The U.S. government's latest initiative in international commerce, the Transpacific Trade Partnership (TPP), is not the panacea it is being touted as. While President Barack Obama says the new pact will benefit U.S. workers and small companies, prominent left intellectual Noam Chomsky charges that it involves highly protectionist measures that will, in fact undermine freedom of trade and represents a neo-liberal assault aimed at furthering corporate domination. In today's program, host Jorge Gestoso interviews Cathy Feingold, director of the international department of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the largest labor confederation in the United States. Feingold criticizes the final version of the TPP as corporate driven globalization, a neoliberal model that has not benefited workers in the United States, Latin America, or anywhere else in the world. The scope of the TPP, whose exact content remains a secret, goes beyond trade and will largely define the framework in which the global economy and communities will function. The AFL-CIO leader also discusses the negative effects of the free trade agreements on agriculture, quality employment, and migration. She also offers a critique of the corporate dominated mass media, the deplorable state of U.S. democracy and growing income disparity. teleSUR
