More evidence that the TPP is good for tobacco and polluters, bad for public health, environment and working people

Today the New York Times published its second editorial calling on President Obama to support language clearly exempting tobacco from the corporate protections that are included in the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) treaty that he is negotiating. 

This editorial follows an excellent story in the Times on December 12 on how the tobacco companies have been using existing trade agreements to bully low and middle income countries to block tobacco control policies.
 
Despite these clean calls to adopt unequivocal language to "carve out" tobacco from the TPP, as proposed a few months ago by Malaysia, the Obama Administration keeps tap dancing around the issue. The problem is that some finely crated technical language will just mean that Big Tobacco's lawyers will earn a little more money beating up smaller countries.

While the problem with tobacco is the most obvious issue with the TPP, it is a broad threat to a wide range of health and environmental regulations.  Also today there was a good story on NPR's Morning Edition about how trade agreements were preventing the US from imposing the same health and safety standards on imported catfish (from Vietnam) that apply in the US.  The net result has been great damage to the domestic catfish industry with unhealthier catfish grown in polluted waters and filled with antibiotics showing up in our supermarkets.

Another NPR story that aired on December 8 described how polluting businesses were using the "investor-state" provisions in NAFTA -- a key element of the TPP -- to sue countries for lost profits caused by environmental regulations.

Finally, for all President Obama's talk about widening inequality and the wage gap, he is not talking about the role NAFTA played in depressing US wages.  The TPP will only make this problem worse.

All this just keeps building the case that the TPP is a bad idea for everyone but the big corporations who will use it to block sensible public health and environmental measures and keep wages down.