New Zealand release full text of Trans-Pacific Partnership

Apparently this is a shocking move under the umbrella of full transparency when the process has been super secret for the last 6 years. I've tried to follow the controversy because it's supposedly the boogeymen of of free trade partnerships, or "NAFTA on steroids".

With that, I'd love if Ragu or someone else with working knowledge can break down why it's good or why it's bad or if the entire hullabaloo is just hot smoke.

This has 30 chapters and thousands of pages: http://www.tpp.mfat.govt.nz/text

 

Then it sounds like Ragu wrote it.

 

I read this earlier today. Written by a former reporter (had some issues, though) who now is an activist and also a self-described socialist. So your mileage may vary. But he paints a pretty scary picture, and it will probably be a hot debate.

Chris Hedges: TPP Is the Most Brazen
Corporate Power Grab in American History

These three agreements solidify the creeping corporate coup d’état along with the final evisceration of national sovereignty. Citizens will be forced to give up control of their destiny and will be stripped of the ability to protect themselves from corporate predators, safeguard the ecosystem and find redress and justice in our now anemic and often dysfunctional democratic institutions. The agreements—filled with jargon, convoluted technical, trade and financial terms, legalese, fine print and obtuse phrasing—can be summed up in two words: corporate enslavement.

The TPP removes legislative authority from Congress and the White House on a range of issues. Judicial power is often surrendered to three-person trade tribunals in which only corporations are permitted to sue. Workers, environmental and advocacy groups and labor unions are blocked from seeking redress in the proposed tribunals. The rights of corporations become sacrosanct. The rights of citizens are abolished.

If there is no sustained popular uprising to prevent the passage of the TPP in Congress this spring we will be shackled by corporate power. Wages will decline. Working conditions will deteriorate. Unemployment will rise. Our few remaining rights will be revoked. The assault on the ecosystem will be accelerated. Banks and global speculation will be beyond oversight or control. Food safety standards and regulations will be jettisoned. Public services ranging from Medicare and Medicaid to the post office and public education will be abolished or dramatically slashed and taken over by for-profit corporations. Prices for basic commodities, including pharmaceuticals, will skyrocket. Social assistance programs will be drastically scaled back or terminated. And countries that have public health care systems, such as Canada and Australia, that are in the agreement will probably see their public health systems collapse under corporate assault. Corporations will be empowered to hold a wide variety of patents, including over plants and animals, turning basic necessities and the natural world into marketable products. And, just to make sure corporations extract every pound of flesh, any public law interpreted by corporations as impeding projected profit, even a law designed to protect the environment or consumers, will be subject to challenge in an entity called the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) section. The ISDS, bolstered and expanded under the TPP, will see corporations paid massive sums in compensation from offending governments for impeding their “right” to further swell their bank accounts. Corporate profit effectively will replace the common good.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/chris-hedges-tpp-most-brazen-corporate-power-grab-american-history

 

A better agreement could certainly be hammered out. It would read as follows: There shall be free trade between the United States and Xxxxxxx.

 

I said if you anything about it, as well as if anyone had a deep knowledge of it. Separate. Sorry to ruffle your feathers.

 

NPR's Planet Money did a show on it last week - It sounds like it's a document that can be read either as the New World Order further carving up the plebs' shares as their own, or as governments trying to do their best, in their clumsy bureaucratic way, with balancing trade. IIRC, the big thing that America "got" in the agreement was the extension of copyright for another 20 years.

 

These monstrosities really ought to be called Less Unfree Trade agreements.