The Trans Pacific Partnership, Yet another Opportunity to Chop-Shop America
A chop shop is a place where you take something whole and useful and bust it into pieces, each of which can be sold at a profit. Chop shops are highly profitable and used to be illegal (and still are for automobiles) until the United States Congress made them legal entities for Wall Street and large corporations.
The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), if it is allowed to become law, will be our fifteenth venture into this area of so-called free trade since 1985 and sixteen more are in various stages of development. Brunei, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore started this particular TTP ball rolling in 2006 and here we are almost exactly six years later, about to enter the 13th round of negotiations (July 2-10) in San Diego. How fitting; America’s 236th birthday.
All that’s heard in Washington these days is the deficit and the partisan fight over which services to the poorest of Americans must be cut. The true deficit is a trade deficit and its brief (and continuing) history of free-trade …