Karel van Wolferen — The Predators Behind the TPP

The designation “trade” used by politicians and the media when talking about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) pact and the proposed Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TPIP) agreement is another perfect example of a misnomer thanks to which a new shadow will be cast over the generally more fortunate parts of the world.

If signed and ratified, the trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic agreements, which seek to organize business activity under one gigantic umbrella of new rules, are likely to change our living environment in ways very different from what elected officials have been misled to imagine.

They have been peddled as trade treaties, and hence as being wonderful for economic growth, job creation, social well-being and general happiness.

But the TPP agreement, which aims to tie the United States together with close to a dozen countries in Asia, Oceania and a bit of Latin America, is not in the first place about trade, and may hardly be significant at all for stimulating genuine exchanges traditionally labelled that way. The same is true for its TPIP companion, which is meant to create and foster a new American-European business environment.

The TPP and TPIP accords are about power, not trade. More specifically, the agreements are about changed power relations between a collectivity of politically well-connected large corporations and the sovereign states in which these entities want to sink new roots. In particular, these treaties would allow U.S. corporations to engage in conduct unchecked by national rules of the participating countries. In eyes not fogged over through neoliberal dogma, such a thing would be recognized as predation.…

All this is easily understood. But it still leaves us with the puzzle of why Asians as well as Europeans, whose EU trade commissioners have been mouthing the same job creating nonsense around the TPIP that accompanies the TPP rhetoric, appear unable to tackle intellectually the dominant power aspects of these treaties.

Perhaps this is because the world in which they exist is politically sterilized by current economic suppositions. More generally, the concept of power (not influence with which it is often confused) receives a “stepmotherly” treatment in popular as well as serious writing, and the social science denizens of academia are entirely at sea over it.
Mainstream economics is ahistorical by design and hence has no room for power, which has helped continue the fateful division of political and economic affairs into separate realms for discussion that has long served the interests of power elites…

Raging Bull-Shit
The Predators Behind the TPP
Karel van Wolferen, former NRC Handelsblad correspondent for East Asia, and professor emeritus of comparative political and economic institutions at the University of Amsterdam
(cross-posted from The Japan Times)