President Obama warned yesterday that China would step into the economic vacuum the U.S. would create if it fails to complete and enact a free-trade deal with Asia. “If we don’t write the rules, China will write the rules out in that region,” he said. “That will mean a loss of U.S. jobs.”
But who’s “we?” The deal was written largely by big American corporations. But American corporations aren’t “we.” They exist for their global shareholders, not for Americans. To the extent we know what’s in the deal (on the basis of what’s been leaked), the Trans Pacific Partnership does exactly what American-based global corporations want: It expands their intellectual property protections and gives them the right to be compensated if national health, safety, labor, or environmental regulations that impinge on their profits.
Moreover, there’s no reason to think American-based corporations will be a counterweight to China. They’ve been cozying up to China for years in order to gain access to China’s vast market.
Your view?
Robert Reich
I’m inclined to let China keep stealing from the multinational corporations unless and until they want to drop the idea that they and only they are guaranteed profits. The multinational corporations need to embrace the notion that humanitarian concerns should be part of their corporate goals. Until they do that, they are no different than vampires living off the bodies of the living.
China owns us already, there is no preventing the dominance of China in global economic markets now. Now that we’ve forced them to buy so much of our government’s debt. The trade deficit won’t be affected by the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) All it does is make it easier for multinational corporations to profit in China. TPP doesn’t do a damn thing for average Americans. If corporations wanted the weight of the US behind their perceived right to profit-take, they probably should have left us with some hope of profit of our own.
Postscript
Donald Trump killed the TPP. One of the few things he’s done that hasn’t proven to be destructive of America itself, and might even be something I could agree with. It’s nice to be right every once and awhile? Not when you have to be grateful to Donald Trump.
