The TPP - a casino where the house always wins

The best part of International Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland signing the U.S. corporate rights agreement TPP - the Trans-Pacific Partnership - in Aukland NZ yesterday was that it was done here in this gambling casino, and a casino is where the house always wins.

In her 2012 book, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, Freeland explains :

"Trying to slant the rules of the game in your favour isn't an aberration, it is what all businesses seek to do. The difference isn't between having virtuous and villainous business people, it is about whether your society has the right rules and policing able to enforce them."

Of course this 'enforcement' would first entail our government not ditching those 'right rules' or 'policing' just because transnational corporations and their revolving-door crony capitalists within government find them inconvenient.

Justin Trudeau on the campaign trail, October 5 2015 :

“The Trans-Pacific Partnership stands to remove trade barriers, widely expand free trade for Canada, and increase opportunities for our middle class and those working hard to join it.... The government has an obligation to be open and honest about the negotiation process ..."

Then in mid-January Freeland told us :

“The negotiations are finished and for Canadians it’s important to understand that it’s a decision of yes or no..." 

All countries have two years to ratify it, but the treaty comes into force if the United States, Japan and four other countries give their approval.  

“It’s important for us to understand that we don’t have a veto.”

Yesterday she said : "There is a big difference between signing and ratifying", promising negotiations and parliamentary committees and round tables etc, all of which are very nice but none of which are legally binding on the Liberal caucus. 
Now that we've signed off on it however, we are all supposed to pin our hopes on those.


Flashback to the Liberal Convention of 2014 two years ago... 
Guest speaker and TPP advocate, former US Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers is interviewed on stage by Freeland, who introduces him as "a dear friend, teacher, and probably the smartest person I know". Summers, she explains, is there to give the Libs "some great ideas about how to transform Canada and in so doing transform the world." 

Now most of us probably remember Larry Summers as the US bank deregulator - a prominent architect alongside Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin in reversing the 1933 US Glass-Steagall Act, that Depression-era legislation which prevented US banks from turning into the high-risk hedge-fund casinos making wild bets against their own depositors' money they became in the late 2000's. Or we remember him as the $5M hedge fund advisor who made millions in speaking fees from the hedge funds he later helped regulate while advocating tax cuts and no ceiling on CEO pay for stimulus recipients. Or as a Bilderberg Group Steering Committee member.

Whatev.

What I wish is that rather than continue to parrot all that "all middle-class liberals together" shmooze that Summers was selling the Libs two years ago, including airily blowing off the casino bank crisis he helped precipitate, better the Liberals should instead try out what Summers, still a strident TPP advocate, is saying now : 

"First, the era of agreements that achieve freer trade in the classic sense is essentially over. The world’s remaining tariff and quota barriers are small and, where present, less reflections of the triumph of protectionist interests and more a result of deep cultural values. 

What we call trade agreements are in fact agreements on the protection of investments and the achievement of regulatory harmonization...

Concerns that trade agreements may be a means to circumvent traditional procedures for taking up issues ranging from immigration to financial regulation must be taken seriously.

Being pressed down everywhere are middle classes who lack the wherewithal to take advantage of new global markets and do not want to compete with low-cost foreign labor. Our challenge now is less to increase globalization than to make the globalization we have work for our citizens."

Try to keep up with your own hero's rhetoric here, Libs. 



Economix Comix : The TransPacific Partnership and "Free Trade"

Robert Reich takes on the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2 minutes 26 seconds

Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz heaps scorn on TPP and TTIP

Paul Krugman on the TPP

Michael Geist : The Trouble with the TPP, Day 1: U.S. Blocks Balancing Objectives   Start here but Geist is up to Day 25 now ....

Press Progress : Bernie Sanders: 
The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a "disastrous" deal for the middle-class.

.

Steve & Dimitri - Canadian potty

Yesterday in Colombia, Harper attacked the critics of his Canada-Colombia free trade investment agreement who object to the deaths of a couple hundred unionists and the displacement of 4.9 million people in the struggle for control over land for the development of resources that over 70 Canadian extraction companies are heavily involved in. Steve  :

"We can’t block the progress of a country like this for protectionist reasons, and (they’re) trying to use human rights as a front for doing that."

If that line sounds familiar, yes, it's the same "human rights as a phony front" argument he uses to defend Israel's atrocities in Gaza.

Tomorrow it's on to Honduras where the Harper government was the first to sanction the right wing coup in 2009 that replaced leftist president Zelaya who coincidentally had put a moratorium on further foreign mining concessions.
Honduras is getting its own Canadian free investment agreement soon as well.
.
Update : DAMMIT JANET gets confirmation on Steve's toiletbunker incident
The Regina Mom launches a potty flashmail!
Biff Loman's toon looks ahead to the next FTA
Boris notes a more recent source for Steve's 'phony human rights' shtick
Dr. Dawg and Kev have updates on the moral bankruptcy of the Canada-Colombia Free Investment Agreement
.

Trade - As It Really Happens

On CBC's As It Happens last night, they were interviewing someone from Kenya who was unable to ship his flowers and produce to Europe by air due to the ashfall from Iceland's unpronounceable volcano. We will lose millions of dollars, he said, and it will all go to compost and cattlefeed.

You could hear the gears turning over in the CBC interviewer's head. Don't you have people starving over there? the gears said. Why is 95% of your crop flowers ? Why aren't you growing food ?

Well here ya go, CBC. Here is a 2 minute vid on trade in Kenya as it really happens, information that would have added a little much-needed context to your flowery interview.

And you 37 Libs who helped pass the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Investment Agreement yesterday, you too.

.

And now for something completely predictable...

Recent testimony from economist Alan Greenspan, 19 years at the helm of the Fed, can only really be appreciated if you imagine that it is part of a previously undiscovered Monty Python skit :

"I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms," Mr. Greenspan said.

Referring to his free-market ideology, Mr. Greenspan added: "I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact."

Rep. Henry Waxman pressed the former Fed chair to clarify his words.

"In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working," Mr. Waxman said.

"Absolutely, precisely," Mr. Greenspan replied. "You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well."

h/t Relentlessly : "Alan Greenspan testified today before the house that myopic self interest would not lead to the creation of the New Jerusalem here on earth."