Jeebus

Some of the provisions of the Trans-Pacific Partnership have been leaked, and this is absolutely awful:

• limit how U.S. federal and state officials could regulate foreign firms operating within U.S. boundaries, with requirements to provide them greater rights than domestic firms;
• extend the incentives for U.S. firms to offshore investment and jobs to lower-wage countries;
• establish a two-track legal system that gives foreign firms new rights to skirt U.S. courts and laws, directly sue the U.S. government before foreign tribunals and demand compensation for financial, health, environmental, land use and other laws they claim undermine their TPP privileges; and
• allow foreign firms to demand compensation for the costs of complying with U.S. financial or environmental regulations that apply equally to domestic and foreign firms.

Just in case you are wondering, there are proposal to make the agreement more people friendly, and less corporation friendly, but it appears that the Obama administration is opposing this at every level.

Note that this is not atypical of US foreign policy, though it it is in direct contravention of of what he promised during the 2008 campaign.

I guess that Austan Goolsbee was told the truth when he was said to representatives of the Canadian government that Obama's populist statements regarding free trade agreements were lies.