Jim Carey — Mexico’s Case Against NAFTA: An Economic and Environmental Wrecking Ball

So is Mexico so eager to open talks with the U.S. on NAFTA if it was “the worst deal ever approved” by Washington? A deal that was helping Mexico get one over on their neighbors to the north. The answer likely has something to do with the devastation that neoliberal “free trade” brings with it wherever it goes. 

Like most countries before they embraced neoliberalism, Mexico before NAFTA was once home to a diverse and robust domestic agricultural sector, less reliant on imported food and manufacturing jobs, and on track to have a fairly Western standard of living. Since the massive trade treaty took effect in 1994, however, this all changed.  Instead, NAFTA set off a series of devastating policies that are still ravaging Mexico today....

Geopolitics Alert
Mexico’s Case Against NAFTA: An Economic and Environmental Wrecking Ball

Jim Carey

See also

Erdoğan in September had called on Washington to swap Brunson for Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish Muslim cleric living in self-imposed exile in the US who Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) government accuse of orchestrating a failed coup in 2016....

Is the Trump administration trying to end Turkish membership in NATO and deepen the divide between the Global North and Global South, and East and West? First, drive Russian into China's arms, then Iran, then Turkey, all of which are armed to the teeth. Sounds like a brilliant strategy.

Trump, Pence Threaten Turkey with ‘Large Sanctions’ if US Pastor not Released
Turkish Minute

Rhiannon Bury — Ford cancels plans for Mexican plant as Trump blasts General Motors

Global car giant Ford has cancelled plans to build a new $1.6bn plant in Mexico and will instead invest $700m in a Michigan manufacturing base, just hours after president elect Donald Trump blasted rival General Motors for building some of its cars south of the border.

Mr Trump had used Ford as a whipping boy during his presidential campaign, suggesting that it was moving manufacturing jobs to Mexico which should have been for US workers and vowed to slap a 35pc tariff on Ford vehicles made in Mexico but sold in the US....

The Telegraph
Ford cancels plans for Mexican plant as Trump blasts General Motors

Rhiannon Bury

Michael Brune — TransCanada Files NAFTA Suit Demanding More Than $15 Billion for Keystone XL Rejection

On June 24, foreign oil company TransCanada filed a lawsuit against the U.S. under NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, arguing that the U.S. rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline violated NAFTA’s broad rights for foreign investors by thwarting the company’s “expectations.” As compensation, TransCanada is demanding more than $15 billion from U.S. taxpayers.

TransCanada’s case will be heard in a private tribunal of three lawyers who are not accountable to any domestic legal system, thanks to NAFTA’s “investor-state” system, which is also included in the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The controversial TPP would empower thousands of additional corporations, including major polluters, to follow TransCanada’s example and use this private tribunal system to challenge U.S. climate and environmental policies.…

Oh what the heck, it isn't "taxpayer money" – just government on the hook. (snark)

EcoWatch
TransCanada Files NAFTA Suit Demanding More Than $15 Billion for Keystone XL Rejection
Michael Brune

ht Dan Crawford at Angry Bear

Michael Wessel — I’ve Read Obama’s Secret Trade Deal. Elizabeth Warren Is Right to Be Concerned

Obama smackdown.

“You need to tell me what’s wrong with this trade agreement, not one that was passed 25 years ago,” a frustrated President Barack Obama recently complained about criticisms of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). He’s right. The public criticisms of the TPP have been vague. That’s by design—anyone who has read the text of the agreement could be jailed for disclosing its contents. I’ve actually read the TPP text provided to the government’s own advisors, and I’ve given the president an earful about how this trade deal will damage this nation. But I can’t share my criticisms with you. 

I can tell you that Elizabeth Warren is right about her criticism of the trade deal. We should be very concerned about what's hidden in this trade deal—and particularly how the Obama administration is keeping information secret even from those of us who are supposed to provide advice. 

So-called “cleared advisors” like me are prohibited from sharing publicly the criticisms we’ve lodged about specific proposals and approaches. The government has created a perfect Catch 22: The law prohibits us from talking about the specifics of what we’ve seen, allowing the president to criticize us for not being specific. Instead of simply admitting that he disagrees with me—and with many other cleared advisors—about the merits of the TPP, the president instead pretends that our specific, pointed criticisms don’t exist.

This is a Democratic trade expert speaking.

