The Island - 0 views
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Barack Obama’s determined, if unbelievably secretive, bid to fast-track agreement on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) ‘not tomorrow, as they say, but yesterday’ is clearly driven by the bitter knowledge that America got well and truly pipped-at-the-post when China launched the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). "Evidence of the relative power of the Chinese and American economies," wrote Pepe Escobar in Asia Times, "was the world’s reaction to China’s launch of the badly needed AIIB to provide development funds for Asia and beyond. The level of funding necessary for such development has long been denied by the US-dominated World Bank and IMF." More galling to the self-annointed ‘Indispensable Nation’ was that even its staunch allies, UK and Israel, unhesitatingly got on board AIIB – despite, as Escobar reveals, "the bullying of the US to stop them leaving the US and its cat’s paw in East Asia, Japan, out in the cold." More amazingly, added Escobar, the US actually thought it could write the rules of trade for China and East Asia!
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Consider for instance, Obama’s speech on May 8, 2015 at a Nike factory in Oregon: "We have to make sure America writes the rules of the global economy and we should do it today while our economy is in a position of global strength. If we don’t write the rules for trade around the world, guess what, China will. And they’ll write those rules in a way that gives Chinese workers and Chinese businesses the upper hand." What is one to conclude from such an unabashed ‘confession’ except that the imperial mind-set is still very much alive and kicking in the 21st Century? The TPP or Trans-Pacific Partnership is being put together in absolute secrecy, so what little has become public knowledge is thanks to Wikileaks. What needs to be remembered is that the US already trades heavily with the other 11 nations included in the TPP talks. Economist and leading commentator Paul Krugman’s blunt assessment: "This not a trade agreement. It’s about intellectual property and dispute resolution; the big beneficiaries are likely to be pharma companies and firms that want to sue governments."
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And that, precisely, happens to be the bone of contention between Obama and Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has been particularly critical of the so-called ‘Investor State Dispute Settlement’ provisions in the TPP which, she charged publicly, would empower corporations to use international courts to sue the US government and other state institutions of signatory governments that enact regulations and ‘protections’ which impact on the profits of corporations. The Obama administration, for its part, argues that the deal is instead about trade and increasing American exports abroad. It has set up a web page on the US Trade Representative’s (USTR) site listing the benefits of exports from each of America’s fifty states resulting from the TPP. But an obscure government document put out by that very same USTR office adequately makes Senator Warren’s case for her! That document happens to be the USTR’s annual report on "foreign trade barriers" around the world, going country by country to list complaints the US government has about their laws with respect to commerce.