If you need a clear and easy to read article to email to your friends about the perils in the Pandora's Box called the Trans Pacific Partnership, currently being pushed by our many of our political leaders, including our President, you can't do better than this concise summary by Robert Reich:
It's Coming: The Worse Trade Agreement You've Probably Never Heard Of
Yes, many of you are familiar with the TPP, but many more are not and people need to sit up and take notice now, while there is still time to derail this travesty of what is supposed to be a "trade agreement" but which I would call a tool to undermine the entire concept of national sovereignty worldwide. And actually, not just the concept since it makes impotent and irrelevant the means by which nations control their internal activities - oversight, legislation and regulation. Do you think that's hyperbole? In my opinion, it is not.
If we had the TPP and if it were used in conjunction with the wholesale legal bribery that was implemented with the Supreme Court's decision re Citizen's United, we could be forestalled forever from having a functioning entity that has been referred to in the past as a government. If we did not have a government and a country that functioned at the behest of the citizens but rather at the behest of Multinational Behemoth Inc., than we effectively cease to have a United States of America. We could keep the name, but it would simply be a geographic name, whose use would be solely to define the source of natural resources or a particular consumer market on a map. Is that our collective vision for our country? Is this the change that we envisioned when we elected President Obama?
Take for your first indication that this is not in likelihood a good thing for our country in the lede of Reich's article - Republicans have announced that they want to co-operate with President Obama in getting it passed. Uh oh. The same people who hate government in general even as a concept and who want to drown it in a bathtub or starve it to death are for this "trade agreement". Let that be the first beep of a smoke detector going off.
Now let's look at details according to Reich insomuch as we can, since one more beep of the smoke detector is that the TPP is being negotiated in secret and few are allowed to know the fine print - hey is that a problem for anyone?
The TPP also gives global corporations an international tribunalof private attorneys, outside any nation’s legal system, who can order compensation for any “unjust expropriation” of foreign assets.
Even better for global companies, the tribunal can order compensation for any lost profits found to result from a nation’s regulations. Philip Morris is using a similar provision against Uruguay (the provision appears in a bilateral trade treaty between Uruguay and Switzerland), claiming that Uruguay’s strong anti-smoking regulations unfairly diminish the company’s profits.
Anyone believing the TPP is good for Americans take note: The foreign subsidiaries of U.S.-based corporations could just as easily challenge any U.S. government regulation they claim unfairly diminishes their profits – say, a regulation protecting American consumers from unsafe products or unhealthy foods, investors from fraudulent securities or predatory lending, workers from unsafe working conditions, taxpayers from another bailout of Wall Street, or the environment from toxic emissions.
Now, if Robert Reich is incorrect in any of these assertions, that could easily be put to rest by simply allowing anyone who wants to, to read the details themselves. Why isn't the TPP available for perusal on a public website? According to Reich the pact will cover 792 million people and 40% of the world's economy. Shouldn't something with that scope and breadth and gigantic repercussions worldwide be on everyone's lips. Shouldn't we all be talking about whether we want multinational corporations to be enabled to do basically anything they want on our soil?
What does it say about our President and some in our Party, the people who we think are representing our interests, that they are working with the government hating, pro-business to the exclusion of anything else Republicans to push this agreement and that the President is framing the pact as being beneficial for American exports and being a job generator? Can we draw any conclusions about whose interests are really being represented? Why would OUR GUYS be promoting something that Reich summarizes as "a Trojan horse in a global race to the bottom, giving big corporations and Wall Street banks a way to eliminate any and all laws and regulations that get in the way of their profits."
Your thoughts and comments? Is my hair legitimately on fire?
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(Edited to add the words "to the exclusion of anything else" after pro-business in describing Republicans in the next to the last paragraph)