The Trans-Pacific Partnership: It’s Free Trade on Steroids

• Prominent author takes aim at “Trojan horse” of globalist interests.

By Dr. Adrian H. Krieg —

The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a treaty involving 12 nations, essentially an expansion of “free trade,” the “Trojan horse” of multinational and globalist interests. The planned treaty consists of 29 chapters, only five of which deal with trade, not unlike the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that comprises two entire books and over 1,000 pages of text.

TPP will encompass 40% of the world’s GNP. It is estimated that 600 multinational corporations co-authored the plan, which is considered the largest planned international treaty ever considered in world history.

The treaty will cover international relationships with banks, the Internet, labor and the healthcare sector, as well as the environment.

No portion of TPP has been released to the public by its authors. Congressmen have been allowed to read it, but are required to submit any notes taken for review by U.S. trade officials. No one outside the 600 multinationals has a full copy. We know this from the three chapters revealed by Julian Assange of WikiLeaks.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the major drumbeater for TPP. The chamber claims that TPP will increase trade and employment, improve infrastructure and do many other things. Proof of the assertions is sadly missing, however, and the evidence is contrary. TPP benefits multinational corporations and nothing else.

Free trade treaties—actually, to this date, they have been called agreements—are a national scandal demonstrated by NAFTA, the deleterious results of which include 11.7 million lost blue-collar jobs, 57,000 small business closures (my corporation included) and an annual trade surplus of $5.7 billion with Mexico turned into a $56 billion deficit.

The fact that TPP is intended as a treaty makes things much worse. If TPP is passed by Congress it becomes part of constitutional law and American challenges to any segment of the treaty will have to be approved by all signatories, i.e., all 12 nations that signed onto TPP, and require a two-thirds majority in Congress to change it. This makes modification, challenge and change to the treaty virtually impossible.

If enacted TPP will destroy family businesses and farms with multinational corporations overtaking all production.

Hello, New World Order!

A large portion of the intended treaty deals with the Internet, regulating what service providers must collect, what content shall be allowed, and how it will be regulated. Currently, the U.S. controls ICANN—the body that regulates the Internet—but that is planned to be terminated and the Internet become controlled by an international body. This will likely mean the end to net neutrality, the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment.

Local and national labor, marketing, distribution and sales regulations will be terminated and replaced by regulations laid out in TPP. Protection of domestic industries will be terminated, and there will be no protective duties or tariffs.

A local American producer will be forced to compete with any producer of the 12 signatories to TPP as well as the six of NAFTA and the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam and U.S.A. (18 nations) will join the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua in benefiting from unfair free trade with the United States.

These free trade agreements have already resulted in 10 years of annual trade deficits totaling over $4 trillion. Put more clearly, for 240 months, we have as a nation imported more than we export.

We additionally have free trade agreements with Panama and South Korea.

Let me simplify this: If TPP is enacted, the U.S. will have in place treaties and agreements with 20 nations, every one of which, except for Canada, has lower wages, fewer regulations and fewer or no labor protections—and America’s manufacturing industries are supposed to compete with them based on production, regulatory and environmental regulations that make manufacturing in America from one to 80 times more expensive?

The plan simply is to eliminate small and family-owned business, long the bane of multinationals, and turn control of the world economy over to 600 multinational corporations.

Governments love this idea. Multinational corporations are large like governments, inefficient and generally do not develop new products, services or inventions, but steal them from smaller firms that produce them.

In the chapters of TPP that have been leaked to the public, we learn of a peculiar provision in the plan to stifle competition. Assuming that some governmental authority decided to build or grant to a business a toll bridge over a river, but a private contractor owned a highway bridge nearby, under TPP that contractor can sue the government for loss of business. This would equally apply to healthcare facilities, hospitals or sports stadiums. It is nothing but protection from competition for existing large businesses.

Examining the basic concept put forward by progressives is the theory that through the increase of interdependence between nations through the liberalization of trade and elimination of tariffs and duties, the world will become more
peaceful because we will all be dependent upon each other. This concept has no credibility at all. It is a theory that has over time been proven wrong.

Mexico has demonstrated a worsening relationship with America, as has China, and we have trade agreements with both of them. All that this has produced is loss of American manufacturing, loss of blue-collar employment and drastic increases in trade deficits.

Let me be very clear here: Any nation that produces year-on-year trade deficits will at some point see the erosion of value in their currencies. Any nation that does not manufacture becomes the colony of the nation that does. The ultimate cost of continued deficits is monetary inflation, or a continuation of ever-rising prices. Real U.S. inflation is about 10.7% annually not the Disney World on the Potomac claim of 1.7%.

Why? The average wages in America and Canada are about $32.50 per hour. Compare that to China, which is $0.75, India at $0.81, Mexico at $4.04, Japan at $27.80, South Korea at $16.20, or Singapore at $ 18.72. Switzerland, with the highest hourly wage of $43.28, also has the lowest unemployment rate, because most employment is super high-skilled.

In crass terms, manufacturing costs can be separated into labor, raw materials and government costs. Of these, raw materials are in most cases the lowest portion, and labor is the highest. For this reason many manufacturing enterprises farm out labor-intensive portions of production to places where costs, especially labor, are lower and government regulations fewer.

Beginning with the maquiladora programs in Mexico that pre-dated NAFTA, American manufacturers transferred well over 2 million jobs south of the border, and that’s just in the automotive, TV and radio industries.

In case you have not noticed, America, which invented television, no longer makes the machines.

Instead of addressing this problem, Washington claims that TPP will offset China’s huge trade imbalance with America. In reality, though, it will do no such thing. The ultimate outcome of TPP will be a shift of trade imbalance from China to Asian TPP members.

The U.S. has reached a point where we are so dependent on Japan, South Korea and China that we are no longer able to produce military hardware to supply our defense needs. TPP will expand this dependency.

It’s worth noting that no other nation is so dependent upon foreign suppliers as is America.

International trade is simple. We purchase goods overseas, and foreigners collect dollars based on what they sell. Currently, the U.S. sets the value of the dollar, because it is the international reserve currency, but this will soon end.
The loss of the dollar as the global reserve currency—which will force American businesses to purchase goods in other currencies—combined with TPP will likely mean the end of America and the beginning of an international multinational business cartel controlling 40% of the world’s economy.

TPP has nothing to do with trade, free or otherwise. TPP is an instrument to eliminate competition from the multinationals and to once again jack up their profit margins at the expense of the American middle class.

All of this smells of Obamacare and its 20,000 pages of rules and regulations. The infamous words of Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) come to mind in this case, when she said in reference to Obamacare: “We have to pass the bill so that we can find out what is in it.”

Dr. Adrien Krieg was on the District Export Council in Connecticut and Rhode Island, an international trade advisory body to the Department of Commerce, for 15 years spanning the Reagan administration to the Clinton administration. He was opposed to NAFTA from its proposal days. Having lived in Mexico, he was well informed about how business is conducted in that country.