Bill
Moyers: The Corporate Plot That Obama and Corporate Lobbyists Don't Want You to
Know About
The Trans Pacific
Partnership is a threat to up-end the economy as we know it.
Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/EDHAR
November 1, 2013 | Alternet.
A US-led trade deal is currently being negotiated that could
increase the price of prescription drugs, weaken financial regulations and even
allow partner countries to challenge American laws. But few know its substance.
The pact, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), is
deliberately shrouded in secrecy, a trade deal powerful people, including
President Obama, don’t want you to know about. More than 130 members of
Congress have asked the White House for greater transparency about the
negotiations and were essentially told to go fly a kite. While most of us are
in the dark about the contents of the deal, which Obama aims to seal by year
end, corporate lobbyists are in the know about what it contains.
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And some vigilant independent watchdogs are
tracking the negotiations with sources they trust, including Dean
Baker and Yves Smith, who join Moyers & Company this week.
Both have written extensively about the TPP and tell Bill the pact actually has
very little to do with free trade.
Instead, says Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, “This
really is a deal that’s being negotiated by corporations for corporations and
any benefit it provides to the bulk of the population of this country will be
purely incidental.” Yves Smith, an investment banking expert who runs
the Naked Capitalism blog
adds: “There would be no reason to keep it so secret if it was in the interest
of the public.”
The following is a transcript of the video:
Let's turn now to another big story ... TPP -- the
Trans-Pacific Partnership. It’s a trade agreement the United States is
negotiating with Australia, Canada, Japan and eight other countries in the
Pacific region. If you don't know about the TPP, and few do, it's because the
powerful people behind it -- including President Obama -- don't want you to
know.
The negotiations are shrouded in secrecy, and once
they are completed, Obama wants to rush the agreement through Congress --
fast-tracking, they call it -- with our elected representatives given the
choice only of voting it up or down. Last year, over 130 members of Congress
asked the White House for more transparency about what's being negotiated, and
were essentially told to go fly a kite. You can be sure of this, however: a
select group of corporate partners -- companies like General Electric, Goldman
Sachs, and Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant -- are not likely to be in the dark.
Players like these stand to be the real beneficiaries of the agreement, because
like other so-called "free trade" agreements, TPP actually will
reward those at the top, even as it creates rules to override domestic laws on
the environment, workplace safety, and investment. Corporate lobbyists already
are lining up in Washington to ram the agreement through once the White House
hurries it out of the delivery room. How do we know this? Because some vigilant
independent watchdogs are tracking the negotiations, with sources they trust,
and two are with me now.
YVES SMITH is an expert on investment
banking and the founder of Aurora Advisors, a New York based management
consulting firm. She runs the “Naked Capitalism” blog, a go-to site for
information and insight on the business and ethics of finance.
DEAN BAKER is co-director of the
progressive Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He's
been a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and a consultant to
Congress and the World Bank. I rarely miss his blog, “Beat the Press,” and I’m
a regular reader of his column in the “Guardian” newspaper.
