Despite What Media Says, TPP Isn’t About Free Trade — It’s About Protecting Corporate Profits
Despite What Media Says, TPP Isn’t About Free Trade — It’s About Protecting Corporate Profits
Zaid Jilani
The Intercept
... opposition to the TPP is not accurately described as opposition to all trade, or even to free trade.
In fact, the deal’s major impact would not come in the area of lowering tariffs, the most common trade barriers. The TPP is more focused on crafting regulatory regimes that benefit certain industries.
“We already have trade agreements with six of the 11 countries. Canada and Mexico — our two biggest trading partners — are in there. The tariffs are almost zero anyhow,” Dean Baker, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told The Intercept. “What’s in the deal? Higher patent and copyright protection! That’s protectionism.”
Concerns that the TPP would lead to even more job losses “are real and I think that the political discussion is responding to those concerns from both parties,” Melinda St. Louis, director of international campaigns at Public Citizen, told The Intercept. But, she noted, “I do think that the trade aspects of the TPP are a small part of it. It’s only six of 30 chapters that have to do with trade and goods really at all. The rest of it is about setting global rules.”
The agreement has been harshly criticized by humanitarian organizations like Doctors Without Borders, which deploys thousands of doctors overseas to offer medical care to those who cannot afford it, because it expands monopoly protections and patents for various pharmaceutical drugs.
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