The Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations have been hijacked by lobbyists from America's biggest manufacturing and agribusiness corporations, Silicon Valley high-tech firms and Wall Street's "too-big-to-fail" banks.
Under the TPP, Wall Street will be able to circumvent the U.S. government regulations that discourage the fraudulent financial games that bankrupted more than 15 million Americans in 2008. The TPP will let large pharmaceutical firms and Silicon Valley IT firms prolong their patent monopoly profits. Manufacturing firms will more freely send their jobs abroad. Large agribusiness will fatten its profits and small family farmers in the U.S. and abroad will suffer.
In 1993, under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a precursor to the TPP, American supermarket chains rushed into Mexico and pulled in the produce of American big agribusiness. Mexico's small farmers lost their domestic markets to American supermarkets' imports of American agribusiness produce. Displaced Mexican peasants became undocumented migrant workers in the United States. U.S. manufacturing firms moved over 1 million jobs to Mexico, widening the income gaps between the top 1 percent and the rest of American households.