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Like some Vaudeville shtick, Barack Obama keeps blathering that a huge flaw in his global trade scam doesn’t exist – but then the flaw hits him in the face like a big cream pie.
The President’s trade scam is called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and it’s a corporate boondoggle loaded with gotchas that hurt workers, consumers, our environment, and others. But its most damnable flaw is that it would allow foreign corporations to sue the US in corporate-run tribunals to make us change or even repeal any of our laws that might pinch their profits.
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No, no, shouts Obama, “there is no chance, zero chance” of that happening. But – Splat! Splat! – reality has smacked him in the face with two cream pies. Using an earlier trade scam, the World Trade Organization has ruled not once, but twice this year that two US laws must be repealed or modified to satisfy the profit goals of corporations in Mexico and Canada. On May 12, a WTO trade tribunal ruled that our “dolphin-safe” tuna labeling law (which lets you and me know that the tuna we buy has not been fished with nets that trap and kill dolphins) violates the free-trade “right” of Mexican tuna fleets to use the cheaper, dolphin-slaughtering nets.
And on May 18, another WTO tribunal hurled a second cream pie. This one smacks “COOL,” an American consumer law that requires country-of-origin-labeling on meat products, so your family and mine can know where the meat we buy comes from. Our Congress passed this sensible right-to-know law, our courts have upheld it, 92 percent of Americans support it – but a group of corporate lawyers on a WTO tribunal has overruled us.
Now Obama wants to saddle us with his TPP, creating more corporate kangaroo courts that’ll have even greater power to usurp our sovereignty. To tell him “Don’t TPP on me!” go to www.TradeWatch.org.
“WTO Orders U.S. to Gut U.S. Consumer Country-of-Origin Meat Labeling Policy, Further Complicating Obama Fast Track Push by Spotlighting How Trade Pacts Can Undermine U.S. Consumer, Environmental Policies,” www.citizen.org, May 18, 2015.