"There is a virtual alphabet soup of new trade and investment agreements under negotiation - the TPP, TTIP, CETA, PA, TISA and more. Despite the bewildering array of acronyms, all of these negotiations tend to pursue a similar, corporate-driven agenda. Each agreement becomes the floor for the next, in a state of perpetual negotiation and re-negotiation. Hard-won exceptions to protect public services or insulate financial services regulations from investor-state challenge, for example, become targets for elimination in the next set of talks. Moreover, this frenzy of negotiating activity remains cloaked in a veil of secrecy. The negotiating dynamic is fundamentally skewed towards corporate interests. Public interest advocates seeking to exempt essential sectors or key public policies from these treaties must win every time, while the corporate lobbyists targeting these policies need win only once. With the stroke of a pen, a single neo-liberal government can essentially lock all future governments into a policy straitjacket"--