TPP a Gift to Plutocrats? Canada’s Trade Minister Wrote the Book on Them
As journalist, Chrystia Freeland chronicled global wealth dividers.
Chrystia Freeland’s financial journalist credentials made her a star candidate for the Liberals. Photo: Joseph Morris. Creative commons licensed.
The winners, say high profile critics, will be captains of global finance and others already so moneyed they’ve earned the moniker plutocrats.
That’s a class of people Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland knows extremely well. Plutocrats is the title she gave her 2012 book about how they are sucking up riches for themselves as income inequality grows. Freeland takes readers into the world of the super-rich, who play by different rules and lead opulent and vastly different lives than the rest of the human race.
The former reporter for the Financial Times goes at the wealthy and powerful hard, pointing out how their success is coinciding with the destruction of “everyone else.”
That puts Freeland in an interesting position, to say the least, as she mulls whether and how to manage passing the TPP, which was negotiated in secret by the recently ousted Conservative government, but endorsed by Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during the election.
TPP as inequality accelerator
Freeland must be aware of criticism, coming from a range of respected sources, that the TPP will widen the wealth gap in developing countries as well as the U.S. and Canada.
“If the Trans-Pacific Partnership is enacted,” Robert Reich, secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, has warned “big corporations, Wall Street, and their top executives and shareholders will make out like bandits. Who will the bandits be stealing from? The rest of us.”
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