Matt Stoller: “Free Trade” Pacts Were Always About Weakening Nation-States to Promote Rule by Multinationals

Posted on February 21, 2014 by Yves Smith

Yves here. I hope those of you who are in countries being browbeaten to sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership or the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership will circulate this post widely.

By Matt Stoller, who writes for Salon and has contributed to Politico, Alternet, Salon, The Nation and Reuters. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller. Originally published at Observations on Credit and Surveillance

Here’s part one of this series on the origins of NAFTA and our current trading regime.

It’s amazing what you find in the Congressional Record. For example, you find American political officials (liberal ones, actually) engaged in an actual campaign to get rid of countries with their pesky parochial interests, and have the whole world managed by global corporations. Yup, this actually was explicit in the 1960s, as opposed to today’s passive aggressive arguments which amount to the same thing.

Here’s the backstory.