Corporations like Citi, Morgan Stanley,
and Goldman Sachs have joined together under the umbrella of the US
Business Coalition for TPP to push for an agreement that according to
Citizens Trade Campaign “will handcuff the steps governments
can take to protect against “too big to fail,” regulate
trade in toxic assets, erect firewalls between different financial
service firms and control the flow of short-term capital into and out
of economies. ”
TPP may also be used by private banks
to destroy public banks. According to Alternet’s Les Leopold,“Clearly, from Wall Street’s
perspective, the [publicly owned] North Dakota bank must go, and all
other state efforts to replicate it must be thwarted. Wall Street’s
stealth weapon may be lodged within the latest corporate trade
agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which currently
is being negotiated in secret. We already know that Wall Street is
seeking to remove all tariff restrictions that prevent the U.S.
financial services industry from doing business in countries like
Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and
Vietnam. The biggest banks also want the treaty to eliminate
“non-tariff” barriers including regulations that create
“unfair” competition with state-owned financial
enterprises.”
TPP also threatens to:
- outsource US jobs to exploitative
sweatshops
- empower corporations to attack
environmental, food safety, animal welfare, and other public interest
laws in international tribunals
- wipe out family farm agriculture
while expanding markets for genetically modified and factory farmed
“food”
- compromises internet freedom
- raise the cost of pharmaceuticals by
expanding the intellectual property rights of pharmaceutical
companies, placing lifesaving drugs out of reach for some of the
world’s poorest people and hindering
- the ability of government health
programs to purchase medicines for people in desperate need.
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