I’ve been deeply involved in trade policy for almost four decades. For 21 years, I worked for former Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt and handled all trade policy issues including “fast track,” the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization’s Uruguay Round, which is the largest trade agreement in history. I am also a consultant to various domestic producers and the United Steelworkers union, for whom I serve as a cleared advisor on two trade advisory committees. To top it off, I was a publicly acknowledged advisor to the Obama campaign in 2008. 

Scathing report.

Politico
I’ve Read Obama’s Secret Trade Deal. Elizabeth Warren Is Right to Be Concerned.
Michael Wessel

Michael Wessel is a cleared liaison to two statutory advisory committees and was a commissioner on the U.S. Trade Deficit Review Commission, as well as the international trade co-chair for the Kerry-Edwards Presidential Campaign.

Disingenuous, back-stabbing Obama lobbying harder than he's ever lobbied before for this big business corporate welfare giveaway

President Obama is pushing hard for passage of the TPP trade deal. Never mind the fact that he spoke out against such deals when he was candidate Obama. It's just another example of his shameless backstabbing and insatiable penchant for neoliberal "change."

Obama says that trade is "inevitable." No, it's not. Certainly not this kind of trade: secret deals that circumvent our own domestic laws and regulations on environment, labor (even child labor), patents, net neutrality and so forth?

News flash, Mr. President...in a vast, highly productive and technologically advanced economy like the U.S. there is pretty much ZERO need for trade deals. It would be much easier and more in the interest of our country and society to just have the government ensure that the residents of our nation have sufficient incomes to enjoy the fruits of their own labor.

We have 46 million people on food stamps, millions of homeless and millions more without the basics. Do we really need to be working to implement policies that feed, clothe, house and raise the living standards of foreigners so our industries can profit? Couldn't our industries profit just the same by selling their product to Americans who have labored to create that very output?

It's maddening to see the president lobby so hard for a deal that likely won't benefit a single American worker. In the decade of the 1970s the nation created 19.4 million jobs with a labor force of only 100 million. There was no TPP or NAFTA. It was also a time of heavy unionization.

Then NAFTA went into effect in January 1994 and from that point on through the end of Clinton's second term the economy created 18.4 million. Less jobs than the 70s and most of those jobs had nothing to do with NAFTA. It was the Internet and dot-com explosion and the whole, Y2K investment boom.

Furthermore, NAFTA's rollout was over a period of 10 years so, what has happened since? I'll tell you what has happened. Nothing. Since 2000 we created only 10 million jobs. Ten million jobs in 15 years with a labor force that is 50% larger that the labor force in the 1970s. Some job creator.

Let's not forget to mention, too, that real wages have declined. Labor's share of national wealth has shrunk and actually, it has never been smaller than it is today. Some boom. Some benefit.

For this we need more trade agreements?

I get even more upset when I see organizations like the creepy Third Way supporting this. The Third Way is to policy what Scientology is to religion. It's like a cult, disguising itself with very "reasonable" sounding ideas that people have been  brainwashed to believe in. Things like debt reduction (to save our kids and grandkids...yeah, right) grand "bargains," to strip Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid from our seniors.

The Third Way is nothing more than an insidious, slick, propaganda operation aligned with the Powers that Be: the same forces that want to dismantle the social safety nets. Their policies are policies of enrichment for the few and lack for everyone else.

The President, Fix the Debt, The Third Way, the Republicans...we are clearly so outnumbered and outgunned that it's a fucking joke, but at least if we're going to go down we can go down swinging and not like a bunch of pansies.

If we know what the consequences of these policies will be (which, we do) and know how to make some money off them at least we can create some wealth and protection for ourselves as it all comes tumbling down.

Get ready, because it's coming.

Robin Broad — Governments and Activists are Fighting the Corporate “Right” to Sue Governments

This post is drawn from a new article regular TCB contributor Robin Broad wrote with John Cavanagh, “A Strategic Fight Against Corporate Rule,” The Nation, February 3, 2014.

TripleCrisis
Governments and Activists are Fighting the Corporate “Right” to Sue Governments
Robin Broad

Jim Hightower — The Trans-Pacific Partnership is not about free trade. It's a corporate coup d'etat--against us!

TPP is not just another trade deal. First, it is massive and open-ended. It would hitch us immediately to 11 Pacific Rim nations (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam), and its door would remain wide open to lure China, Indonesia, Russia, and other nations to come in. Second, note that many of those countries already have trade agreements with the US. Hence, THIS AMAZING FACT: TPP is a "trade deal" that mostly does not deal with trade. In fact, of the 29 chapters in this document, only five cover traditional trade matters!

