Dishonest White House Response to Warren's Attack on Secret Panels in Trade Deals
Dishonest White House Response to Warren's Attack on Secret Panels in Trade Deals
Tuesday, 03 March 2015 * By Yves Smith * Naked Capitalism | Truth Out dot com
Elizabeth Warren is clearly getting on the Administration’s nerves.
The Massachusetts senator has come out forcefully against the misleadingly named trade deals, the TransPacific Partnership and its ugly sister, the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Mind you, these treaties are not about trade. Trade is already substantially liberalized and in keeping, only five of the 29 chapters of the TransPacific Partnership deal with tariffs.
What these pacts are primarily intended to do is strengthen intellectual property laws to help US software and entertainment companies, along with Big Pharma, increase their hefty profits, and to aid multinational by permitting the greatly increased use of secret, conflict-ridden arbitration panels that allow foreign investors to sue governments over laws that they contend reduced potential future profits. I am not making that up.
Warren focused on the so-called investor-state dispute settlement process in a Washington Post op-ed last week. We’ve discussed these panels in gory detail in previous posts.
That article led the White House to issue a “lady doth protest too much” rebuttal that we’ll shred shortly. But let’s first review the state of play.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/29407-the-administration-s-dishonest-response-to-elizabeth-warren-s-attack-on-secret-investor-arbitration-panels-in-trade-deals
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