Weekend Economists Go Eat Worms March 27-29, 2015

[Demeter]

54. What the Corporate Media Aren't Telling You About the TPP

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/28932-what-the-corporate-media-isn-t-telling-you-about-the-tpp

The Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP as it's more commonly known, is a public health disaster waiting to happen.

According to leaked documents, the proposed trade deal, which I like to call the Southern Hemisphere Asian Free Trade Agreement - SHAFTA - would extend patent protections for drugs made by Big Pharma to prevent rival companies from making generic version of those same drugs.

This a huge deal.

For hundreds of millions of people all over the world, generic drugs are a cheaper alternative to the more expensive drugs sold by Big Pharma.

So if the TPP goes through, real live breathing people (Doctors Without Borders estimates about half a billion of them) will effectively lose affordable access to the medicine they need to survive.

And that's just one small provision of SHAFTA - pretty much every major industry in the world has their own little honeypot in there...

AND THESE ARE LISTED AT LINK