Lori M. Wallach is the director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch.

The TPP has been negotiated behind closed doors for seven years with notorious human rights violators like Vietnam and Malaysia and hundreds of official U.S. trade advisers mainly representing corporate interests. The administration had kept the text secret, even after announcing a final deal, and is now making absurd claims about its glories. But thanks to leaks and negotiator admissions, it’s clear this is a bad deal for most Americans.



It would offshore jobs, increase our trade deficit, raise drug prices, gut some consumer assurance measures and let companies break our laws.

The TPP includes investor protections also found in NAFTA that incentivize American job offshoring by eliminating risks otherwise associated with producing in low-wage countries. It would drive down our wages by putting Americans in competition with Vietnamese workers who make less than 65 cents per hour. And it would also result in larger trade deficits, killing more jobs. Our experience with similar free trade agreements has shown what happens. The United States had 20 percent higher export growth over the last decade to nations that are not free trade agreement partners than to nations with which we have such agreements. The Obama administration’s 2012 U.S.-Korea free trade agreement served as the TPP’s template, but the U.S. goods-trade deficit with Korea more than doubled, undermining tens of thousands of American jobs.

Meanwhile, the administration dismissed Congress’s demand that the TPP include enforceable disciplines against countries lowering their currency values to gain unfair trade advantages after Japan, Vietnam and Malaysia threatened to leave the negotiations.



But only six of the TPP’s 30 chapters even cover actual trade issues. The rest are a trade pact Trojan horse of regulatory relaxation and new corporate rights to which signatories agree they will conform their own laws.

These include new monopoly protections for pharmaceutical firms that would extend patent terms, shut out generic competition and raise medicine prices. Another chapter would require us to import seafood, meat and poultry that does not comply with U.S. safety standards. Vietnam and Malaysia have major shrimp farms whose products are often rejected in the United States because of the antibiotics and other substances, like feces, that are poured into the shrimp ponds. But enforcing our standards could be considered an illegal trade barrier under the TPP. Another TPP chapter would ban “Buy American” and “Buy Local” policies, giving all firms operating in any signatory country equal access to U.S. procurement contracts.



And the TPP would expand the "investor-state" dispute settlement system that allows foreign firms operating here to drag the U.S. government before extrajudicial tribunals staffed by private corporate lawyers to demand unlimited taxpayer compensation if they think our environmental, health or other laws violate their TPP rights and limit their “expected future profits.” Tribunals have ordered governments to pay $3.6 billion to corporations for toxics, energy, water and other policies under past U.S. agreements. These involved developing nations with few U.S. investors here, so we avoided greater liability. But with 9,000 corporations from TPP nations established here, the TPP would double U.S. exposure to these attacks. That alone would provide 9,000 reasons to oppose TPP.



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