Thursday, October 24, 2013

TPP—naked predation

To be perfectly honest, I don't actually know what it is in the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership.  I am not supposed to know—that is the whole idea of these so-called "free-trade" deals.  But I am quite sure I will hate it—just as I have hated all such neoliberal sludge going back to my last political actions in opposition to NAFTA.  I still have a sample of my thoughts from 1993 over at the Elegant-Technology website.

These trade deals are an affront to everything I believe about how an economy should be organized.  I am a centrist who believes that successful economies are those that are quality mixtures of public and private actions.  You need BOTH.  In my mind, Marxism failed (and will always fail) because the true believers insisted that everything should be decided by the group—and the group had to be guided by political specialists who strove to maintain ideological purity.  The opposite is represented by the Libertarian / Neoliberal extremists who argue that everything should be organized by "private enterprise."  Trade agreements like NAFTA are fatally flawed because they keep outlawing creative options for collective action.  There are big fat books cataloging the disasters of the privitization-of-everything craze of which NAFTA was so large a part.  I consider neoliberalism an ideological disaster on par with the failure that was Marxism.

Back to the present.  The one thing Marxism and neoliberalism share is that they are BOTH manifestations of Predator-Class thinking.  And both fail because they produce shoddy societies.  Marxism gave us Wartburgs and Ladas and the Great Leap Forward.  Neoliberalism gives us bridges that fall down and the deindustrialization of USA.  Well, folks, the planet can no longer support so many devotees of shoddiness and these days, the bad guys are the ones who claim we must always organize our economy to do things on the cheap so that the Predators can live ever more extravagant lives.  Because the only meaningful solutions to the big problems by definition MUST include the economics of the Producers who must build the new green society, neoliberalism's crackpot schemes like the TPP are literally a death sentence for the planet.

see also:
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
Will they end public banking with another trade agreement?

Sunday, August 18, 2013
Neoliberalism is just everywhere

While Transparency Would be Great, the Trade Deal's Eradication Would be Better

The Problem With the TPP

by MARIO OBANDO  OCTOBER 23, 2013

Over 600 official corporate advisors have negotiated a secret pact—the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). While President Obama has sought to ensure this “free-trade” agreement, little of the TPP has been revealed to the U.S. public.

The lack of transparency speaks to the current conditions of how the U.S. government is handling security—through secrecy.

This secrecy applies itself to how corporate elites and their supported governmental allies in the United States, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam have sought to pass this “free-trade” agreement. This pact, also known as NAFTA on Steroids as well as a “corporate Trojan Horse”, encourages and implements corporate interests in the reshaping of domestic policies.

For Obama, the TPP would allow the U.S. to double its exports but little has been said about its impact on domestic policies. The negotiations have not been made to the public but what we do know is that it seeks to diminish labor standards, solidify corporate interests in regards to intellectual property, deregulate environmental standards as well as cripple government abilities to regulate food safety and health insurance.

Supporters of the TPP have called for its implementation as it would increase “new drugs and improve access to medicines” except its desire to call for more patents on medicine would have the opposite effect.

Anti-TPP NGOS in Japan and Mexico ensure that this “pro-business” measure actually hurts the welfare and health of the poor and working classes of their respective countries.

Thus, instead of “new drugs” the TPP will see more privatization of healthcare and increase costs for patients in need of generic drugs.

The Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) among other free trade pacts throughout the world have actually taken low-cost generic drugs off the market in Guatemala and as Emilio Godoy, has reported, in Jordan, similar initiatives have increased medicine prices by 20 percent, which according to Oxfam, leads to the eroding of public health services for the people who actually need access to them.

President Obama has sought a “fast track” to the TPP initiative—allowing for a potential authorizing of undemocratic economic pacts.

Given the state surveillance, the continuity of heavily militarized local police forces, the structured maintenance of the prison industrial complex, the continued deportation of migrants, and the criminalization of racial minorities as a result of these institutionalized mechanisms of oppression, it seems that the passage of such a TPP would lead to more state repression to uphold the interests of corporations while also the crippling of state social services to do anything about income inequality.

The U.S., along with its interdependent state and business partners, continues to pursue initiatives not concerned in any way with poor and working class people but wholeheartedly invested in the investments and interests of multinational corporations.

The lack of transparency, coupled with the “fast track” option, and the underlying concern to privatize economics and open up markets, will lead to the more sovereignty for corporations, deregulation of governments, and the exploitation and impoverishment of poor and working class people as well as migrant labor in the countries prepared to implement another NAFTA. more

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