The other two dozen chapters amount to a devilish "partnership" for corporate protectionism. They create sweeping new "rights" and escape hatches to protect multinational corporations from accountability to our governments... and to us. Here are a few of TPP's provisos that would make our daily lives riskier, poorer, and less free....

Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's superb research and activist group, Global Trade Watch, correctly calls the Trans-Pacific Partnership "a corporate coup d'etat." Indeed, nations that join must conform their laws and rules to TPP's strictures, effectively supplanting US sovereignty and cancelling our people's right to be self-governing. Worse, it creates virtually permanent corporate rule over us--there's no expiration date on the agreement, and no provision in it can be altered unless all countries agree. Thus, even if Americans voted in an election to make changes, any other TPP country could overrule us by not agreeing.

Well, you might think, we'll still have our courts to redress corporate misuse of TPP's provisions. Uh... no. One of the deal's chapters creates a monstrous monkey wrench called the "Investor-State Dispute Resolution" system. In this private, supra-legal "court," corporations are empowered to sue TPP governments over environmental, health, consumer, zoning, or any other public policies that the corporations claim are either undermining their TPP "rights" or diminishing--get this--their "expected future profits."This elevates thousands of private, profit-seeking entities to the legal status of sovereign nations. Under the investor-state system, a smaller version of which was included in NAFTA and other free-trade schemes, the deck is stacked for corporate interests. Cases are decided behind closed doors by three-person international tribunals of private attorneys who often have a glaring corporate bias. The same lawyers who represent corporations in these cases routinely switch over in other cases to serve as "judges." Holy revolving door!

These "tribunalists" are not accountable to any electorate, and their decisions are final--there's no appeal to a real court. If a corporation wins a case, taxpayers of the government being sued lose, for they must pony up cash to compensate the corporation for its "loss" of profit....

WARNING--BUCKLE UP BEFORE READING THIS: Last year, Obama's top trade rep, Ron Kirk, declared that locking out the people is necessary, because the deal's details would outrage Americans and spook Congress from rubber stamping it. In short, to win public approval of TPP, the Obamacans say they must keep it hidden from the public. 

Where, you might ask, is Congress? In the dark.

Even though the Constitution says Congress has exclusive authority "to regulate commerce with foreign nations," the White House has repeatedly rejected pretty-please requests by lawmakers merely to attend negotiations as observers, and congressional leaders have not been allowed to review, much less have any meaningful input on, the draft texts of TPP's 29 chapters. (Update: In June, our progressive friend, Rep. Alan Grayson, who has been a tenacious critic of the shady process, was finally granted a peek at the full draft--though not allowed to take a copy. "It's easy to understand why [it's] been kept secret," Grayson says, confirming that "It puts corporate interests ahead of American interests.")...
There are, however, 600 or so "outsiders" who've been welcomed inside to help write TPP. They are handpicked members of the 16 Industry Trade Advisory Committees--practically all of them corporate executives.

Wait. It gets worse!

In addition, Obama has now named one of their own to replace Kirk: Michael Froman, an Obama classmate in law school and a protege of Robert Rubin in the Clinton administration. Post-Clinton, Froman traipsed along with Rubin to Citigroup, which made him a Wall Street multi-millionaire. From there, he went back to Obama in 2004 as a senate campaign advisor and money-bagger (including introducing the rising political star to Rubin). Now he's been brought in to wire all these connections to the TPP sovereignty bomb.

These are just the highlights. You need to read the whole thing and let your congressional representatives know what you think of it.

Hightower Lowdown
The Trans-Pacific Partnership is not about free trade. It's a corporate coup d'etat--against us!

Edited by Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer

Zach Carter and Ryan Grim — Obama's EU Trade Deal Would Include New Political Powers For Corporations

The Obama administration is pursuing a free trade agreement with the European Union that would grant corporations new political power to challenge an array of regulations both at home and abroad, according to an administration official involved in the negotiations.

While the plan is still in its early stages, the effort alarms consumer and environmental advocates who worry it will lead to a rollback of important rules and put multinational companies on the same political plain as sovereign nations.

If states are unable to pass and enforce laws within their borders, it could change the nature of their community and government, nonprofit groups emphasize. Exactly how broad these corporate political powers will be is undetermined, but one aspect of the agreement, known as "investor-state dispute resolution," would allow a company to appeal a regulatory rule or law to an international court, most likely theWorld Bank. The international body would be given authority to impose economic sanctions against any country that violated its verdict, including the United States....

