President Obama started a fresh push for the Transpacific Partnership on Friday when he sent Congress a draft Statement of Administrative Action.
That action means that after 30 days, the White House will be able to present Congress with legislation on the TPP.
And on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton chose Ken Salazar, who is an aggressively outspoken supporter of the Transpacific Partnership, to lead her White House transition team, despite the fact that Hillary Clinton has come out firmly against the TPP.
Salazar's appointment raises serious questions about what we can expect from a Hillary Clinton administration and whether she's sincere in her opposition to the TPP and other so-called "free trade" deals that are still being negotiated.
And it's important to remember why these trade deals are so dangerous to begin with.
Activists from the right and the left have been working hard to raise awareness about the dangers of the TPP and its transatlantic cousin, the TTIP.
But by far the most sweeping deal that's being negotiated in secret and largely overlooked by activists is the Trade in Services Agreement, also known as TiSA.
TiSA will undermine citizens' privacy and governments' sovereignty, and negotiators are hoping to have a deal finalized by the end of this year.
Paola Casale at
EconomyInCrisis writes bluntly about TiSA that "You may be asking: 'how does this affect me?' The best one sentence response I can come up with is: 'how does this not affect you.'"
Fifty-one countries would be initially governed by TiSA, including the United States, the European Union, and 22 other nations from around the world, representing 70% of the world's services' trade.
If it goes into effect, it would cover close to 80% of the U.S. economy that falls under the heading of "services".
"Services" is a broad term that covers all sorts of things, such as shipping, air travel, e-commerce, telecommunications, the internet, healthcare, financial services, engineering, and the list goes on and on.
Based on leaked texts and summaries published by the European Union, it's clear that TiSA aims to go even further than the WTO to globalize markets, functionally destroy national borders, and to create new corporate-friendly rules and regulations in sectors like e-commerce and financial services.
TiSA would include a "standstill clause" for financial services, and Switzerland has proposed that the agreement force all signatories to allow "any new financial service" to enter the market, which would virtually guarantee that banks all over the world, freed from sovereign regulation, would adopt the same sort of reckless speculation that destroyed the global economy just 8 years ago.
The deal also aims to make it so that banks and e-commerce outlets like Amazon could send an individual's data out of a TiSA country for processing, regardless of national privacy laws, breaking with centuries of precedent on locally kept business records according to David Dayen at
The New Republic.
Alberto Mucci recently explained in an article on
Politico that "TiSA deals with barriers to services' trade such as the conditions by which lawyers from Norway might be able to practice in the United States or German engineers might gain easier access to Mexico.".
In other words, TiSA will have profound impacts on immigration and employment policies in every single country that takes part in the agreement.
More than that, it will cripple our democratic republic by making it even easier for corporations to manage or strike down our public laws.
