Trans-Pacific Partnership: Another Trade Liberalization Scam
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/23740-trans-pacific-partnership-another-trade-liberalization-scam
Protesters in Maryland demonstrate against the Trans-Pacific Partnership in January, 2014.
The gathering pressure for Congress to "fast track" the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) demonstrates yet again that trade liberalization is one of the few aspects of economic policy about which there is agreement across the mainstream of the political spectrum, in both the United States and Europe. Almost all conservative commentators endorse it with gusto, for centrists it is an article of faith, and even many progressives accept it implicitly by their criticism of industrial country protection.
The neoliberal ideologues sell it by bestowing the label "free trade," which is allegedly reached by repeated measures of "trade liberalization." No matter that the TPP has little to do with trade and everything to do with setting loose capital on a global scale. Well tested and demonstrably disastrous in the North American Free Trade Association, this liberating of capital includes 1) global extension of corporate patents under the moniker "intellectual property rights," 2) shifting enforcement of those patents from national governments and courts to ad hoc international tribunals, and 3) prohibiting as "protectionist" measures protecting labor rights and the environment.
This is not "freer" trade, but re-regulation of trade to entrench corporate profit making. However, if you call it freer trade, you can sell it to the public. In order to discredit this corporate sales pitch, I have to drive a stake through the heart of the Free Trade dogma that is the ideological justification for neoliberal globalization.
The greatest economist of the 20th century, J M Keynes, explicitly recanted his support for free trade. In a rarely quoted (suppressed?) passage in The General Theory, he wrote:
So lately as 1923, as a faithful pupil of the classical school who did not at that time doubt what he had been taught and entertained on this matter no reserves at all, I wrote: "If there is one thing that Protection can not do, it is to cure Unemployment. . . . So absolutely overwhelming and complete has been the domination of the classical [free trade] school. (The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936, Ch 23, Section 1).
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Sorry, Virginia,
but there is NO such thing as "Free Trade".
There is NO such thing as "Free Markets,
and there certainly is NO Omnipotent Invisible Hand
that reaches down from Heaven to correct "mistakes" in the Free Marketplace,
and protect Citizens & Consumers.
That is ALL a big scam designed by the already VERY RICH,
and sold to gullible Americans by smooth talking Con-Men.
[font color=white]................[/font][font size=4]The Golden Calf on the altar
[font color=white]......[/font]of the Church of the Invisible Hand.[/font]
Like all Religions,
this new one requires blind faith in an invisible deity for which
no evidence exists. In fact, after 25 years of submission to this new deity, America's destroyed Working/Middle Class is evidence that there is no such thing as Invisible Hands and Free Trade/Free Markets.
It will take decades to rebuild our destroyed Working Class,
and the FIRST step is to get rid of anyone who professes a belief in Free Trade, Free Markets, or an Invisible Hand.