Money Merry-Go-Round: Emails Show How Wall Street Execs and Alums Crafted Trade Bill
(COMMON DREAMS) Kathy Kiely, June 3, 2016 — Foreign corporations could sue to undermine US protections for consumers’ health, safety and financial security under a provision added to the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal (TPP) after executives of big banks pressed the nation’s chief trade negotiator, himself a former big-bank executive, to include it.
A series of emails, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and released last week by Rootstrikers, an organization that opposes the trade deal now pending before Congress, confirm the push by financial service companies for the “Investor-State Dispute Settlement” provision. ISDS, as it is referred to by the cognoscenti writing the emails, would, in the words of one critic, Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach, “elevate individual investors to the status of a nation-state” in trade disputes.
The emails also are bound to reinforce the suspicion that US trade policy is being set by what might be called an “executariat” of corporate and government leaders who periodically swap positions for their mutual benefit. “They’re written as if they are being sent between colleagues,” says Dennis Kelleher of the watchdog group Better Markets. “That’s because the writers all have been, currently are or will be colleagues at major Wall Street firms.”
Most striking is an exchange between Faryar Shirzad, the co-head of Goldman Sachs’ government affairs office, and US Trade Representative Michael Froman.
The two men have mirror-image resumes: Shirzad worked on economic and international issues in the administration of then-President George W. Bush, serving as a top aide to the president (known as a “sherpa”) at several international economic summits.