Mind your guru, Minister Freeland

By Alison@Creekside

The best part of International Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland signing the U.S. corporate rights agreement TPP — the Trans-Pacific Partnership — in Aukland, NZ on Wednesday was that it was done here in this gambling casino, and a casino is where the house always wins.

In her 2012 book, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, Freeland explains:

“Trying to slant the rules of the game in your favour isn’t an aberration, it is what all businesses seek to do. The difference isn’t between having virtuous and villainous business people, it is about whether your society has the right rules and policing able to enforce them.”

Of course this “enforcement” would first entail our government not ditching those “right rules” or “policing” just because transnational corporations and their revolving-door crony capitalists within government find them inconvenient.

Justin Trudeau on the campaign trail, October 5 2015:

The Trans-Pacific Partnership stands to remove trade barriers, widely expand free trade for Canada, and increase opportunities for our middle class and those working hard to join it …. The government has an obligation to be open and honest about the negotiation process …”

Then in mid-January Freeland told us:

‘The negotiations are finished and for Canadians it’s important to understand that it’s a decision of yes or no …’

All countries have two years to ratify it, but the treaty comes into force if the United States, Japan and four other countries give their approval.

‘It’s important for us to understand that we don’t have a veto.'”

Yesterday she said: “There is a big difference between signing and ratifying,” promising negotiations and parliamentary committees and round tables etc, all of which are very nice but none of which are legally binding on the Liberal caucus. Now that we’ve signed off on it, however, we are all supposed to pin our hopes on those.

Flashback to the Liberal Convention of 2014, two years ago. Guest speaker and TPP advocate, former US Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers is interviewed on stage by Freeland, who introduces him as “a dear friend, teacher, and probably the smartest person I know.” Summers, she explains, is there to give the Libs “some great ideas about how to transform Canada and in so doing transform the world.”

Now most of us probably remember Larry Summers as the US bank deregulator — a prominent architect alongside Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin in reversing the 1933 US Glass-Steagall Act, that Depression-era legislation which prevented US banks from turning into the high-risk hedge-fund casinos making wild bets against their own depositors’ money they became in the late 2000’s. Or we remember him as the $5M hedge fund advisor who made millions in speaking fees from the hedge funds he later helped regulate while advocating tax cuts and no ceiling on CEO pay for stimulus recipients. Or as a Bilderberg Group Steering Committee member.

Whatev.

What I wish is that rather than continue to parrot all that “all middle-class liberals together” schmooze that Summers was selling the Libs two years ago, including airily blowing off the casino bank crisis he helped precipitate, better the Liberals should instead try out what Summers, still a strident TPP advocate, is saying now: