No Ordinary Deal (ePub)

'This valuable volume of essays shines the light on the secretive process of free trade negotiations and demonstrates the urgent need for greater public and parliamentary scrutiny.' - Senator Bob Brown, Australian Greens'The USA is driving a Pacific trading agreement that deserves much more critical attention than the authorities want us to give it. This book shows why the agreement matters and why it should be resisted.' - Professor Frank Stilwell, Department of Political Economy, University of SydneyThe Trans-Pacific Partnership is no ordinary free trade deal. It has been billed as an agreement fit for the 21st century, but no-one is sure what that means.The US sells this eight-country deal as the key to jobs and economic recovery, while protecting home markets. Australia hails it as a foundation stone for an APEC-wide free trade agreement. New Zealand sees it as a magic bullet to open the US dairy market. None of these arguments stack up.Experts from Australia, New Zealand, the US and Chile examine the geopolitics and security context of the negotiations and set out the costs of making concessions to the US simply to achieve a deal. They argue its obligations will intrude into core areas of domestic government policy which have nothing to do with imports and exports, including foreign investment, financial regulation, access to affordable medicines, food standards, services and government procurement. These are the issues that caused the majority of the public opposition to the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement in 2004. Above all, No Ordinary Deal exposes the contradictions of locking our countries even deeper into a neoliberal model of global free markets - when even political leaders admit that this has failed.