Press Release – NZNO
The New Zealand Nurses Organisation (NZNO) is joining thousands of other organisations and individuals in calling for the text of the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), currently being negotiated in secret, to be made public.

TTPA not democratic and not right, nurses say.
The New Zealand Nurses Organisation (NZNO) is joining thousands of other organisations and individuals in calling for the text of the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), currently being negotiated in secret, to be made public.

NZNO believes the Government should not sign any agreement that has the potential to limit its ability to make decisions in the best interests of New Zealanders.

The TPPA will limit the ability of governments to regulate wholesale and retail prices for medicines to ensure that they are affordable, and will also give foreign investors the right to sue governments for making laws which affect those investments, even if the legislation is in the best interests of citizens.

NZNO policy adviser, Marilyn Head says, “These are matters that affect public health, and must be open to scrutiny. There is a very real risk that multinational corporate interests will override our sovereign interests and that could be disastrous for health.”

TPPA proposals for extended patents on medicines will delay market entry of the cheaper generic medicines that PHARMAC relies on to keep the price of medicines down. Other proposals would delay and interfere with PHARMAC’s negotiating and decision making power. Without PHARMAC New Zealand will find it harder to afford the most effective medicines or medical technologies.”

“The TPPA would also mean our government would lose their right to set policy on issues like tobacco control. Tobacco companies would have the right to sue the New Zealand government for taking steps to reduce the harm tobacco causes.”

“NZNO advocates for effective delivery of public health policy and a Smokefree Aotearoa by 2025. The TPPA will make achieving those important aims much harder,” Head says.

“The health of New Zealanders should not be negotiable. NZNO urges the Government to release the text of the agreement, consult properly with the public and put the health and well-being of its citizens before big business.”

DESVARIEUX: You mentioned NAFTA. How is this similar to NAFTA?

ZEESE: This is basically NAFTA on steroids. It's the same kind of thing. These tribunals I talked about existed with NAFTA already, and they've been very successful to corporations. Corporations win 90 percent of the time when they sue in these trade tribunals under NAFTA.

And with NAFTA you could see what happened with our economy. It resulted in massive loss of jobs, hundreds of thousands of jobs lost. Terrible for the Mexican workers as well. Small farmers were forced to compete with subsidized corn. They went out--a lot of them went out of business, had to move to the cities, caused economic disruption in the cities. And that was one of the causes of the undocumented immigration we saw in the United States was because of NAFTA, because we undermined that economy.

Who gets rich from these agreements? The oligarchs and the wealthiest. And that's what we're going to see here.

Just last week, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) came out with a report. The report was about what the TPP will do for our economy. And it was kind of remarkable. It's amazing this is even being pursued. Under--what CEPR said was there'll be a 0.1 percent increase in the GDP each year. That's one-tenth of 1 percent increase in the GDP each year. That's almost insignificant, one-tenth of one percent. And they also said that they also found that 90 percent of American workers will see their incomes and their wages go down, because we're starting this race to the bottom, continuing this race to the bottom in wages. And so our middle class will get weaker and you'll see the wealth divide expand.

So what's good about this trade agreement? That's why I said earlier the more people know about it, the less likely it is to pass. And that's why they're keeping it a secret and trying to keep Congress out, because they don't want a debate on this, they don't want the facts to come out about this. They want to sneak this through and do--. And when NAFTA was passed, it was also passed by fast track.

And one of the things that these kind of--NAFTA and World Trade Organization, these kinds of treaties, they have in them requirements that countries make their laws align with the treaty. And when the WTO passed, the World Trade Organization, for example, that's how we lost the separation between the investment banks and traditional banks. That's how we lost that separation which was so important to the economy, that separate regulatory structure, because that was required by the WTO.

Well, this law is going to require all sorts of changes in our laws as well. For example, laws favoring U.S.-made products, that's a trade barrier. That'd be unfair. Laws favoring local green economy, that's unfair trade barrier. That'll be a problem. There's even people talking about farmers markets being under attack because of this. So--and we definitely won't be able to see GMO labeling. That's not going to happen with this. That'll be a trade barrier if you are required to label the foods [incompr.] GMO.

So this law affects much more than just trade. A very small [incompr.] trade [incompr.] about tariffs. Okay, that's no big deal and you don't need fast track for that. But if you're going to change a whole economy and give more power to these transnational corporations, that's why they've got to do it in secret and that's why they've got to do fast track, because people when they hear that their food's not going to be labeled properly, that they're not going to be able--that their wages are going to go down, that their farmers markets will be threatened, that all sorts of regulations on food--we won't be sure how safe they are any longer [incompr.] environmental effects, there's so many negative things about this law that as it becomes known to the American people, I have no doubt it will fail. I think we're going to stop this law.

And we're actually starting a project--next phase of this--we did these protests this week where we had the--take over their building and we did a fast track train through Congress, through the whole Washington, D.C., area to expose the TPP. We built a 35-foot train. It went throughout the city to expose it.
Now we're going to the phase of really working on Congress. And every Tuesday we'll be up there with what we're calling the fair trade brigades, who will be pushing members of Congress to stand up for their constitutional responsibility, to do what the Commerce Clause says it's their job to do, regulate trade, and not approve fast track, not give that power to the executive, but do what the Congress is supposed to do: hold hearings, debate it, hear witnesses, get expert testimony, make amendments, put in place a law that puts the people and the planet before profits, not profits before the planet and the people.

DESVARIEUX: Okay. Great. As you know, I'm on Capitol Hill, so it'll be good to connect.
ZEESE: That'd be fun.

DESVARIEUX: Okay. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining us in-studio, Kevin.

ZEESE: Happy to do it. Thanks for having me.

Only a traitor could EVER consider supporting or signing this travesty of an 'agreement'.

Kat wrote on Oct 15^th, 2013 at 6:05am:


This agreement is irrational - but it's been in the pipeline for a while. Labor was considering it too and they will buckle when they're told to. Albanese might have fought this issue - but Shorten won't.

What sort of country have we become? Surely our leaders if they were independent would run from this - but they don't have minds of their own and get their orders from a higher power.

Amgen is pushing hard to convince the Obama administration to demand stringent intellectual property protections for biologic drugs in the TPP talks

The TPPA will limit the ability of governments to regulate wholesale and retail prices for medicines to ensure that they are affordable, and will also give foreign investors the right to sue governments for making laws which affect those investments, even if the legislation is in the best interests of citizens.

NZNO policy adviser, Marilyn Head says, “These are matters that affect public health, and must be open to scrutiny. There is a very real risk that multinational corporate interests will override our sovereign interests and that could be disastrous for health.”