Trans-Pacific Partnership

Very little has been written about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which is an attempt to create a trade agreement between the U.S. and Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam, all of which are considered Pacific Rim nations. Canada will soon be joining.

However, it does not appear to be an agreement that we should be pushing.  Leo Hindery may have the most salient reasons why.

1.  It pays short shrift to the issues consumer safety and environmental practices and to the concerns of organized labor.
2. It breezes through intellectual property protection, regulatory coherence, and antitrust enforcement, especially of state-owned enterprises (SOEs).
3. It allows for even more extreme financial industry deregulation while allowing for equally extreme foreign investor protections that in the past have helped American multinational corporations offshore American jobs. A proper trade agreement -- multilateral or bilateral -- should limit the massive investment incentives that many nations (although not the U.S., of course!) now use to draw jobs to their shores and thus have cost America millions of manufacturing jobs in just the last decade. These indirect export subsidies are nothing more than a highly effective way to circumvent WTO's prohibition of direct export subsidies.
4. It bans "Buy American", which would give all companies operating in any signatory country equal access to U.S. government procurement contracts (even though none of these other government's procurement comes even close to matching ours in amount).
5. It gives America's "Big Pharma" companies patent extensions while at the same time limits our ability to cut costs through 'drug formularies', even though such formularies are now deeply embedded in our Medicare, Medicaid and VA programs. The only possible result is much higher drug prices for American consumers.
6. It allows TPP's signatory nations to export the products of their highly subsidized State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs), contrary to the objections of every small and medium sized American manufacturer, all of our non-service labor unions, and every right-minded trade economist in America. Nor are there likely to be appropriate limits on major foreign SOEs investing directly in the United States.