More Corporate Cronyism and Shadiness Revealed in Newly Released Obamatrade Report

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The good news is that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recently admitted that the TPP, aka Obamatrade, has very little chance of passing Congress before next year’s Presidential election. The bad news is the main reason for this is because the RINOs in charge don’t think it represents enough of a giveaway to multi-national mega corporations.

All that aside, David Dayen just published a very valuable piece detailing the findings of a 121-page report critiquing the TPP by the Labor Advisory Committee.

Here’s more from Naked Capitalism:

The U.S. Trade Representative’s Office has been maligned for its network of Trade Advisory Committees, allegedly “independent” counsel for trade agreements. The Washington Post did the best work on the Advisory Committees back in February of last year, showing that 85 percent of the cleared advisors (meaning cleared to read the text of trade agreements as they are being negotiated) either worked directly for private industries or their trade groups.

But there’s another, more obscure group called the Labor Advisory Committee. Its 19 members are all the heads of major labor unions (Clayola Brown, president of the A. Phillip Randolph Institute, I guess technically isn’t, but that organization is a constituency group of the AFL-CIO). And like all Advisory Committees, they are required by law to write a report to Congress expressing their opinions about any finalized trade agreement. That means we now have this 121-page document, giving labor’s full argument against the TPP, from the people who have been following it from the inside for several years.

It gets off to quite a start in the first words of the executive summary:

On behalf of the millions of working people we represent, we believe that the TPP is unbalanced in its provisions, skewing benefits to economic elites while leaving workers to bear the brunt of the TPP’s downside. The TPP is likely to harm the U.S. economy, cost jobs, and lower wages.

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