"The dirty little secret about [the negotiation] is that it is not mainly about trade, but rather would target for elimination the strongest consumer, health, safety, privacy, environmental and other public interest policies on either side of the Atlantic," said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. "The starkest evidence ... is the plan for it to include the infamous investor-state system that empowers individual corporations and investors to skirt domestic courts and laws and drag signatory governments to foreign tribunals."

The Obama administration is also pursuing an aggressive investor-state resolution system under the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal with several Pacific nations.

The Huffington Post
Obama's EU Trade Deal Would Include New Political Powers For Corporations
Zach Carter and Ryan Grim

The New World Order conspiracy theory coming true with the US forfeiting sovereignty to transnational corporations and international orgs?

David Becker — Trans Pacific Partnership: A new Constitution

Neoliberalism on steroids. This is what your president has planned for you and your children, those that survive the drones anyway. Creepy stuff being thought up and implemented by creeps.

I have excerpted the most salient points.

What struck me in Public Citizens review was that the system being setup as the arbiter of the trade agreement is following the US' fascination with "extra judicial" proceedings as a viable means of following the ideals of our Constitution. It's those same thought processes that gave us rendition, enhanced interrogation, military tribunals, unitary executive. You can't help but see our past 35 years of leadership in the realm of pioneering new concepts in equality, fairness, justice, and processes to achieve such.

Concepts of "free market", "invisible hand", and process of deregulation, economies of scale, etc. How else do you explain the use of rotating corporate tied lawyers as judges? Where is the separation of the judge and the plaintiff? This is right out of the current US play book on how to better your nation with the social institution known as "revolving door"?

You can see in this document the culmination of work performed over the last 40 years (yes Carter started the deregulation) by the conservative (internationally known as neoliberal) ideology merged with Milton Friedman's economics and Ayn Rand's objectivism. Dare I say, the TPP is to capitalism what our Constitution was to democracy?....

This document is the constitution of a new world order. It is an order that has been the dream of many for ages upon ages that until this time in humanity was not possible do to the limits of the technology of the time. This is the document of what I coined a few years ago as The United Corporations of Global. It is this aspect of the document that the people of the world should be most fearful of. It is not a trade agreement as I believe the common man (as in the court concept of the "common man") would think of the phrase "trade agreement". This is a constitution that is coming prepackaged with the rules and regulations already written. Only, there is no need for ratification to be a part of the creative process. This document comes pre-ratified in that all a nation has to do is say "I'm in"....

The documents greatest power is what I alluded to when I mentioned rendition, unitary executive, enhanced interrogation, military tribunals. Rationalization. This document codifies the use of rationalization as a viable thought process for achieving the advancement of humanity. It reinstates the fallibility of human thinking, turning on it's head the enlightenment age because this document believes it is of enlightened thought. It rationalizes as enlightenment the freeing of people to trade to the greatest level of monetary efficiency. Such a thought is putting a human creation ahead of humanity....

This is a document written by people who envision the world structured far differently than how we are taught to view our social organization based on the US Constitution and it's meaning to the world.... 

This document is not just about how nations will relate to each other, it also gives the same rights and privileges to individual investor entities as representative of a nation. Thus, keep in mind that anything you read here also means a rich person or a business entity is treated as if they are the nation. However, citizens are not at anytime mentioned as being a "party" of any type other than when it comes to citizens potentially creating a loss for a "party" or it's investor representative. In other words, "citizens" are at all times considered to have lesser status such that citizens have no claim to inalienable rights and the resultant rule of law. It is less than slavery for in this document, the only recognized covered entities are "party" which means a nation of signature and it's participants in the sector of said parties social interaction referred to as "investment".... 

...what we have here is an agreement that the investing entity is protected via insurance in the form of the host nation's taxing ability that becomes a mechanism for "encouraging" shall we say, a host nation to take measures to assure it's citizens remain compliant. This is the new social order.

This is the corporate model of relationships...

The further we go with implementing these types of agreements the further removed we are from the enlightenment concepts that resulted in a group of people writing prose such as our Constitution. You can forget about the ideal bound in our Declaration of Independence. And, the further we are moved toward the model of business organization as the dominate model for structuring a society. It is too accepted that the purpose of business is to make money. There is no longer any talk of "social responsibility" within today's business model. Business no longer is a means for creating wealth that society then puts to work in reducing life's risks. Business is simply about making money...stop. The declaration for the TTP would simply read: We hold this truth to be self-evident, the purpose of business is to make money.

Angry Bear
Trans Pacific Partnership: A new Constitution
Daniel Becker