Look out America – here comes the Trans Pacific Partnership! Dubbed “a corporate coup d’etat” by Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, it’s a grandiose grab for power masked as a trade deal, allowing an unprecedented level of global corporate rule over Americans. Let’s take a quick look at what we’ll be getting into.
The trade hoax. Of the document’s 29 chapters, only five address tariffs and other actual trade matters. The other 24 consist of various ways to “free” corporations from any accountability and from any responsibility to the world community’s common good.
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Bye-bye “Buy American.” TPP dictates that all corporations based in any member nation must be given equal access to the public dollars that any government spends on equipment, food, highway projects, etc. Thus, our own national, state, and local governments would no longer be free to give preference to suppliers of our choice. “Buy American” and “Buy Local” programs could be challenged by private corporations.
Wall Street rides again! If anyone doubts this the pact is a corporate boondoggle dressed in trade clothes, let them read its shameful financial provisions. “Too big to fail” laws, ensuring that the costs of a bank’s collapse would be borne by investors, not taxpayers? Under TPP, giant global banks could scamper into private tribunals to grab billions of our tax dollars if they have to comply with such laws. Also, our nation’s financial regulations would have to be “harmonized” to comply with TPP’s extreme deregulation, re-creating the anything-goes Wall Street ethic that crashed the world economy in 2008. A Robin Hood Tax on volatile, super high-speed speculators? Nope. TPP specifically lets global banks challenge and kill these laws.
To help stop this anti-democratic nasty, go to www.exposethetpp.org.
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