“Free trade” agreements have become the antithesis of actual free trade, and the latest batch, one of which President Trump just trashed, sneak in all sorts of execrable provisions. From Paul Craig Roberts at paulcraigroberts.com:
On Trump’s third day Trump is one up on the Establishment. Can this last?
I am not a Trump booster. I am a scorekeeper.
On the third day of his presidency Donald Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacificic Partnership (TPP). Based on this we must assume he will also deep-six the Trans-Atlantic Partnership.
Trump and his advisors regard the Pacific and Atlantic partnerships as trade deals like NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement that sent American jobs to Mexico at the expense of Americans.
However, the most strategic part of these agreements is that they make global corporations immune from the laws of the countries in which they do business if those laws adversely impact the profits of the global corporations.
Who decides the question? Not the courts of the countries or a world court. The question is decided by a corporate tribunal staffed only by corporations.
In other words, the sovereign laws of sovereign countries, such as France’s laws against GMOs, are subject to damage suits decided by corporate tribunals, which means the end of the legal sovereignty of countries.
The so-called trade partnerships are weapons of American economic imperialism.
Whether Trump and his advisors are aware of this or not, Trump has on his third day dealt a lethal blow to a power lusted after by US global corporations.
How will this formidable force respond to this blow inflicted upon them by Trump?
That remains to be seen if the blows that Trump has promised against the interests of the elites continue.
Hillary Clinton is all over the lot on trade agreements, so it would be informative if the electorate knew where she stood on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) while she was Secretary of State. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the State Department said it would release them in April. It didn’t, and now says it will not do so until after the election in November. How convenient for Waffling Hillary. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:
Update: Donald Trump’s campaign Monday demanded that the State Department release Hillary Clinton-era government emails about a pending 12-nation trade deal that Trump says will destroy American jobs and hurt the American economy.
“Hillary Clinton’s TPP emails should absolutely be released, as her support for TPP threatens to permanently undermine U.S. workers and sovereignty,” said Trump’s senior policy advisor, Stephen Miller, in a statement to IBT. “Hillary is 100 percent controlled by corporate interests, including foreign corporate interests, and it is essential these emails see the light of day.”
“There is zero doubt that, if elected, Hillary Clinton would enact the TPP — just like she enacted the Columbian [sic] deal and the Korean deal after claiming to oppose both,” Miller wrote in apparent reference to recently released documents about Clinton’s work on those deals as Secretary of State after she had previously pledged to oppose them during her 2008 presidential campaign.
“Hillary’s careful wording on TPP in her primary battle — that she now disapproves of it only ‘in its current form’ after months of lobbying for it — is further proof that she has every intention of ramming it down the throats of the American people, sending millions more jobs overseas. Hillary is the outsourcing candidate.”
Even CNN is stunned at The White House’s (and Hillary’s) hypocrisy…
As we detailed earlier, with Hillary Clinton unclear on her ‘real’ support for ObamaTrade, and international trade bound to be a crucial issue during the 2016 US Presidential campaign, it will likely come as no surprise to many that, as International Business Times reports, the Obama administration has now abruptly blocked the release of Clinton’s State Department correspondence about the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), after first saying it expected to produce the emails this spring.
The decision came in response to International Business Times’ open records request for correspondence between Clinton’s State Department office and the United States Trade Representative. The request, which was submitted in July 2015, specifically asked for all such correspondence that made reference to the TPP.
The State Department originally said it estimated the request would be completed by April 2016. Last week the agency said it had completed the search process for the correspondence but also said it was delaying the completion of the request until late November 2016 — weeks after the presidential election. The delay was issued in the same week the Obama administration filed a court motion to try to kill a lawsuit aimed at forcing the federal government to more quickly comply with open records requests for Clinton-era State Department documents.
…
If IBT’s open records request is fulfilled on the last day of November, as the State Department now estimates, it will have taken 489 days for the request to be fulfilled. According to Justice Department statistics, the average wait time for a State Department request is 111 days on a simple request — the longest of any federal agency the department’s report analyzed. Requests classified as complex by the State Department can take years.
Earlier this year, the State Department’s inspector general issued a report slamming the agency’s handling of open records requests for documents from the Office of the Secretary.
“In my opinion it is more incompetence than maliciousness, but either way, it is a gross error by FOIA processors to not get these documents out before the election,” said Jones, whose group helps journalists obtain government records. “Their inefficiency is doing great harm to the democratic process.”
