What trade-agreement pledge?

The big trade deals during the Clinton and Bush administrations — NAFTA is Exhibit A — came with false promises and outright lies concerning how they would affect American workers. But the hope-and-change Obama administration would do business in a more honest, open and worker-friendly fashion than those other administrations, right?

If you believed that, you probably also believed Barack Obama was more concerned about putting “folks” back to work than bailing out his bankster friends. From The Raw Story:

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a forthcoming U.S. trade agreement that looks to solidify a seamless regional economy in the Pacific-rim, would give multinational corporations the power to challenge and even avoid compliance with laws in member countries — including the U.S. — provided a super-national corporate tribunal agrees with their claim.

That’s according to documents leaked this week by the Citizens Trade Campaign, an activist group responsible for leaking TPP proposals on intellectual property last year. The latest leak details a TPP draft chapter on “investments,” which proposes an independent dispute arbitration process that would be empowered to supersede domestic laws or regulatory actions in member states if they are seen as conflicting with the TPP’s framework…

In the event of a dispute between two entities incorporated in two different countries that are both members of one of these treaties, a trade tribunal serves essentially as a parallel legal system that exists outside of national laws and wields the power to knock down those laws or free multinational corporations from their obligation to comply with them. Considerations pertaining to labor rights or environmental protections are often not factored in to these decisions.

Although President Barack Obama had pledged during the 2008 presidential campaign to “not support NAFTA style trade agreements in the future,” he appears to have embraced them instead…