TPP, TTIP and TISA: How the Media Misrepresent Obama’s “Fast Track” “Secret” International Trade Deals
By Eric Zuesse
Global Research
May 07, 2015
Both conservative and liberal ‘news’ media misrepresent U.S. President Barack Obama’s proposed international trade-deals as if they were about only such things as lowering tariffs and reducing national trade-protectionism — which are relatively minor surface-features of these huge proposed treaties: TTIP with Europe, TPP with Asia, and TISA (Trade in Services Agreement). All of these proposed Obama trade-deals are actually about transferring to panels of international corporations the powers that currently reside in the various individual nations’ regulatory and legal authorities — i.e., that reside in the democratic governments that are accountable to the population that elected them instead of to the few global billionaires who control the international corporations.
A typical example of this misrepresentation is an article by Ryan Grim and Amanda Terkel at Huffington Post on May 6th. Its headline is “Clinton Campaign Chairman On Trade Deal: ‘Can You Make It Go Away?’.” It says: “If TPA [Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority] passes, the issue won’t go away, as Congress would be allowed a 60-day period to review the final draft, which isn’t yet complete.” This statement gives the impression that Fast Track can pass and then the trade-deal that has been fast-tracked can fail to pass Congress — but this is something that has actually never happened.
For example, if you will google-seach in one-and-the-same search the two phrases together “fast track was passed” “bill was defeated” you will get the following: “No results found for ‘fast track was passed’ ‘bill was defeated’.”
The reason why this is the case is laid out in the book by Public Citizen, The Rise and Fall of Fast Track Trade Authority. It explains that Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) was created by President Nixon in order to get around something: to get around the U.S. Constitution’s having placed America’s treaty-making authority in a balance-of-powers framework with Congress, something that the Constitution did in order to prevent the emergence of dictatorship by excessive power in the hands of the federal Executive, the President (which dictatorship was Nixon’s goal to achieve). The book also explains how TPA has been consistently used since Nixon in order to provide mega-corporations more and more control over the economy, not just within this country but globally.
The Rest…HERE
