriers and open up the world's biggest free trade zone between the US and EU.

read more: http://sputniknews.com/europe/20160627/1042005239/france--ttip-eu-interests.html