TPP: A Trade Deal from Hell

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In 1995, Lori Wallach founded Global Trade Watch . It's a Public Citizen division. It monitors destructive trade deals.

Its "mission is to ensure that in this era of globalization, a majority have the opportunity to enjoy economic security, a clean environment, safe food, medicines and products, access to quality affordable services such as health care and the exercise of democratic decision-making about the matters that affect their lives."

Working closely with environmental, labor, and other allied groups, Wallach supports the public interest in Congress, foreign parliaments, the courts, government agencies, and the media. 

A National Journal profile called her "the trade debate's guerrilla warrior.' The Institute for International Economics says she's the "madame Defarge of Seattle."

On June 13, Public Citizen headlined "Controversial Trade Pact Text Leaked, Shows U.S. Trade Officials Have Agreed to Terms That Undermine Obama Domestic Agenda."

"After Two Years of Closed-Door Negotiations, Trans-Pacific Partnership Text Replicates Alarming Bush Trade Pact Terms That Obama Opposed as Candidate, and Worse."

US officials secretly agreed to controversial provisions. According to Wallach:

"The outrageous stuff in this leaked text may well be why U.S. trade officials have been so extremely secretive about these past two years of TPP negotiations."

"Via closed-door negotiations, U.S. officials are rewriting swaths of U.S. law that have nothing to do with trade and in a move that will infuriate left and right alike have agreed to submit the U.S. government to the jurisdiction of foreign tribunals that can order unlimited payments of our tax dollars to foreign corporations that don't want to comply with the same laws our domestic firms do."

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