This is part of the neoliberal agenda, to smuggle in freedom for corporations to shift wealth across national borders under the idea that it is "freeing up financial services" and so is part of a free trade in goods and services agenda.

A similar tactic, though different in detail, is treating the ever-expanding restriction on rights to information copying and sharing as "promoting trade in intellectual property", as if the makers of Mickey Mouse cartoons before WWII are gaining encouragement to their creative activity by the Disney Corporation retaining perpetual copyright via repeated extension.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.