Alright boys and girls, gather ’round me, and I’ll tell you the story of the “Investor State Dispute Resolution” clause. Wait children… where’re you going? Don’t run away. Don’t cry!
Okay, the wonkish gibberish used by the Powers That Be to write those corporate boondoggles they call the “trade deals” is toothachingly-boring and incomprehensible. Could that be on purpose? Of course! If they wrote these wage-destroying, environment-killing, sovereignty-sucking scams in plain English so we commoners could understand what they’re doing to us, they couldn’t get away with it.
Enjoying Hightower's work? Join us over at our new home on Substack:
So here comes the Trans-Pacific Partnership, by far the largest trade flim-flam in history. Written in gobbledygook, it was negotiated in secret by corporate lobbyists and government lawyers. Even Congress doesn’t know what’s in it, but TPP is to be hustled into law through a super-rushed, rubber-stamp process called “Fast Track”.
No need to be suspicious, though, for an upstanding new group called Progressive Coalition for American Jobs now assures us that this global deal “will support hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the United States.” Hello – do we have sucker wrappers around our heads? That’s the exact same claim that Bill Clinton made for NAFTA, which siphoned hundreds of thousands of jobs and entire industries out of the US.
By the way, who are the members of this “coalition”? Every progressive group I know of is adamantly against the TPP, and no progressive has stepped forward to claim ownership of this PR push for corporatizing the people’s democratic rights. Is there a coalition? Who’s in it? Who funds it?
Nobody’s answering because nobody’s there. The coalition is a fraud, just like TPP. For a real coalition of progressives who’re standing tall against the whole TPP fraud, go to www.StopFastTrack.com.
“A Pro-TPP Campaign Built on Four Pinocchios,” www.huffingtonpost.com, March 12, 2015.
“Elizabeth Warren Says Trade Deal May Force U.S. Payouts to Overseas Firms,” www.bloomberg.com, March 11, 2015.
Special rate for original Lowdown readers